Opening Remarks by Singapore's Ambassador at Asia Climate Philanthropy Advisory Anniversary

Where Generosity Meets Climate Action

Ladies and gentlemen, good evening.

Congratulations ACPA, and thank you for the opportunity to mark this milestone with you.

THE CLIMATE FINANCING GAP

Climate action will be critical in Asia – for two reasons.

First, Asia is where the fight against climate change will be won or lost.

·       Asia accounts for 50% of global emissions.

·       90% of the world’s future growth in energy demand will come from Asia.

·       Building new renewable energy capacity and phasing down fossil fuel energy will be critical to decarbonising Asia.

Second, Asia will suffer the most from climate change.

·       Asia as a whole is warming nearly twice as fast as the global average.

·       Sea level rise around Southeast Asia exceeds the global mean, threatening more than 150 million people living in low-lying coastal areas.^[i]

·       The toll on lives and livelihoods is mounting.

o   Southeast Asia faces approximately 100 climate disasters annually, affecting 80 million people each year.^[ii]

Yet, Asia remains severely underfunded to drive decarbonisation and build climate

resilience.

·       Asia’s funding gap for climate mitigation and adaptation stands at over US$800 billion annually.^[iii]

·       Public capital is willing but insufficient.  Private capital is ample but unwilling to commit in a big way because project risks are too high.

This is a time for philanthropy to play a larger role in driving climate action in Asia.

·       A partnership across public, private, and philanthropic capital can help to effectively plug the gaps in Asia’s climate finance.

But the climate philanthropic space remains at a nascent stage.

·       Globally, less than 2% of philanthropic giving goes towards preventing climate change. Of this, only 12% goes to Asia, despite the region’s outsized needs.^[iv]

·       Climate adaptation receives much less^[v].

Talking to philanthropies, I often hear they want to fund climate action but are unsure how.

·       First, mitigation and adaptation solutions are highly technical and complex. Donors without the necessary climate expertise may find it hard to evaluate and invest in such projects.

·       Second, good projects are scattered across the region, and site-specific. A donor who wants to fund ten projects may face ten separate due diligence exercises.

·       Third, donors are uncertain if their giving would result in real impact. 

And philanthropic funders want some return too.

·       Not to profit, but to recycle capital into the next project and multiply impact at scale.

·       This is not charity in the old sense. It is catalytic capital, doing a job nothing else in the system is built to do.

ACPA’s work directly addresses these challenges.

·       ACPA’s mission is to make climate giving simpler, more strategic, and more impactful.

·       It pairs trusted knowledge with regional networks, so philanthropists can act with confidence.

And the Singapore government is keen to work with philanthropies and with ACPA to help drive meaningful climate action in Asia.

Let me suggest three ways in which philanthropic capital can do this.

·       crowd-in private capital

·       fund the first mile for nature

·       support the measurement commons

CROWD IN PRIVATE CAPITAL

First, crowd in private capital for marginally bankable decarbonisation and adaptation projects.

Philanthropies can leverage innovative funding instruments such as blended finance to

maximise the impact of their contributions.

·       Blended finance uses concessional capital - from public and philanthropic sources - to accept first loss and lower returns, and thereby crowd in multiples of commercial capital.

Singapore’s FAST-P or Financing Asia’s Transition Partnership offers philanthropies an effective vehicle to amplify their climate giving. 

·       FAST-P is a blended finance platform to support green and transition projects in Asia – from displacing coal and investing in renewables to electrifying transportation and decarbonising industrial processes.

·       The Singapore Government has pledged US$500 million as concessional capital to match dollar for dollar similar capital from other governments and philanthropies.

·       The aim is to use this US$1 billion base of concessional capital to crowd in four times more private capital for a total fund size of US$5 billion.

·       Or put differently, if you contribute US$5 million to any of FAST-P’s three funds, it will unlock US$5 million from the Singapore government and crowd in US$40 million of commercial capital.

o   That’s a 10X multiple of impact for every philanthropic dollar given.

This is not theory.  FAST-P is already doing this at scale, attracting four dollars of commercial capital for every dollar of concessional capital committed.

·       Its Green Investments Partnership has raised US$800 million, to fund renewable energy and waste and water management projects.

·       The Energy Transition Acceleration Finance Partnership has raised US$250 million, to fund grid modernisation to enable the displacement of fossil fuels for power generation.

The same logic of blended finance can work for climate adaptation as well.

·       Philanthropy can provide the patient and concessional capital that improves the risk-return profile of projects that enhance climate resilience.

·       Philanthropy can also fund the early stages of project development.

o   This includes technical assistance, feasibility work and capability building, to translate opportunities into credible and investible pipelines.

In the climate resilience space, food systems deserve particular attention.

·       Farmers in many parts of Southeast Asia face eroding soils, erratic monsoons, and shrinking yields.  Yet agrifood systems remain critically underfunded.

·       Philanthropy can help to fund climate-resilient seed varieties, water-efficient irrigation, and stronger food supply chains.

·       We will come to you when our plans for supporting adaptation are better developed.

FUND THE FIRST MILE FOR NATURE

Second way in which philanthropic capital can help the climate cause: fund the first mile for nature.

