Climate finance collaboration – building a custom app for the Multilateral Climate Funds
The Multilateral Climate Funds, or MCFs, have together channelled more than US$32 billion for climate and sustainability action to date, leveraging over US$197 billion in co-financing. The projects that the MCFs fund are varied and wide-ranging – from increasing climate resilience in Pakistan, to renewable energy in Mali and nature-based seawalls in Fiji. They provide both immediate support, such as early warning systems for extreme weather, and longer term resilient development.
Ahead of COP29, part of the MCFs action plan included improving how the individual funds share knowledge. By working together more closely, the funds (which include The Adaptation Fund (AF), Climate Investment Funds (CIF), Global Environment Facility (GEF), and Green Climate Fund (GCF)), will make it easier to share expertise and improve people’s understanding of how to access climate finance.
At Climate Policy Radar, we combine human expertise with cutting-edge technology. Our curated databases and AI tools help decision-makers find the evidence they need from mountains of complex documents, which in turn informs climate action. After supporting hundreds of thousands of users in easy access to all climate laws and policies and working with the UNFCCC to make sense of 200,000 pages of submissions to the Global Stocktake, we've been working with partners at the MCFs to launch the Climate Project Explorer. For the first time, we are bringing together publicly available project data from four of the MCFs, allowing people to search for that information in a single place.
The Climate Project Explorer, launching at COP29, will empower all its stakeholders – the Funds, Governments, NGOs, researchers, civil society and the private sector – with easy access to climate project information. If you are at COP29 in Baku, stop by the MCFs Pavilion in the Blue Zone to hear more, get live demos, and chat to our team.
We’re excited to showcase the collaboration between the funds, which is front and centre of the landing page:
Building for and with our stakeholders
In June 2023, at the Global NDC Conference and the SB58 Bonn Intersessionals, CPR began speaking to representatives from some of the MCFs about the value of having a custom app to explore climate projects. We then ran a workshop at the MCFs pavilion during COP28, where we collected insights about what a Climate Project Explorer would need to encompass.
Fast-forward to autumn of 2024, and we started working on the Climate Project Explorer in earnest. It’s what we’re calling a “custom app”, or a search application: it uses the same technology that powers our Climate Policy Radar app and Climate Change Laws of the World, but includes different data and bespoke filters. As such, it has similarities to the Global Stocktake Explorer that we built in 2024 as official partners of the UNFCCC, which helps decision-makers navigate 170,000 pages of submissions to the Global Stocktake process.
Introducing Climate Project Explorer
Going live at COP29, the Climate Project Explorer includes searchable repositories of nearly 4000 documents from all four funds. This includes:
publicly available project proposals
annual reports
project evaluations/reviews and other project-related documents
the publicly available policies of the MCFs (will be added in coming weeks).
Users can search the full text of project documents from all four climate funds.
Contextual search
Thanks to our contextual search, users can quickly find exact matches and highlighted, related phrases.
English translations
We automatically translate relevant passages into English. While these translations aren’t perfect, we hope that, by doing so, we help find wider audiences for the documents.
Advanced filtering
Thanks to our filters, users can find the information they need from the publicly available projects and policies from the 4 different funds, covering more than 130 countries.
Here’s an example of some of the filter options in context of the search results:
What’s next?
We’re collecting feedback on the Climate Project Explorer, with a view of improving it. We’ll include guidance documents from the funds soon. We’re also looking to introduce AI-powered searches and GenAI features, visualisations and more. In building it, we’ve made our processes and code behind the scenes faster and easier for us to apply to other data sources. Thank you to the amazing team at CPR who made this happen, and to our partners at the MCFs for being so insightful and open to collaboration.
As always, our code and data are open, which improves transparency and accountability for climate action.
We’d be grateful if you had 20 minutes to chat to our product team about how we can make the Climate Project Explorer even better. If you do, please book a call here. We’re enthusiastic about collaborating in other ways too. If you’re at COP, come and find us in person, on LinkedIn, or reach out to us at any time on https://www.climatepolicyradar.org/collaborate.