Kick-starting global cLimate Investments: uncovering hidden liNks in climate finance and exploring dynamic evolution of investment networKs for policy deSign

LINKS aims to contribute to a transformation of the climate finance system to deliver the scale and quality of investment needed to meet the Paris climate goals and ensure effective capital allocation. By understanding the architecture of the financial system, exploring macro patterns in low-carbon investment emerging from observed investors’ behaviour and interactions, and designing cross-cutting policies aligned with long-term climate targets, LINKS will promote essential guidance for a re-orientation of financial flows towards low-carbon and energy efficiency investments. LINKS aims to advance the understanding of the role of climate finance to foster the low-carbon transition by using network theory, advanced computational techniques and extensive empirical data to model the financial system as a complex adaptive system. LINKS will thus lay the foundations of, and pioneer a new field, namely climate finance networks, where dynamics of interconnected investors represented as a network, results in the complex behavior of the whole system. LINKS will bring together interdisciplinary theories and developments in finance, environmental economics, sociology, computer science, network analysis and complexity in an integrated approach to study and model climate finance. Taking this approach will allow advancements in at least three directions: i) a new theoretical approach to account for complexity thinking and systemic perspective in climate finance, ii) more empirical analyses on networks structures of low-carbon investments and their dynamics to shape the development of the climate finance system, iii) policy modelling analyses to explore whether specific architectures of the climate finance system have significant impact on the effectiveness of climate public policies and invested public resources. LINKS will thus deliver robust conclusions on how the financial system could contribute to the required investments to achieve the low-carbon transition.