For Southeast Asia, nature offers vast carbon removal potential while strengthening resilience to climate impacts.

·       Southeast Asia alone holds a quarter of the world’s forest carbon capacity, over a third of the world’s mangroves, and nearly all its tropical peatlands.

·       Forests regulate rainfall and stabilise water supplies.

·       Mangroves protect coastlines from storm surges and erosion.

·       Peatlands store carbon and stabilise local climates.

But nature is under-invested in Southeast Asia.

·       The region needs an estimated US$54 billion a year for nature-based solutions. It is currently getting only about US$8 billion^[vi].

Carbon credits offer a market-driven solution to bridge the nature financing gap.

·       Carbon credits are generated by activities that reduce or remove carbon emissions.

·       Countries or companies may want to purchase such credits to help offset their hard-to-abate residual emissions.

·       This convergence of demand and supply creates a win-win situation.

o   For developing countries where financing needs far outpace available resources, carbon credits create an additional pathway to fund mitigation projects.

o   For sovereign and corporate buyers, they offer a transparent and credible solution to meet emissions reduction targets.

But many nature projects struggle to attract private capital.

• High-profile failures involving major forest conservation projects have damaged confidence in nature-based carbon credits.  

• The returns on many nature projects are long-duration.  Their transaction costs — for due diligence, structuring, legal work, and impact verification — are high relative to project size. 

Philanthropies can fund project preparation and pipeline development.  

• The most critical bottleneck in nature financing is not the absence of willing investors.  It is the absence of investment-ready projects.  

• This is where philanthropies and foundations come in: to put resources into feasibility analysis, project structuring, and impact frameworks. 

• It is unglamorous work. But it is the foundation on which supply rests. 

SUPPORT THE MEASUREMENT COMMONS

Third, support the measurement commons in adaptation.

·       In mitigation or decarbonisation projects, we have a universal unit: tonnes of carbon dioxide reduced. Investments, targets, and accountability can all be built around it.

·       Adaptation has no equivalent.  One of the biggest challenges to adaptation finance today is not a shortage of interest, but a shortage of trusted and useful data.

·       Investors often work from fragmented datasets, different methodologies and inconsistent ways of measuring resilience outcomes.

We need to build a shared public infrastructure, especially for agri-food systems.

·       We must make adaptation measurable. This means better climate and agricultural data, common approaches to measuring outcomes, and platforms that can translate data into actionable insights.

·       This data infrastructure must be built as a public good. This is so data can be pooled from different sources – multilateral development banks, research institutes, and intergovernmental organisations – to generate the insights that investors, innovators and governments need.

·       Philanthropies, together with governments, are well suited to fund a shared public infrastructure.

o   A bank funding its own due diligence has no reason to give a competitor free access.  

o   A foundation funding a shared measurement standard has no such conflict – the “return” it needs is impact.

o   And this impact is maximised precisely by making the infrastructure open and widely used.

CLOSING

Let me conclude.

In this room stands the Climate Future Map of Asia. The gaps on that map are not abstractions.

·       They are farmers in the Mekong Delta watching saltwater creep into their rice fields.

·       They are Jakarta’s urban poor, losing a day’s wages with every flood.

·       They are coastal families in the Philippines, rebuilding a home one typhoon at a time.

It is people like them that we must direct the philanthropic firepower gathered in this room.  Let us work together to make that happen.  Here is to the next chapter of Asia’s giving climate.

^[i] Affandi, M. L. A., Din, A. H. M., Rasidi, S., Pa'suya, M. F., & Ng, K. W. (2024). Sea level rise estimation and

projection from long-term multi-mission satellite altimetry data around the Southeast Asian

Region. International Journal of Remote Sensing, 45(24), 9033–9063.

^[ii] Wertz, J., Clark, A., & Hui, M. (2025, December 4). Deadly floods' $20 billion toll shows Asia's rising climate

risk. Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-04/deadly-floods-20-billion-toll-shows- ↗ (opens in new tab)

asia-s-rising-climate-risk.

^[iii] Basu, R. & Lim, C.H. (2024). Explainer: How Asia Can Unlock $800 Billion of Climate Financing. International Monetary Fund Blog. https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2024/01/29/explainer-how-asia-can-unlock-800-billion-of-climate-financing ↗ (opens in new tab).

^[iv] Ang, A. (2026, May 25). As the U.S. and Europe pull back from global climate aid, can Asian funders fill the gap? Fortune. Fortune.com/2026/05/25/Asian-philanthropists-climate-aid-gap/ ↗ (opens in new tab)

^[v] ClimateWorks Foundation (2025). Foundation funding for climate change adaptation and resilience 2025. Content.climateworks.org/AdaptationFunding2025 ↗ (opens in new tab); ClimateWorks Foundation (2026). Funding trends 2026: Climate change mitigation philanthropy. https://www.climateworks.org/report/funding-trends-2026/ ↗ (opens in new tab). Foundation funding for adaptation totalled an estimated $870 million in 2024. In the same year, climate mitigation funding from foundations and individuals combined reached an estimated $11.7 billion to $18.4 billion.

^[vi] United Nations Environment Programme. (2026). State of Finance for Nature in ASEAN. https://unep.org/resources/state-finance-nature ↗ (opens in new tab)