Barbara Buchner

Dr. Barbara Buchner is Executive Director of the widely renowned Climate Finance program at Climate Policy Initiative and is based out of San Francisco. Named one of the 20 most influential women in climate change by the International Council for Science, Barbara advises leaders on climate, energy and land use investments around the world.

Barbara is the lead author on CPI’s Global Landscape of Climate Finance, which has set the benchmark for climate finance tracking, and >Climate Finance in 2013-14 and the USD 100 Billion Goal—a joint report with the OECD that played a seminal role in the lead-up to the Paris Agreement.

She directs the Global Innovation Lab for Climate Finance (the Lab). The Lab’s public-private approach solicits, shapes and tests cutting-edge climate finance instruments that resolve financing barriers hindering alternative energy, adaptation, and land use projects. The Lab has helped raise over 500 million USD for its initiatives, and it was endorsed by the G7 in its first year of operation. The success of the Lab has also helped shape the new India Innovation Lab for Climate Finance. Barbara also leads CPI’s work as Secretariat of Finance for Resilience (FiRe), a sister initiative to The Lab that focuses on private sector approaches to scaling up investment in green growth. In addition, Barbara built and directed the San Giorgio Group, which brings together key financial institutions actively engaged in green low-emissions finance in collaboration with the World Bank Group, CLP (China Light & Power) and the OECD.

Barbara regularly speaks at high-profile events as an expert in climate policy and climate finance, and she has presented at Climate Week, at the Climate Finance Ministerial, as part of the GCF Private Sector Facility, at COP side-events and at the BNEF Summit among many other events.

Barbara was promoted from Director to Senior Director in 2013 and Executive Director in 2016. Previously, Barbara served as a Senior Energy and Environment Analyst at the International Energy Agency (IEA) and as a Senior Researcher at the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM) where she was involved in a number of activities related to FEEM’s Climate Change Policy and Modelling Unit in the field of environmental economics. She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Graz and was a Visiting Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).