Climate Finance: Birth of an Economic Aggregate (1990–2025)[Finance climat : naissance d'un agrégat économique (1990–2025)]

At Baku in 2024, climate negotiators fixed a new collective goal: $300 billion a year by 2035 for climate action in developing countries. Climate finance — the public and private flows developed countries mobilize to help developing countries cut emissions and adapt — is the magnitude that goal purports to measure, though no fund holds it and no counting method commands assent. Climate finance was assembled into an economic aggregate, in the lineage of GDP, through three ingredients that met between 2007 and 2014: the Copenhagen pledge supplied a political number in search of its object, the OECD's development-aid statistics supplied an accounting apparatus already standing, and economists in international organizations and development banks supplied the devices — markers, concessionality thresholds, attribution rules — that turned the two into a countable whole. A computational break-detection analysis of a multilingual corpus, blind to the calendar of the climate negotiations, corroborates this periodization. Four recurring controversies — concessional-loan valuation, Rio-marker credibility, mobilized-private-finance attribution, the aid/climate-obligation boundary — organize the field since 2015; a 2025 World Bank operation in Türkiye displays all four in one transaction. The ambiguity of these categories is not a flaw: it lets donors report mobilization and recipients audit obligation from the same number, making a distributive conflict administrable rather than resolved.