Pressure is growing on governments to ensure the green changes they need to make to curb climate change don't damage people's livelihoods and their communities, worsening already stark inequalities around the world.

Donors are starting to pour billions of dollars into helping coal-dependent emerging economies ditch coal for solar and wind power - as with the international partnership announced for South Africa at COP26, with more such deals under consideration.

Ani Dasgupta, head of the U.S-based World Resources Institute (WRI), said this new type of cooperation should be "as transparent as possible".

That will enable other countries to learn from it and help ensure frontline communities affected by the shift away from fossil fuels receive their fair share and the assistance they need.

"We don't want a situation where the (just transition) deal results in the same rich people - who benefited from the past system and polluted the world - also benefiting from this transaction," he told me.

The growing urgency to clean up our economies and cut the climate-heating emissions they belch out has yet to spur the swift responses required on the ground - but why?

Some argue that if we just had the technology to gobble up CO2 from our factories and the air, all would be well - and we could keep on burning fossil fiels with abandon.

But a new report from consultancy firm McKinsey - and comments by top politicians and energy officials at last week's virtual World Economic Forum - point to a different view.

It's not that we don't have the right clean tech, they say, but that we're not investing anywhere near enough in rolling it out at scale and speed.

"Effectively we are planning to rebuild an economy that took one to two centuries to build in the next three decades... Something of that magnitude - the scale and speed - is under-appreciated," Dickon Pinner, the global leader of McKinsey Sustainability, told our climate editor Laurie Goering.

The challenge of getting investment where it needs to go is a problem that affects all levels of action to safeguard the planet's climate and nature, from the global to the local.

Our Malayasia-based reporter Beh Lih Yi talked to fishermen who are seeking money to expand a successful mangrove-restoration project but can't meet the demands of international funders.

"We are nervous - we are fishermen and we can't commit to something we're not confident in delivering," one of the group said.

And in northern Ghana, an insurance programme led by a social enterprise that uses land and crop data collected by the agriculture ministry to provide cover for about 1,360 farmers is struggling to enlist larger numbers.

"The main issue in agricultural insurance is gaining the trust of farmers," said the head of inclusive finance at the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.

The need to democratise access to the finance and tech that's starting to become available to keep us safe in a warming world has never been clearer.

See you next week,

Megan

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