Scaling Climate Action by Lowering Emissions (SCALE) is an umbrella program that supports participating countries to leverage World Bank projects with high-emissions reductions potential to mobilize debt-neutral financing from international carbon markets for their low-emission and resilient development.
Supported by contributions from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Switzerland, SCALE addresses barriers to carbon market expansion, builds a bridge between carbon credit producers and buyers, and leverages the WBG’s suite of financial tools to develop innovative solutions. It draws on over two decades of experience through its foundational carbon funds — including FCPF, ISFL, Ci-Dev, and TCAF – which have laid the foundations for market-based approaches to decarbonization consistent with countries’ development aspirations. SCALE’s task is to expand developing countries’ access to climate and carbon finance by embedding these market-based approaches into World Bank operations.
SCALE’s support to countries is anchored in three objectives:
- Generating large-scale, high-impact emissions reductions from WB operations. Working with regional sector teams, SCALE identifies World Bank-funded projects with high potential for large-scale emissions reductions (ER). SCALE then supports countries to generate high-integrity, socially inclusive ERs from these projects, and to register their ER programs with market grade standards in order to be able to monetize them on carbon markets. SCALE works to identify opportunities for innovative uses of financial products to leverage the expected emissions reductions for further up-front capital to fill financing gaps.
- Building countries’ operational infrastructure and capacity to ensure the high integrity of the emissions reductions they generate. SCALE supports countries establish strategic plans; measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) systems; socially inclusive benefit sharing mechanisms (further supported by the EnABLE trust fund); institutional arrangements (working alongside the Partnership for Market Implementation (PMI), its sister umbrella program focusing on country-level infrastructure) and other operational building blocks of emissions reduction programs, while also creating incentives to mitigate risks in emerging carbon markets. As a result, countries gain the expertise, tools and systems to replicate such ER programs in other operations across different sectors and expand participation in carbon markets.
- Monetizing emissions reductions to access additional debt-neutral finance through carbon markets. SCALE provides countries with advisory services and capacity building on carbon transactions to help them access carbon markets, and collaborates with carbon buyer aggregators such as the Kinetic Coalition and LEAF Coalition to mobilize additional carbon finance. SCALE helps countries manage their performance and market risks by providing countries with risk management services and offtake guarantees. It also supports countries to establish the legal frameworks and build technical know-how, including working with MIGA on the Letter of Authorization Template to facilitate guarantee issuance in support of private investors engaged in Article 6 transactions.
