The World Bank announced that a new multi-partner fund – the Scaling Climate Action by Lowering Emissions (Scale) –has been established to pool funding from the global community for scalable pathways to greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions reduction. 

The partnership, which includes donor countries, the private sector and foundations, will provide grants for verifiable emissions reductions and expand the funding sources for global public goods.

World Bank Group president David Malpass says climate finance needs major new mechanisms that pool funding from the global community to accomplish actual reductions in GHG emissions across the developing world.

“Scale offers a key non-fragmented avenue for the global community to take action on climate change.

“The verifiable emission reductions created by Scale and similar mechanisms will also be an important step toward building effective carbon credit markets,” he says.

Scale will deploy results-based climate finance where countries receive grant payments for achieving pre-agreed, verifiable results that draw on 20 years of World Bank Group experience in this area.

Scale will support countries to build a track record of generating emission reductions from impactful programmes and policies that they can apply toward their national emission reduction targets.

The fund will also yield excess credits that can be offered in carbon markets with the potential to unlock additional private sector funding.

As such, Scale will pool public and private resources to channel additional funding to middle and low-income countries’ emission reduction programmes and help bridge the gap between the supply of and demand for high-quality emission reduction credits by supporting large-Scale climate investments. The fund will also help countries develop high integrity credits and enhance their access to international carbon markets.

Social inclusion is embedded in the design of all Scale programmes, the World Bank Group notes.

An associated fund within the Scale umbrella – Enabling Access to Benefits while Lowering Emissions (EnABLE) – enhances the inclusion of marginalised communities and indigenous peoples in programmes under the partnership through specially designed benefit sharing arrangements.