Stories of Impact: The Global Green Growth Institute
For this month’s edition of ‘Stories of Impact’, we are showcasing the extraordinary breadth of GGGI’s work, featuring an interview with Stelios Grafakos, their Lead of Global Practice on Climate Policy and Planning.
Could you please start by introducing GGGI and your current area of focus?
We are an intergovernmental organisation founded in 2012 at the Rio+20 conference. We support our members and partner countries to follow a green growth model of economic development that is both environmentally sustainable and, very importantly, socially inclusive.
Right now, we have 54 member countries, mainly focusing on LATAM, Africa, SE Asia, supporting developing countries and emerging economies to meet their green growth goals.
What’s truly special about the GGGI is that our staff are embedded in the government ministries themselves, such as Ministries of Environment and Natural Resources, Ministries of Energy and increasingly at Ministries of Finance. This unique placement allows us to experience first hand, and better understand, the gaps, capacities and opportunities to co-design green growth strategies, policies and projects.
Given that our staff are embedded in these governments, we are able to constantly enhance in-house capacity to deliver our services, rather than a more time-bound ‘fly in fly out consultants’ model. We are present on the ground to make sure the work is being delivered, collaborating when needed with local partners and consultants on the ground to make sure we’re delivering a green growth plan or services that really works. We operate as the trusted neutral advisor to governments, with all the projects we support being demand-driven and country owned.
We currently operate across a broad range of sectors, including but not limited to green resilient and circular cities and infrastructure, just and inclusive energy transitions, adaptive resilient landscapes and oceans, sustainable agri-food systems. Gradually we’re looking at being embedded within ministries of finance, given the critical role that they play for the green transition.
What are you currently working on?
Since 2025, we’ve had a change in leadership and an organizational realignment/restructuring. Among other priorities (including green hydrogen and Article 6-aligned carbon finance), we are prioritising how AI can help identify opportunities for green growth and climate action, wanting to make sure we’re staying ahead of the curve.
Meanwhile, I personally work on the thought leadership and climate policy/planning domains of national and sub-national climate action. This includes supporting countries on the development of Long-Term Low Emission Development Strategies (LT-LEDS), NDC enhancement and implementation, NAP development and implementation. Overall, our services span across the whole value chain, from stakeholder engagement and the establishment of government structures to analysis, modelling and scenario assessment, finance mobilization and project pipeline development.
How are you using Climate Policy Radar in your work?
Firstly, we appreciate and utilise CPR’s role as a central repository of global climate plans and policies as we always want to learn from other countries and their plans.
More specifically, part of our work on thought leadership and knowledge generation through flagship initiatives and reports includes a global assessment of National Adaptation Plans (NAPs).
By the end of 2024 we carried out this global assessment manually (without the assistance of machine learning, with the support of 15 universities and research institutes, evaluating 60 national adaptation plans from a quality and comprehensiveness perspective. With the added benefit of the CPR app, we can now engage in two-way dialogue with the data to test the human assumptions we have made in the first place and identify any gaps and missing components that may have occurred during the manual assessment. We can use CPR’s AI tools to advance this type of global reviews and assessments in a more efficient and accurate way.
Our first test of this dialogue was on a just transition assessment of LT-LEDS of G20 countries. We manually set out to find out how well the G20 countries are incorporating just transition components. We then used CPR’s tools to cross-check and make sure we weren’t missing anything, which served the dual purpose of helping train CPR’s just transition topic - a data-science enhanced filter that identifies not only a keyword but an entire class of keywords interconnected under the just transition umbrella term. We found that CPR found things the manual assessments did not. Working together - humans and AI - has turned out to be a great way to conduct these reviews.
We plan now to expand this collaboration. We were so happy to see how it worked and our initial outcomes are now published in our latest report. The report highlights the strengths and the gaps of G20 countries’ LT-LEDS on addressing just transition elements providing valuable insights and good practices for countries that are still expected to develop or update their LT-LEDS.
How will CPR continue to support your organisation’s goals going forward?
On one hand, it will continue to help us with all important cross-checking exercises like the one above. On the other it will help us to identify further gaps in manual searches in policy and planning documents.
We may expand our assessment to all LT-LEDS submitted to the UNFCCC to further understand how countries address issues of just transition. We may also reverse the logic tested above by using the AI tools first to run the assessment, and manually checking it after. The combination between human and machine will remain key - the manual work will need to continue to further refine the classifiers and the framework of these reviews and assessments depending on the topic of analysis and research.
All in all, we are so excited to move forward with CPR, to work with greater efficiency and accuracy that will allow GGGI and partners to:
advance knowledge generation on robust and evidence-based strategies for green growth and climate action.
better support countries to enhance, improve and deliver those green growth and climate plans and strategies.
Are you using CPR to drive impact in your organisation? We’d love to share your story if so. Get in touch.