Donovan Escalante

Donovan Escalante is a manager at Climate Policy Initiative in San Francisco where he focuses on climate finance. His projects address the need to mobilize private investment towards low-carbon, climate resilient growth in developing countries. At the intersection of the public and private sectors, he works to design new financial mechanisms to solve barriers to renewable energy deployment. As part of the Global Innovation Lab for Climate Finance, he worked in Brazil to help develop and pilot a new financial instrument to lower the cost of financing for distributed solar generation through securitization. He also works closely with public entities to increase the effectiveness of public spending, leading a four-year evaluation of the Climate Public Partnership (CP3) Programme – an innovative £130m private equity fund of the UK Government that provides early-stage equity financing to companies and projects investing in climate relevant sectors.

Prior to joining CPI, Donovan worked as a consultant in international climate policy at Ecofys in Cologne, Germany. He contributed to the development of Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs) in Chile, Mexico, and Ethiopia. He also contributed to international policy discussions through his work on the UNFCCC NAMA Registry, the NAMA guidebook for the African Development Bank, the UNEP Bridging the Emissions Gap report, and his research on Effort Sharing for the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. He holds an M.Sc in Industrial Ecology from Leiden University in the Netherlands and a B.A. in Economics from the University of Texas in Austin.