The Climate Finance Files
The Climate Finance Files are a collection of data and tools on international public climate finance.
Tools and Data
Python package
Get, rebuild, remix, and create using our tools and methodologies, all with a few lines of code.
The climate-finance Python package downloads climate finance data from the OECD and the UNFCCC, cleans and harmonises it, and converts it to different currencies and prices. Install it with pip install climate-finance, or read the source on GitHub.
Methodology
Read how we count climate finance in The Climate Finance Files methodology.
What are The Climate Finance Files?
The Climate Finance Files are a collection of data and tools on international public climate finance.
We think is the best (or more accurately, least worst) publicly available data on international public climate finance. Our data isn't perfect, because the data coming from providers is flawed. But we've done our best to apply a standardised and transparent methodology so that the data is comparable across providers and minimises over-counting. To learn more about our methodological choices, read this.
The Climate Finance Files look specifically at international public financial support for climate change adaptation and mitigation.
As part of this work, we are releasing tools to more easily extract, clean, and work with the data reported to UNFCCC and the OECD, without relying on the many individual spreadsheets and databases where it is currently stored.
We are also making clean versions of the data available for others to analyse. This should meaningfully lower the barriers to access that many organisations face when seeking to conduct research or advocacy on these topics.
Why are we releasing new climate finance data?
Climate finance data is notoriously difficult to access and understand. The different reporting systems, methodologies, sources, and types of finance can make it hard to provide straightforward answers to key questions.
We started this work to quantify annual climate finance contributions by specific countries. But asking a question as simple as "How much does France spend on mitigation and adaptation in developing countries?" raised a myriad of questions: According to which source? Commitments or disbursements? Grants or loans? ODA or other official flows? Bilaterally or multilaterally... and so on.
Finding answers to these questions isn't easy. Different organisations have different motivations for how they report and present this data. And analysing climate finance in a robust way requires going back to messy and complex raw data.
We realise that many organisations have a strong track record of analysing climate finance data. We have learnt a lot from that work.
But we think that accessing clean, comparable data on climate finance should be much easier than it is now.
Sources
The Climate Finance Files build upon and use data from various sources: