Public development banks (PDBs) are crucial to meeting global climate and development goals. For 2025, major global agendas from the G20 Sustainable Finance Working Group to the FiCS Communiqué have repeatedly stressed the urgent imperative for PDBs to scale up climate finance and initiate new models of collaboration.

However, a decade after the Paris Agreement, the data indicates an inconsistent trajectory for PDB ambitions.

Challenges for PDB capital mobilization

Following rapid growth between 2020 and 2022, tracked PDB climate finance saw a notable decrease in 2023.

This decline signals that, while the need for climate investment has never been higher, PDB efforts are being undermined by emerging headwinds, including:

• Shrinking public fiscal space
• Rising cost of capital
• Diversion of resources to address near-term shocks

In this increasingly uncertain macroeconomic and geopolitical context, it is more critical than ever that PDBs scale their commitments and implementation capacity to ensure sustained growth in climate financing.

Based on data presented in CPI’s Public Development Bank Climate Action Portal (PDBCAP), this report directly responds to these challenges by providing practical, data-driven insights into the next steps PDBs and key stakeholders must take to achieve climate goals.

Various stakeholders can leverage the insights in the report to:

• Raise collective climate ambition across the PDB network.
• Implement robust climate commitments that withstand macroeconomic shocks.
• Generate sustained growth in capital mobilization.

Download the full report

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