Development finance institutions from the UK, Canada and Norway have agreed to work together on climate and energy-transition investments in emerging markets, with a shared ambition to support US$10 billion of activity by 2030.
British International Investment, FinDev Canada and Norfund announced the memorandum at the COP31 climate conference in Antalya, Türkiye. The collaboration, called 10by30, is intended to bring the institutions together on potential deals and attract private investors alongside them.
The headline figure is a goal, not a sum already raised or invested. It includes private capital the institutions hope to mobilise as well as their own investment activity. The memorandum does not create a joint fund, a new legal entity or a financial commitment between the participants, and any future investment will need to pass each institution’s own approval process.
From shared opportunities to individual decisions
The institutions plan to identify opportunities together and share information about prospective projects and the markets in which they operate. They also intend to coordinate due diligence: the financial, legal and other checks carried out before deciding whether an investment should proceed.
That cooperation is designed to reduce duplicated work and help the partners reach decisions more quickly on transactions they may support together. They also plan to co-invest in selected major deals and improve how they measure climate and development effects.
A shared pipeline is a list of potential investments, not a list of completed transactions. Each organisation will still apply its own mandate, governance and decision-making procedures. An opportunity identified by one partner will not automatically receive backing from all three.
The announcement does not identify specific projects or say how much each institution will contribute to the shared ambition. Nor does it establish how much private investment has been secured under the collaboration. The eventual mix will depend on the transactions that are developed and approved.
Power, networks and industry
The partners expect the work to cover renewable energy, electricity transmission and distribution, energy storage, sustainable fuels and industrial decarbonisation. These are different parts of an energy system rather than a single type of project.
New wind or solar generation can produce lower-emission electricity, while transmission and distribution networks carry power to homes and businesses. Storage can hold energy for use at another time, helping manage differences between when electricity is generated and when it is needed.
Industrial decarbonisation concerns ways to reduce emissions from production. Sustainable fuels are also included in the intended scope. Listing a sector does not mean that a particular technology or project has been selected, financed or completed.
The collaboration is focused on investments intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in emerging markets, including higher-emitting economies. Climate finance can also support adaptation to the effects of climate change, but the three institutions’ shared focus here is the energy transition and emissions reduction.
Existing initiatives, broader partnership
Each participant has its own climate investment initiative: British Climate Partners, Canada’s Climate Mobilization Strategy and Norway’s Climate Investment Fund. The memorandum brings those existing efforts into closer cooperation; it does not merge them into a single organisation.
The UK and Canadian institutions have worked together before. In 2025, British International Investment and FinDev Canada agreed to cooperate through their concessional finance facilities, including sharing potential investments and due diligence. Concessional finance can use terms designed to make an investment more viable than it might be on ordinary commercial terms.
The new arrangement adds Norfund and places the three-way cooperation around climate and energy-transition investment. Neither agreement should be read as proof that a particular transaction has been completed.
A wider finance challenge
The announcement comes against a larger international debate about the amount and type of finance available to developing countries. At COP29 in 2024, countries agreed a goal of at least US$300 billion a year in climate finance for developing countries by 2035, with developed countries taking the lead. They also called for efforts to scale finance from all sources to US$1.3 trillion a year by that date.
Those global figures and the 10by30 ambition cover different time periods and scopes. The latter is an investment objective for the three institutions, not an additional annual government pledge under the COP29 agreement.
For the partnership, the next test will be the flow of actual proposals through due diligence and individual approvals. The amount ultimately invested, the private capital attracted and the emissions avoided will depend on the projects that emerge, rather than on the memorandum alone.
