Responding to climate change is commonly understood as a financial challenge: What are the expected costs of the impacts of climate change? How much money is needed to reduce emissions to a safe level and to help people live in a changing climate? Who should pay? While these questions reflect the big issues of climate politics – about historical responsibility, unequal exposure and the terms of possible futures – they do not tell us a lot about the relationships between and contestations over climate change and finance capitalism. This book develops an expansive definition of climate finance and a critical framework for analysing its political economy. Drawing from a wide-range of case studies, the authors highlight the diversity, scale and contradictions of climate finance entanglements – from funding renewable energy, putting a price on carbon, responsible investing and financialising resilience.

The promise of harnessing market forces to combat climate change has been unsettled by low carbon prices, financial losses, and ongoing controversies in global carbon markets. And yet governments around the world remain committed to market-based solutions to bring down greenhouse gas emissions. This book discusses what went wrong with the marketisation of climate change and what this means for the future of action on climate change. The book explores the co-production of capitalism and climate change by developing new understandings of relationships between the appropriation, commodification and capitalisation of nature. The book reveals contradictions in carbon markets for addressing climate change as a socio-ecological, economic and political crisis, and points towards more targeted and democratic policies to combat climate change. This book will appeal to students, researchers, policy makers and campaigners who are interested in climate change and climate policy, and the political economy of capitalism and the environment.