Marek Soanes
Researcher, Climate Change
Marek Soanes work focuses on climate finance, including research to help shape the new generation of finance for development, to delivering capacity building to improve developing countries ability to access, absorb and mobilise finance.
He is particularly interested in delivering interconnected actions at the international and national level that help channel finance in a way that promotes pro-poor investment in low-carbon climate-resilient development. Presently, he is researching ways shape international funds that promote local level activities in both climate change mitigation and adaptation, and deliver local developmental benefits on the ground.
He has experience working across the climate change arena, from carbon markets in both developing and developed countries, to the climate change negotiations as part of the UNFCCC. All this work has taken Marek across East Asia, and East and West Africa, working with both public and private sectors.
Climate and development finance, carbon markets, economics of climate change.
Experience in East Asia (Bangladesh), Africa (Senegal, Zambia, Mali, and Tanzania)
Research on the financing agenda of the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals; innovative financing for promoting local action on climate change; public and private sector access to international climate finance namely the Green Climate Fund.
MSc in Carbon Management, The University of Edinburgh (Scotland); BSc Environmental Geoscience, The University of Edinburgh (Scotland)
Marek Soanes's blog posts
Increasing climate finance to the local level is the best way to improve efforts to tackle climate change. IIED calls on the board of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), meeting this week in South Korea, to make sure vital finance reaches those who need it most.
Evidence from community-focused initiatives suggests that climate and development funds can deliver local finance by adopting six key structural changes.
Marek Soanes's blog posts with other authors
Ingenious and cost-effective solutions to climate change developed by vulnerable communities are hugely underfinanced. IIED is exploring further what’s blocking climate finance from reaching the local level and developing new insights for getting money to those on the front lines of climate action.
As the Green Climate Fund meets to select projects for funding, is the current funding criteria prioritising a business as usual approach?