There is a growing interest in further understanding the quality of climate finance. This requires tracking and assessing quality using common indicators. While methodologies for tracking and assessing climate finance quantity are now relatively well-established (see CPI, 2025), common approaches—across multiple different types of public climate finance providers—for assessing and tracking its quality are still nascent.  

At a time when public budgets are increasingly strained, exposing public climate finance to shifting priorities, the need to build an evidence base on the quality of climate finance is particularly acute. International climate finance discussions have emphasized the need to enhance the quality of climate finance flows, as well as related reporting and transparency (UNFCCC, 2024a). Indeed, an evidence base on the quality of climate finance—in terms of what is working (or not) and for whom—can inform better, more strategic decision-making when allocating scarce public climate finance. However, practical and common approaches for gathering that evidence base remain elusive across public climate finance providers. The current lack of harmonization and, therefore, scope for comparisons inhibits more and better coordination between actors, as well as more targeted use of scarce public climate finance, informed by evidence on the quality of past interventions.   

Building on CPI’s (2025) framework for understanding the quality of climate finance, this follow-up paper spotlights and analyzes practical indicators for tracking climate finance quality. CPI’s recently published three-level conceptual framework defines climate finance quality at the project, market, and system levels. It ultimately aims to provide users with a means of tracking the extent to which finance delivers sustained transformational change beyond one-off projects —at the market and system levels—toward low-emission, climate-resilient, and equitable economies. Building on this theoretical exploration, the present study seeks to spotlight practitioner-focused indicators for tracking quality at each of the three levels, with a view to laying the groundwork for implementation (data collection, analysis and deriving learnings).

To that end, it presents key indicators at the project, market, and system levels, respectively, that could be tracked as part of efforts to build the evidence base on climate finance quality. The study examines the merits and shortcomings of these indicators, with case studies illustrating how public climate finance providers use different results indicators, and concludes with key reflections derived from this exercise. 

This paper aims to establish a quantitative basis for assessing the quality of climate finance. Spotlighting practical quality indicators helps progress the conversation toward a set of key and possibly common metrics that multiple public climate finance providers could use. These indicators were drawn from the extensive existing catalogue of results measurement and monitoring approaches used by practitioners at different public climate finance institutions (as well as coalition groups therein), distilling, in particular, those which offer scope for common application. This approach aims to reduce the subjectivity associated with quality judgments, providing a basis for comparing and aggregating across institutions, where possible. At a higher-level, the work contributes to and supports efforts to reduce fragmentation across public climate finance providers, thereby improving the quality of, and coordination underlying, public climate interventions (Ministry of Finance of Brazil, 2025). Overall, this work aims to be a springboard for the following steps:

1. Establishing a common indicator base to track climate finance quality across actors at each of the three levels presented in the theoretical framework. 
2. Collecting data and building the evidence base on what is working, for whom, and what may be scaled or replicated accordingly. 
3. Using the evidence base generated from tracking results indicators to inform broader, global discussions on the types of financing needed from different actors and where scarce public climate finance may be strategically and optimally deployed. 

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