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Experts

Bella Tonkonogy

Associate Director, Climate Finance at Climate Policy Initiative
Bella_Tonkonogy_CPI

Bella Tonkonogy is Associate Director based in San Francisco. Since joining CPI in 2016, she has played a leading role in the Global Innovation Lab for Climate Finance through serving on the core management and strategy team, supporting the development of innovative climate finance instruments in renewable energy, climate risk, and forestry, and understanding the Lab’s impact. She has also been a lead advisor to the Cities Climate Finance Leadership Alliance, managing the Secretariat transition to CPI and overseeing strategy development and implementation. Bella also manages projects to improve the effectiveness of climate finance more broadly, such as a 2018 project for the Blended Finance Taskforce on how blended finance can be more effectively deployed for clean energy, and a 2019 report for the International Development Finance Club on Implementing Alignment with the Paris Agreement. As an expert on sustainable finance, Bella has represented CPI at a number of international fora and in media interviews.

Bella previously served as a Policy Advisor in the U.S. Treasury, overseeing the agency’s energy and environment investments in emerging markets, including as liaison to the Global Environment Facility and as advisor to U.S. negotiators on the Green Climate Fund, multilateral environmental agreements, and multilateral development bank energy policy. She has also served as a staff economist at the U.S. EPA, consultant to the OECD, UNDP, and clean technology companies, and as an early Braintrust member of the PRIME Coalition, a clean energy philanthropic initiative. Bella has an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management, an MSc from Imperial College London, and a B.A. from the University of California-Berkeley.