Iraq’s Climate Investment Plan (CIP)

• Iraq's Climate Investment Plan (CIP) puts the country's climate investment need at US$82.85 billion to 2030 — US$23.25 billion of it in electricity, US$13.4 billion in transport and US$11.8 billion in the oil-and-gas transition — and sets out five funding streams to mobilise it.
• As consultant to UNDP Iraq (April–June 2024, 50 working days, Baghdad and Erbil), Enlil Center mobilised ministry data for the plan, drafted its mitigation and finance sections, and trained Iraq's 14-ministry technical committee on operationalising Article 6 carbon markets.
• Ministry-specific sessions for Oil, Environment, Industry and Housing tied Article 6 mechanisms to the CIP's own priorities: gas capture, energy efficiency and renewables scale-up.
• The full technical report, to which Enlil was a contributing author, is published in the Research section; its sector tables and Iraq's 2021 emissions inventory are in the Data Hub.

Overview

Iraq's economy earns most of its revenue from the sectors it must decarbonise, and the state budget cannot carry the transition alone. The Climate Investment Plan is the government's answer: a transitional plan for 2025–2030 that prices climate resilience sector by sector, separates what domestic finance can cover from what needs outside capital, and identifies the barriers — methane flaring, grid losses, missing carbon-market infrastructure — standing between Iraq and multilateral climate finance. As consultant to UNDP Iraq, Enlil Center provided the research and capacity-building needed to make that plan operational.

Caption: The plan Enlil helped build: investment required to 2030 against expected annual benefit, by sector. Source: Pathways for Climate Investment in Iraq – Technical Investment Report (2025), Table 1.

What we did

Enlil delivered targeted technical support across Iraq's ministries, combining data analysis, policy drafting and hands-on training. The team led data mobilisation on climate investment and financial mechanisms across the relevant ministries, feeding the CIP's sectoral needs assessment for energy, water and agriculture. It drafted the mitigation and finance sections that identify barriers to capital formation and the pathways for Iraq to access multilateral funding through Article 6 credits. It designed and delivered a capacity-building programme on operationalising Article 6 of the Paris Agreement for the inter-ministerial technical committee, with representatives of all 14 relevant ministries, followed by ministry-by-ministry sessions for the Ministries of Oil, Environment, Industry, and Housing, Construction and Municipalities, each tailored to that ministry's CIP priorities.

Policy impact

Enlil's contributions strengthened the CIP's mitigation and finance pipeline, with the US$11.8 billion oil-and-gas transition and US$23.25 billion electricity lines as its largest priorities. The plan was submitted in late 2024 and formally endorsed in February 2025, and positions Iraq to attract grants, public-private partnerships and carbon-credit revenue aligned with its UNFCCC commitments. Enlil assesses that the plan's real test is Phase II — turning sector envelopes into governorate-level projects with owners and financing — and tracks the underlying data in the Hub.

Our role

Enlil brought independent Iraqi expertise to UNDP's mandate, delivering 50 working days of consultancy between April and June 2024 across Baghdad and Erbil. The value was in translation: bridging international carbon-market standards with the way Iraqi ministries actually work, so that training and analysis were practical and ministry-specific rather than generic.

About the CIP

The Climate Investment Plan identifies US$82.85 billion of mitigation and adaptation needs for 2025–2030, with US$36.85 billion of near-term priorities, and emphasises energy efficiency, 12 GW of solar, methane capture and Article 6 markets. The technical report — Pathways for Climate Investment in Iraq — is available in full in the Research section.