Unlocking private capital for a sustainable transition

About the Sustainable Finance Observatory 

We focus on removing barriers to private financing 

Specialised expertise in Transparency, Impact, and Bankable Sustainable Solutions.

The Sustainable Finance Observatory is an international independent think tank specialised in unlocking private finance for a sustainable transition.

Since 2025, our organisation is the result of the merger between the international think tank 2° Investing Initiative - 2DII, a pioneering organisation supporting private financiers on climate alignment and impact investing since 2012 - and the Observatoire de la finance durable, set up by the French Minister of Economy and Finance in 2019 to monitor the ESG commitments of the Paris Financial Center.  Our work relies on robust financial expertise supported by former experienced bankers, sustainable finance analysts and lawyers in our team and a Scientific and Expert Committee composed of some fifty senior academics and practitioners.

The President of our board is François Gemenne, lead co-author of the 6th IPCC report.

Our activities aim to remove barriers to private financing around three fundamental pillars: Transparency, Impact and Bankable Sustainable Solutions.

Our contribution to shaping the international agenda

The Sustainable Finance Observatory contributed to shaping the environmental agenda at the Seventh United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-7)

Our Deputy Executive Director, Émilie Maehara, was invited to deliver the keynote presentation on Overcoming Financial Barriers at the UNEA-7 Cities and Regions Summit.

Focused on addressing the triple planetary crisis - climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution - and on strengthening synergies among Multilateral Environmental Agreements, UNEA-7 brought together more than 4,600 delegates from over 160 countries, against a backdrop of persistent systemic finance and implementation gaps. The Cities and Regions Summit convenes mayors, regional leaders and urban sustainability experts from around the world to collaborate on the most pressing environmental challenges.

Cities and regions are uniquely positioned to drive integrated local solutions that address climate, biodiversity and pollution together. They are responsible for 62% of SDG implementation and around 75% of global emissions, yet they face a systemic finance gap receiving only 10–17% of international climate finance. Émilie's keynote highlighted concrete options for how national and subnational governments, together with public and private financiers, can collaborate to:

• build multilevel technical cooperation and institutional arrangements that turn fragmented initiatives into investment-ready portfolios; and
• deploy innovative financing mechanisms and robust financial structures aligned with the risk–return expectations of different financiers. 

This approach is fully aligned with the initiative Unlocking Capital with Finance Expertise Hubs, launched by the Sustainable Finance Observatory at the Fourth United Nations International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) and selected as part of the Sevilla Platform for Action. The initiative demonstrates how proven finance techniques can unlock capital flows for climate and SDG projects, including blended finance and co-financing mechanisms, as well as credit enhancement tools such as guarantees, including first-loss instruments. 

The Sustainable Finance Observatory is strengthening its collaboration with UNEP and cities and regions networks to scale up bankable pipelines of subnational projects, with the objective of bridging the finance gap.

See the agenda: https://www.unep.org/events/summit/unea-7-cities-and-regions-summit Watch the replay from 5:20 onwards.

SFO promotes the role of financial engineering in unlocking private capital for climate action at COP30

The Sustainable Finance Observatory participated in COP30 (10–21 November, Belém) around its President, François Gemenne. We were also present at the COP30 Local Leaders Forum (the “COP of Mayors”) and the Urban Nature Forum, held in Rio de Janeiro ahead of COP30. 

We were invited to present the role of financial engineering in unlocking private capital for climate action at eight international events, organised by leading global climate action organisations, including the COP30 Presidency, UNEP, GlobalABC, ICLEI, the Global Covenant of Mayors (GCoM), Regions4, Natural Resources Defense Council, Atlantic Council, Nature4Climate, Climate-KIC, and others (see press release). 

The UNFCCC and the IMF estimate that achieving the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals will require 70–90% of financing to come from the private sector. Our work on financial engineering focuses on developing bankability models and applying financial structuring to improve the risk–return profile of projects and unlock private capital at scale. This is achieved by making more strategic use of scarce concessional public finance and increasing its leverage effect. 

At COP30, our presentations, dialogues and partnership discussions focused in particular on three critical areas for mitigation and adaptation:

• energy-efficient building renovation;
• cities and regions; and
• adaptation and biodiversity.