Climate Policy & Finance

The Green Climate Fund, striving to be fully operational by the Paris climate summit in December, missed its "effectiveness date" at the end of April, an important deadline giving the Fund the authority to begin making funding commitments. This analysis provides a status update on what the Fund needs to not only "open for business" soon, but also move lastingly beyond "business as usual."

At COP20, parties adopted the Lima Work Programme on Gender to advance implementation of existing gender mandates across all areas of the climate negotiations. This HBF-WEDO submission proposes how an in-session workshop during the forty-second session of the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (June 2015) could advance gender-responsive mitigation action and technology development.

The coming set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will seek to protect ecosystems, conserve resources, and lift millions of people out of poverty. But, though the SDGs will stand on solid legal ground, that ground must be developed further, argues Barbara Unmüßig, president of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung.

The COP 20’s “Lima call for climate action” is no wake-up call but a worrisome sign of a feeble multilateral climate process plagued by political deafness and leaving poor and vulnerable communities alone with the impacts of climate change.

The Conference of Parties (COP) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is meeting in Lima, Peru until December 12, 2014.  In this interview, Barbara Unmüßig, Co-President of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, speaks about the prospects of the Lima summit, the future of the multilateral climate process and the perspectives for the Green Climate Fund.

In the climate finance arena, the Adaptation Fund (AF) has pioneered direct access. To date, six national implementing entities (NIEs) in Africa have commenced the challenging process of programming direct access funding domestically. This collaborative research report provides lessons learnt on how to strengthen the accreditation of future NIEs to the AF and to jump-start their engagement with the Green Climate Fund (GCF).

Updated just before COP 20 in Lima (Peru), this series of 11 short introductory briefings, written in co-operation with the Overseas Development Institute, discusses a normative framework for and gender aspects of climate financing, the evolving global climate finance architecture, the progress in operationalizing the Green Climate Fund, and looks at the scale and impact of thematic climate finance flows on different regions in the developing world.

The first ever pledging conference for the new Green Climate Fund will be held in Berlin, Germany on November 20th.  Anything less than USD 10 billion in confirmed pledges could be seen as a sign that rich countries are not supportive of the Fund and spell trouble for the climate talks in Lima, Peru beginning in just two weeks.  But at stakes is much more than just one big figure, according to Liane Schalatek.

Designed to "promote the paradigm shift towards low-carbon and climate resilient development pathways," the GCF is the first climate fund with a gender mainstreaming mandate from the outset of its operations.

The Ban Ki-moon Climate Summit, with the expected participation of more than 120 heads of states and high-ranking government officials from over 160 countries, is not part of the official UN climate negotiations process. Nevertheless, when the UN Secretary General announced the special summit more than a year ago, he did so certainly in hopes that government heads would strive to display decisive actions and announce ambitious emissions reduction goals to grease the path to a new global climate deal post-2020.