Dr. Ekaterina (Katya) Gratcheva is a Senior Advisor on Climate and Sustainable Finance at the International Monetary Fund's Monetary and Capital Markets department. Prior to joining the IMF, she led the finance function of the $10 billion Climate Investment Funds (CIF), which has mobilized over $65 billion for climate action across 325 projects in 72 developing and middle-income countries. CIF accelerates climate action by empowering transformations through clean technology, energy access, climate resilience, and sustainable forests and is currently introducing new priority areas: the transition from coal, climate-smart cities, nature-based solutions, industry decarbonization, and renewable energy integration. She focused on scaling CIF resources through access to capital markets and financial innovation.

Katya is also a thought leader on sovereign ESG and sustainable finance. She brings critical thinking and practitioner experience to climate and sustainable finance grounded in an evidence-based approach that separates reality from rhetoric. Her widely cited sovereign ESG publications, such as “Demystifying Sovereign ESG” and “Rethinking Sovereign ESG,” raise fundamental issues about current sovereign ESG approaches and proposed solutions. She also focuses on developing alternative approaches and data sources, such as satellite data, as described in Spatial Finance: Challenges and Opportunities in a Changing World and Changing Wealth of Nations 2021: Managing Asset for the Future. She also advises the Human Rights Measurement Initiative, which measures countries’ performance on human rights and how that contributes to countries’ sustainability. Email contact.