“The Capital Markets Climate Initiative (CMCI) aims to help unlock the private sector’s ability to help meet the $100 billion of new green investment required annually by 2020 to tackle climate change in developing countries,” said the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC)

Speaking at a meeting of financiers in London on Tuesday, Barker said that while the Copenhagen Accord spoke of the need for this sum to be invested, there has been “very little progress in how that capital will be shaped, how it will be raised, how it will be deployed, who the investors will be, who the recipients will be, and what the conditions must be in order to tap that and let it flow”.

The private sector is expected to provide most of this finance, he said, but there is still a role for public finance.

“We want the City of London, with its unique expertise in innovative financial products, to lead the world and become the global hub for green growth finance. We need to put the sub-prime disaster behind us and focus back on investment in genuine wealth creation and in ways that don’t damage the environment,” Barker added.

A DECC spokeswoman said no formal body has been established and there is no programme of meetings planned under the CMCI. “It’s quite fluid,” she said.

Christopher Cundy