Increasing Municipal Access to Climate Finance Mechanisms

By Lucia Lombardo

This summer, I was given the opportunity to work at CDP North America as the Sustainable Infrastructure fellow on the Cities team. Formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project, CDP is an environmental disclosure non-profit helping companies, investors, municipalities, and states realize their environmental impact. I worked within the North America Cities team, spearheading work on CDP’s Matchmaker program, which pairs proposed municipal sustainable infrastructure projects with investors. Examples of projects currently on the dashboard include installing LED lights on a city-owned bike path, energy efficiency upgrades in city buildings, and adding EV charging stations in city parking decks. The program is in its fourth year and over 1,200 projects have been disclosed through the platform, totaling almost $100 billion USD.

Much of my fellowship consisted of city engagement, which took many forms. One form was through phone and video calls with municipal staff to discuss their potential projects, their financing concerns and needs, and how CDP’s access to investors could help finance their projects. I spoke and met with around 75 cities to discuss potential projects for the platform, including the City of Anchorage, the City of Newark, and the City of San Leandro, CA. The second form my engagement took was assisting webinars on topics ranging from water infrastructure to project financing. These webinars were intended for municipal staff and the recordings were another resource CDP provides to cities who disclose.

Municipal Bonds panel, moderated by Fletcher alum and CDP employee Richard Freund (bottom right)

The third form my engagement took was helping to create, plan, and run CDP’s three-day Sustainable Infrastructure workshop. This workshop included panels of investors, city staff, and other actors speaking on topics like solar project development and municipal bonds. The workshop included a networking session for municipal staff, which I helped lead. In total, the workshop had over 60 attendees over three days and was conducted fully virtually through an external events platform.

Beyond engagement, I analyzed data sets from the Matchmaker platform and conducted research on projects for my team. One such research project concerned water infrastructure projects submitted to Matchmaker; this information was used in an external briefing by a CDP senior employee to investors. Another research project I conducted was on solar projects as well as projects related to temperature rise, hurricanes, and flooding. This research was used by CDP’s employees Richard Freund, the Manager of Sustainable Infrastructure on Capital Markets NA and Christina Copeland, the Associate Director of Water Security, in a blog post they co-authored.

The final responsibility I took on during my fellowship was the creation of the city climate finance resource compendium. This summer-long project was my brainchild and served two purposes; the first was creating an external file, providing municipalities with climate finance forms available to their city and was meant to be a starting point for cities. The second purpose was to create an internal document for CDP staff on how and when to disseminate the compendium to cities. The external file included five two-pagers on types of climate finance like Green bonds and PACE loans. The internal file was a resource guide with prompts from cities followed by information on which resource a CDP employee could send. The file also included descriptions of, and links to, past CDP workshops and webinars that employees could send to municipal staff. This project culminated in a presentation I gave to the global Cities team introducing the resource.

I loved my experience with CDP and was hired on a part-time basis into September after my fellowship ended in August. The work they do on environmental disclosure is necessary and extremely relevant today. None of my experience would have been possible without the generous contributions to CIERP’s Strategic Internship Program grants, of which I was a recipient.

Lucia Lombardo (she/her/hers) is a second year MALD studying international environment and resource policy and negotiation and conflict resolution. She is interested in energy and environment policy consulting as well as the intersection of conflict and the environment.

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