China as a Provider of International Climate Finance

Beata Cichocka and Ian Mitchell
Additional contact information
Beata Cichocka: Center for Global Development
Ian Mitchell: Center for Global Development

No 339, Policy Papers from Center for Global Development

Abstract: This paper quantifies and evaluates China's bilateral, regional, and multilateral climate-related development finance from the Belt and Road Initiative's inception in 2013 until 2021, shedding light on its substantial but often opaque contributions. Our analysis suggests that China has provided an annual average of nearly $4 billion for climate to developing countries since 2013, totalling over $34 billion by 2021, primarily through bilateral channels through lending from its policy banks. Recently, China's climate finance through multilateral institutions has substantially increased. However, this increase has been coupled with declines in China’s bilateral climate-relevant finance, which fell from over $6 billion in 2017 to under $1 billion in 2021, outpacing the decline of China’s overall development finance. Separately, we find China has made significant ongoing fossil fuel investments in developing countries, amounting to over double its climate-relevant finance over the period. Since 2017, the Chinese government has made commitments to “green” its outward cooperation, and outbound fossil fuel finance fell below climate-related finance for the first time in 2021. Although China remains a “developing” country and recipient of climate finance, it is now a net provider of climate support, suggesting it is already positioned to contribute to a new UN climate finance goal to be agreed for beyond 2025. Overall, this paper seeks to contribute to debates on China’s role in the international climate finance architecture and emphasizes the potential for other development actors to further engage China in multilateral climate cooperation.

Pages: 58 pages
Date: 2024-09-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-cna, nep-ene, nep-env and nep-ipr
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cgdev.org/publication/china-provider-i ... l&utm_campaign=repec

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cgd:ppaper:339

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Papers from Center for Global Development Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Publications Manager ().