In 2009, high-income countries promised to provide $100bn a year in climate finance to low- and middle-income countries by 2020. They have failed to keep this promise. Their official reports claim that the climate finance they provided and mobilized reached $83.3bn in 2020, but Oxfam estimates the real value was only around a third of that reported.

Immediate action is needed to restore trust in the $100bn goal and ensure that the provision of climate finance is fair and robust. For too long, most high-income countries have persisted in counting the wrong things in the wrong way. There are too many loans, too much debt, too few grants, too little for adaptation, and too much dishonest and misleading accounting.

This paper sets out recommendations for action at COP27 and beyond to rectify these issues, restore trust in climate finance and stop the world’s poorest climate-vulnerable countries and communities being short-changed of the climate finance they urgently need, and to which they are entitled.