The report identifies the mismatch between the amount of funding available and the amount needed for climate finance, thus highlighting the need to deploy international public climate finance more catalytically to increase the flows of private capital and government spending. The report identifies eight sets of financing levers for driving climate action: project-based investments, financial sector reforms, fiscal policies, sectoral policies, trade policies, innovation and technology transfer, carbon markets, and climate intelligence. For each of these levers, the report identifies the main interventions available, barriers to action, as well as the role and relevance of the instruments available. The report also broadly lists the mitigation and adaptation priorities across different sectors, including energy systems, land and ecosystem, the urban and infrastructure, as well as industrial systems.

The need for an equitable consideration of social and political economy issues in the countries and the regions to which they are applied is highlighted as a crosscutting issue across all levers. The report states that the use of climate finance to support this process, even when it does not achieve climate results directly, is essential for successful clean development. The report suggests that more can be done to refine the differentiation of climate finance to match the specific needs and circumstances of countries. This includes applying tiered conditionality for more advanced countries, which is dependent on their own efforts and orientation toward long-term strategies.

The report also acknowledges that a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the societal dimensions of transformative climate action covering all relevant sectors of the economy, along with the major types of transformative climate action, is still lacking. It states that the World Bank intends to contribute to closing this knowledge gap through a forthcoming report on the societal dimensions of transformative climate action.