Uploaded September 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Around the world, rising humanitarian needs and intensifying climate impacts are putting pressure on stagnant or shrinking development budgets. This creates a dual challenge: how to finance urgent priorities in health, education, and infrastructure while also meeting climate commitments.
This seminar explored the concept of development-optimal climate finance—an approach that disentangles the risks, costs, and benefits of climate action from those of development. Akash Deep, Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, and Nick O’Donohoe, Former Chief Executive Officer at British International Investment, explored the challenge of allocating aid resources across the overlapping mandates of development and climate action. Deep and O’Donohoe discussed the risks of conflating development and climate objectives, the necessity of disentangling the two, and how public donors and private investors can better manage funds to achieve their desired impact.
More: belfercenter.org/event/development-optimal-climate-finance
Around the world, rising humanitarian needs and intensifying climate impacts are putting pressure on stagnant or shrinking development budgets. This creates a dual challenge: how to finance urgent priorities in health, education, and infrastructure while also meeting climate commitments.
This seminar explored the concept of development-optimal climate finance—an approach that disentangles the risks, costs, and benefits of climate action from those of development. Akash Deep, Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, and Nick O’Donohoe, Former Chief Executive Officer at British International Investment, explored the challenge of allocating aid resources across the overlapping mandates of development and climate action. Deep and O’Donohoe discussed the risks of conflating development and climate objectives, the necessity of disentangling the two, and how public donors and private investors can better manage funds to achieve their desired impact.
More: belfercenter.org/event/development-optimal-climate-finance
