From the rehearsal dinner in Lima to the wedding of interests in Paris: finding the recipe to keep everyone seated at the negotiations table

Commission President von der Leyen announced a €2 trillion EU budget fit “for a new era,” set to launch for a seven-year period in 2028. As EU-watchers in Brussels and beyond scrambled to digest the reams of legislative proposals that followed this headline-grabbing announcement, much in the detail should give pause – especially from the perspective of closing the EU’s climate investment deficit.

With the dust settling from COP29’s hard-fought negotiations on the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), attention is shifting to how the climate finance goal will be met. The challenge is how to scale up financing for increasingly connected priorities in a challenging landscape of debt stress and cuts in official development assistance.