World Coal: IEA CCC Report - Global financing for coal power goes East

(World Coal, Surrey, 19 May 2017) Development finance is essential to help the advancement and empowerment of low and middle income economies. But, past announcements by multilateral development banks restricting finance for greenfield coal plants cast doubts on future funding. This approach to coal investments spread to other development agencies and also became a foundation for the rules governing OECD export credits (pdf). A new report from the IEA Clean Coal Centre by Paul Baruya, Trends in international lending for coal-fired power plants, examines the implications of these announcements and explores the roles and policies of different financial institutions. In 2014 alone, US$152 billion of funding was received by the coal power and mining sectors from such institutions. Of this total, just US$9 billion was provided by multilateral development banks and export credit agencies. Thus these publicly financed institutions make a minor contribution to direct funding of coal projects, although they maintain a role in attracting commercial funding to higher risk projects.