Accelerating Impact Investments for Climate and Nature in Asia 2025

The World Economic Forum’s Coal to Clean Initiative, part of the GAEA (Giving to Amplify Earth Action) programme, is spearheading efforts to design scalable financing mechanisms for coal phase-out – vital to achieving net zero but massively hindered by the corresponding financial and operational complexities. A key issue of retiring coal-fired power plants (CFPPs) early in South-East Asia, in particular, is that many are relatively young and with substantial outstanding revenue still to generate. The early retirement of these assets must therefore address the financial pressures on asset owners, ensuring they can meet outstanding debt obligations and realize fair value from their investments. The Coal to Clean Initiative focuses on innovative financing solutions to address these issues, while minimizing reliance on large amounts of concessional capital and balancing critical energy security and just transition challenges. Based on a representative sample of CFPPs in the Philippines, the initiative is developing debt-based refinancing mechanisms to achieve significant emissions abatement through early CFPP closure. These approaches involve restructuring the capital stack of CFPPs to offer asset owners early monetization of plant value without financial loss, and could be delivered in the form of a public-private-philanthropic partnership (4P). The proposed mechanisms also aim to incentivize asset owners to consider early retirement, a critical step in creating a pipeline of CFPPs eligible for retirement. By enabling early payouts, asset owners can also hedge against risks of stranded assets and diminishing revenue streams as cleaner alternatives outcompete coal. The initiative highlights the potential for market-based mechanisms that deliver investor returns at commercial rates, using familiar financing tools to enhance replicability. Future work will explore bundling multiple CFPPs into portfolios and integrating alternative mechanisms, such as repurposing CFPP sites to maximize impact.CASE STUDY 1 Coal to Clean Initiative GAEA plays a key role as convener, broker and adviser to facilitate the 4P approach, with a particular focus on how innovative financing mechanisms can help address barriers or market failures, paving the way for bigger institutional and commercial investors to come in and mainstream economic and environmental sustainability. Achieving crucial goals such as the transformation of our energy future requires more than just willpower – it demands collaboration across sectors, where public, private and philanthropic forces unite and orchestrate the spectrum of capital and its different assets and tools with a systems-level change lens. Luis Alvarado, Head of GAEA / Strategic Public-Private-Philanthropic Partnerships, Centre for Nature and Climate, World Economic Forum Accelerating Impact Investments for Climate and Nature in Asia 7