The Finance Programme engages with local, national and international financial institutions, circular enterprises, accountants, legal experts and policymakers to help meet two broad goals:
1) To improve the salience of the circular economy as a cross-cutting approach for financial market participants to meet a range of sustainability objectives, while equipping the sector with the expertise required to identify, understand, and assess effective circular economy initiatives.
2) To help businesses access capital directly for circular economy projects by mitigating the myriad challenges of being circular in a largely linear system. This includes addressing difficulties in financial reporting; solving the accounting challenges that can arise for circular business models; and distributing that knowledge effectively and widely to provide solutions to scale up acquisition of capital for impact-driven developments.
Finance plays a critical role in allocating capital to projects and initiatives that accelerate the transition to a low-carbon circular economy. However, the relative novelty and complexity of the circular economy as a topic means that there is considerable difficulty in identifying and differentiating high-potential projects - in the absence of global standards for circular economy investing, financiers have been required to develop their own approaches.
As such, the landscape of circular finance is scattered and misaligned - financiers struggle to find suitable investments in the circular economy, while businesses are unable to effectively communicate their own developments in circularity.In order to address this unique problem, the Circle Economy Finance Programme engages in distinctly collaborative approaches to improving the allocation of capital to the circular economy. Our projects focus on knowledge sharing and exchange, and a belief that greater harmonisation will be key to unlocking the potential of the financial sector in the circular economy.