International funding and technology transfer are crucial for creating climate change mitigation and adaption opportunities. This paper, jointly published by aidinfo and Publish What You Fund, calls for transparency in climate finance flows, harmonisation between climate change and aid transparency practices, and learning and collaboration between different stakeholders.The paper observes that the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) offers a model for decentralised publishing of data on international funding flows and investments. It outlines the following steps for realising the opportunities of the open data approach.

Although the IATI standard incorporates information on climate finance, small modifications to the standard would allow users to provide more detailed information on climate actions and impacts as part of their IATI publication.
Despite IATI being compatible with the OECD Creditor Reporting System (CRS), an additional set of elements could be developed with the UNFCCC to enable countries to publish information using the IATI standard whilst meeting UNFCCC reporting requirements.
The planned UNFCCC registry will introduce a system for reporting on finance, but the IATI model is more effective than the central database and a useful template for the UNFCCC.

The paper presents the following recommendations to advance existing synergies.

Organisations working on aid and climate finance transparency should strengthen collaboration with other stakeholders.
Funders must provide detailed, accessible and timely information to meet the needs of different information users.
Publish What You Fund should increase its coverage of and discussion on climate finance issues.
The IATI Steering Committee needs to identify opportunities and solutions for integrating additional climate-related codes and data fields into the standard.
IATI and the UNFCCC should engage to explore the potential for the IATI data format to support reporting to the UNFCCC.
The UNFCCC needs to consider using a decentralised open data approach compatible to IATI for its planned registry of support needs and resource availability.