{"id":82324,"date":"2024-12-18T14:45:45","date_gmt":"2024-12-18T14:45:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.climatepolicyinitiative.org\/?p=82324"},"modified":"2026-04-21T23:07:24","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T23:07:24","slug":"building-al-ml-tools-to-track-public-development-banks-climate-ambition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.climatepolicyinitiative.org\/id\/building-al-ml-tools-to-track-public-development-banks-climate-ambition\/","title":{"rendered":"Building AI\/ML tools to track public development banks’ climate ambition"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Public development banks (PDBs) play a critical role in the global transition toward low-emissions climate-resilient development. Particularly in emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs), PDBs are instrumental in accelerating climate investment by financing transition projects and developing de-risking mechanisms to \u201ccrowd in\u201d private finance, shaping policy frameworks at a national and international level, and providing advisory services and technical assistance to accelerate the growth of climate project pipelines (CPI 2024<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Accordingly, comprehensive tracking of PDB climate ambition can provide important insights into where PDB support for low-emissions climate-resilient transition is strongest, as well as where greater efforts are needed to raise their ambition. For example, initial tracking reports in 2023<\/a> and 2022<\/a> showed that PDB climate ambition had thus far been largely concentrated among multilateral development banks (MDBs) and bilateral development finance institutions (DFIs) located in advanced economies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2024, to test the robustness of these and other previous findings, we have increased tracking from 70 to 170 institutions, aiming specifically to increase coverage of smaller PDBs in EMDEs and add multilingual functionality to include non-English sources. However, implementing these additions meant that a drastically larger volume of unstructured information would need to be ingested in order to begin the analysis, a task that the data backend developed in 2022 and used again in 2023 was not fit to handle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the taxonomy of climate commitments was retained from the original methodology<\/a>, in 2024, we completed an extensive overhaul of the commitments tracking process, utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools (ML) to process substantially larger primary datasets and capture more robust information, leading to deeper analytical insights. See the 2024 report on PDBs\u2019 climate commitments<\/a> for key findings and recommendations that were informed by the AI\/ML-enabled data-gathering process. In this technical blog post, we dive more deeply into the details of our new data methodology in the spirit of joint learning and knowledge exchange among climate finance analysts.<\/p>\n\n\n

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