Behind the billions: New dataset exposes the $54 billion gap in MDB climate finance transparency
As COP30 begins today, the world’s focus turns to global efforts to accelerate climate action. Multilateral development banks (MDBs) play a central role in the provision of climate finance for emerging and developing economies (EMDEs), yet questions remain about where their billions are going and how effectively they are being used.
Today we’re launching a new report and accompanying dataset, Behind the Billions: tracking the missing pieces of MDB climate finance data. The dataset is the first cross-MDB repository compiling all publicly available, project-level climate finance data disclosed by MDBs between 2021 and 2023.
The findings reveal that $54 billion of MDBs’ reported climate finance cannot be traced to specific projects. While MDBs collectively reported $307 billion over this period, only $253 billion appears in project-level disclosures, leaving a major portion unaccounted for. For several major MDBs, including the African Development Bank (AfDB), IDB Invest (the private-sector arm of the Inter-American Development Bank), the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), the Council of Europe Development Bank (CEB), the New Development Bank (NDB), and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), no dedicated project-level climate finance data source could be identified at all.
Gary Forster, CEO of Publish What You Fund, said:
“MDBs are central to the global effort to scale up climate finance. But unless their billions can be tracked to individual investments, stakeholders cannot know whether funds are reaching the right sectors and countries, or whether claims about mobilising private finance are credible. This database shines a light on the gaps and demonstrates that full, investment-level disclosure is both possible and urgently needed. We now hope to see better disclosure as the MDBs release their 2024 numbers”
The report finds that over the 2021–2023 period:
- Only six of eleven MDBs publish project-level climate finance data (Asian Development bank (AsDB), Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), European Investment Bank (EIB) and the World Bank).
- Just two (AsDB and IDB) publish complete, machine-readable datasets aligned with their aggregate totals for all three years.
- The World Bank publishes partial data, but IFC and the multilateral investment guarantee agency (MIGA) remain opaque.
- Evidence from AsDB, IDB, EBRD, EIB and AIIB shows that even private sector climate finance can be disclosed without breaching confidentiality.
To improve the transparency of climate finance commitments, Publish What You Fund calls on MDBs to:
- Publish all climate finance investments at project level, with bulk download options to improve accessibility.
- To improve comparability, harmonise disclosure across institutions, ensuring consistent definitions and data fields.
- Strengthen the MDB Joint Report by publishing a central dataset of all disaggregated climate finance allowing stakeholders to directly verify aggregate climate finance figures.