WICE draws lessons on grounded finance from London Climate Week

Washington D.C. - 11 July 2026 - The World Institute for Conservation and Environment (WICE) shares reflections from Kenneth MacClune, WICE’s Environment Advisor, who just returned from London Climate Action Week (LCAW) 2026, which ran from 20 to 28 June. MacClune attended on behalf of People’s Courage International (PCI), contracted through ISET-International. He presented research on climate risk and informality. His read on the week informs how WICE should continue to build out its blended finance work.

Ken MacClune, WICE Environment Advisor, and Laura Hammet, WICE Consultant, meeting for coffee during London Climate Week.

LCAW 2026 convened under the theme “Climate Cooperation in a Fractured World.” Programming covered finance, resilience, energy, nature, health, governance, geopolitics, and diplomacy. The week drew a strong turnout despite a sustained and record heatwave, quite timely and ironic for all of the climate researchers and activists in attendance.

For MacClune, a significant takeaway from LCA was the change in posture. Climate action has moved from setting targets to making systems deliver; and it is doing so under harsher conditions. Finance was the dominant thread of the week, in which discussions centered on capital allocation, measurable outcomes, and the trying to close the gap between commitments and money that actually moves.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres argued that finance ministries, central banks, planning ministries, and public investment authorities should treat climate risk as core economic policy. He added that capital markets should value resilience rather than treat it as a soft public-good add-on.

MacClune’s own contribution centers on a gap he calls grounded finance.

“Grounded finance is capital that reaches the places where people live, work, and move, and that changes conditions on the ground rather than sitting in instruments and pledges one or two steps removed from the people it is meant to protect,” said MacClune. “The week was strong on the architecture of finance and thin on the plumbing that connects it to the populations most exposed.”

MacClune identified the deeper issue as a power differential. Global finance sits on one side, while the communities that need financing to meet their own adaptation needs sit on the other. When terms are set far from the ground, the effect is not only slower flows. It skews what gets funded toward responses that fit the financier’s risk model rather than the community’s reality. Adaptation is by nature a bottom-up problem. MacClune assessed the resulting risk of maladaptation as high.

The heat in London also made the resilience case difficult to avoid. One extreme-heat session at the London School of Economics was cancelled because the venue was too hot. Resilience to heat, drought, flood, and storm stopped reading as secondary to mitigation, and instead read as a central economic, fiscal, and governance question.

MacClune summarized the week as a move from ambition architecture to delivery architecture. The emphasis has shifted away from who holds the better pledge, and instead falls on which systems move money, reduce risk, change incentives, and protect people. MacClune flagged that becoming too technocratic and capital-led can become a significant risk.

“The opening is for the implementation and systems work that many of us do,” said MacClune. “That means incentives, governance, institutional capacity, exposed populations, and the connective tissue between plans and outcomes.”

That framing, to test whether finance is actually reaching the ground, shapes how WICE thinks about the future of international development and closing the finance gap for many climate projects that have been left severely underfunded in the last year. WICE intends to not only address the “finance architecture” but the “question around plumbing.” Blended finance structures can move concessional and catalytic capital into the projects, communities, and markets that most need it. That work is already underway through the Congo Basin Forest Finance Facility and the Blue Impact Fund. Both are built to channel capital toward measurable outcomes for exposed populations rather than pledges held one step removed.