Forum for Financing Sustainable Cities: Bringing cities and investors together

This article first appeared on the C40 website.

The C40 Financing Sustainable Cities Forum was hosted in London on April 4th, 2017 by the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and the Greater London Authority, with the support of the Citi Foundation and WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities. The forum brought together cities, investors, national governments, academics, private sector experts, NGOs and technology providers to identify the key barriers in financing sustainable urban infrastructure. These partners discussed shared solutions for unlocking finance for low-carbon investments in cities.

To make their job easier and to get a better sense of the investment potential in C40 cities, C40 and CDP have partnered together to produce an analysis of sustainable infrastructure projects currently in development across the C40 network. The report is accompanied by a beta pipeline that highlights planned projects in C40 cities. The data shows that there are over 3,000 low-carbon infrastructure projects in planning stages across C40 cities worldwide, with over 700 in the buildings sector alone. Cities have only reported costs for 15% of these projects – but even this 15% amounts to US$15.5 billion in required investment.

This highlights the tremendous opportunity for collaboration between cities and the private sector to invest in sustainable projects, and also the need to accelerate investment and development in sustainable infrastructure in order to deliver a climate safe future. Recent C40 research, Deadline 2020, has estimated that C40 cities need to spend US$375 billion over the next four years on low carbon infrastructure in order to be on the right trajectory required to meet the ambition of the Paris Agreement.

Cities must rapidly improve project development information to attract finance. With further support, C40 aims to work with CDP and various other partners to improve the flow of project data from cities and build out this pipeline to become a valuable resource for cities and investors to support sustainable infrastructure investment.