At the 16th Conference of the Parties (COP) in 2010, developed countries formalised a collective climate finance commitment made previously in Copenhagen of “mobilising jointly USD 100 billion per year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries...from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources” (UNFCCC, 2010). However, there is currently no definition of which “climate” activities, flows, or other interventions could count towards the USD 100 billion; what “mobilising” means; or even which countries are covered by this commitment.
At present, official systems in place to track climate finance mainly focus on public outflows from developed countries. The greatest uncertainties relate to private and South-South flows to developing countries as well as domestic flows.

This paper focuses on the issue of private climate finance mobilised by developed countries in the context of the USD 100 billion commitment. It examines different definitions used by actors to quantify the level of private climate finance mobilised by their interventions, as well as the methods used to track private climate finance.