Lab Alumni Highlight Guarantees, Standardisation, and Local Capacity as Climate Finance Priorities

Three alumni of the Global Innovation Lab for Climate Finance shared lessons from scaling innovative instruments at the Lab's 2024 New York Climate Week Summit panel. Key themes included the need for simpler, replicable models, treating nature as a distinct asset class, and using guarantees to unlock institutional capital for emerging markets.

Martha de Sá, a 2023 Lab alumna, described her experience structuring the Amazônia Viva Financing Mechanism with Natura — the first capital markets instrument used to fund local Amazon cooperatives supporting the bioeconomy. The USD 10 million transaction took two years to complete, illustrating the complexity of creating scalable models in nature finance. She called for building foundational tools combining technology, local knowledge, and simple documentation to make structures replicable, pointing to the fintech sector as a model for scalability.

Las Perera of the Green Guarantee Company, a 2022 Lab solution, argued that guarantees serve as flexible, low-intervention tools that build market confidence without becoming permanent fixtures. The company provides investment-grade guarantees for emerging market climate projects, specifically addressing the sub-investment-grade credit ratings that block financing in many regions. Sanjay Wagle of the CRAFT fund, developed in 2017, noted that climate adaptation investing has moved from a niche concept to a recognised opportunity, though he stressed the sector still needs venture capital, credit, and project finance to scale.

The panel's moderator, CPI Associate Director Ben Broché, drew out a consensus that climate finance must simultaneously improve standardisation and respect local diversity. Panellists agreed that institutional investors and local communities have different needs that resist one-size-fits-all approaches. The Lab's Climate Finance Learning Hub is developing standardised playbooks for proven financial mechanisms to reduce the time and cost of replication. The panel's insights are feeding into the Lab's broader agenda as it moves toward its next cohort selection.

Key figure — USD 10 million — Amazônia Viva Financing Mechanism transaction size