Climate Finance Needs Registries, Not Dashboards

Climate finance has a measurement problem that technology alone has not solved. Over the past decade, governments, multilateral institutions, and private actors have invested heavily in dashboards, disclosure platforms, and reporting tools to track emissions, climate risks, and financial flows. Yet despite this proliferation, questions around credibility, double counting, and verification remain unresolved.

At the core of the issue is a structural gap. Most climate finance systems rely on self-reported data aggregated into visual interfaces, rather than on authoritative registries that establish provenance, ownership, and auditability. Dashboards present information. Registries establish truth.

This distinction matters. Climate finance depends on trust across borders, institutions, and markets. Carbon credits, climate bonds, adaptation finance, and transition investments all require confidence that reported outcomes correspond to real activities, measured consistently and verified independently. When trust is weak, capital becomes cautious, fragmented, or mispriced.

The experience of voluntary carbon markets illustrates the problem. Repeated assessments by international bodies have shown that inconsistencies in project methodologies, baseline setting, and verification practices undermine confidence in credits. As a result, buyers face uncertainty over whether emissions reductions are additional, permanent, or accurately measured. Dashboards may display volumes and prices, but they cannot resolve disputes over underlying data integrity.

A similar challenge exists in climate risk disclosure. Financial institutions increasingly report exposure to physical and transition risks using climate scenarios and stress tests. However, without common registries linking assets, locations, and climate data, disclosures remain difficult to compare or verify. This limits their usefulness for regulators, investors, and supervisors seeking system-wide insights.

What is missing is registry infrastructure that treats climate data as a shared reference rather than a collection of reports. A climate registry records who issued a claim, what asset or activity it refers to, how it was verified, and under which standards. It enables traceability across time and across systems. Importantly, it creates a basis for accountability when claims are challenged.

Some early efforts point in this direction. Under the Paris Agreement, national emissions inventories and registries underpin reporting and review processes coordinated by UNFCCC. Multilateral development banks are exploring common platforms to track climate finance commitments and outcomes. The World Bank and others have emphasised the need for interoperable systems that reduce duplication and improve data quality.

Yet progress remains uneven. Many initiatives still prioritise presentation over verification, layering new dashboards on top of fragmented data sources. This risks creating an illusion of transparency without resolving the underlying trust deficit.

India’s digital public infrastructure offers a useful analogy. Systems such as Aadhaar, DigiLocker, and UPI did not begin with dashboards. They began with authoritative registries for identity, documents, and transactions. Visualisation came later, once trust was embedded in the system. Applying similar design principles to climate finance would mean prioritising registries that can be reused across mitigation, adaptation, and transition finance.

Trust registries could link project data, verification outcomes, financial instruments, and policy frameworks without centralising control. They would allow regulators to supervise more effectively, investors to assess risk with greater confidence, and markets to price climate outcomes more accurately. Crucially, they would reduce the burden on project developers and institutions forced to report the same information repeatedly across incompatible platforms.

SUTRA’s focus on shared trust registries is directly relevant to this challenge. Climate finance does not suffer from a lack of data. It suffers from a lack of shared reference points. By treating registries as core infrastructure rather than optional tools, policymakers can move from fragmented reporting toward systems that support scale, integrity, and long-term confidence.

If climate finance is to mobilise capital at the pace and scale required, trust must be designed into the architecture. Dashboards can inform. Registries are what allow markets to function.

References

1. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Sixth Assessment Report: Mitigation of Climate Change. Geneva: IPCC, 2023.

2. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Modalities, Procedures and Guidelines for the Transparency Framework under the Paris Agreement. Bonn: UNFCCC, 2021.

3. World Bank. Climate Finance Tracking and Reporting: Challenges and Opportunities. Washington DC: World Bank, 2024.

4. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Enhancing Transparency and Integrity in Voluntary Carbon Markets. Paris: OECD, 2023.

5. Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market. Core Carbon Principles. London: ICVCM, 2023.

6. Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures. 2023 Status Report. London: TCFD, 2023.

7. Network for Greening the Financial System. Climate-Related Risk and Financial Stability. Paris: NGFS, 2023.