Barriers to Investment in Climate Change Solutions—A Scoping Review

Journal Paper by Sarah Hafner, Olivia James and Aled Jones
Sustainability, 2019 11(11)
June 2019

Abstract

The finance sector has engaged with policy development processes around climate solutions for well over a decade, with the aim of overcoming barriers to investment. In this paper we analyse 31 practice-based policy reports, highlighting key barriers to such investing. We use those practice-based policy reports to identify themes associated with barriers to investment to conduct a scoping literature review of academic research. We identify 91 relevant papers and use content analysis to summarise the identified barriers  in a structured way to help inform the research landscape. Given the urgency of this issue, we call on the academic community to increase the effort in this new and emerging discipline and, in particular, on the need for an independent view on the validity of some of the claims made in policy reports.