Climate Policy & Finance

The Green Climate Fund (GCF) has a mandate to fund mitigation and adaption action in developing countries while "taking a gender-sensitive approach." With the Fund Board set to discuss and decide the vision, objectives and business model for the Fund, this paper makes a case for mainstreaming gender into the processes and financing of the GCF in conjunction with these decisions.

Expectations for the climate summit in Doha were so low that it is quite remarkable that the meager results still managed to fall short of them. The UN climate talks appear to have a recurring theme: The process was saved, unfortunately the climate wasn't. Did Doha move us even the tiniest step forward ?

Relationships between democracy and more particularly democratization on the one side and climate change and responses to that on the other are underexplored in the two literatures on democratization and climate change. A special issue of the journal DEMOCRATIZATION, with contributions by several Heinrich Böll Foundation authors, explores a variety of facets of this complex and interdependent relationship.

Growing evidence of links between climate change, migration, and conflict raise plenty of reasons for concern and it’s time to start thinking about new answers to these multifaceted crisis scenarios. - New report on Climate Change, Migration, and Conflict in South Asia!

Responding to climate change presents challenges for the oil dependent and water stressed countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), but also opportunities to forge new paths to more inclusive and effective development. This brief considers the scope and objectives of dedicated public finance directed to the region, drawing on Climate Funds Update data.

The Board of the Green Climate Fund met for the second time in Songdo, South Korea from October 18 – 20, 2012. With board members having to tackle the nitty-gritty work of operationalizing the Fund by early 2014 now in earnest, the selection of South Korea as the host country for the GCF was the most concrete outcome of the three day board meeting.

The State of Qatar is hosting the 18th Conference of the Parties (COP 18) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Doha from November 26 to December 7, 2012. This webdossier compiles analysis and perspectives from the the Heinrich Böll Stiftung and its partners on how climate change, resource and energy politics relate to political and social change.

Large-scale wind farms and solar power plants are springing up everywhere one looks. That’s good for the climate, but small-scale farmers and the poor are becoming the pawns of hard-nosed business interests around the world.

Gender-Responsive Multilateral Adaptation Investments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region – This study analyses how gender-responsive multilateral adaptation projects in the MENA region are, finding and discussing both best and worst practice examples. The authors demands that multilateral institutions in all their MENA adaptation projects implement gender safeguard policies consistent with existing international conventions and instruments on gender equality.

At its historic first meeting from August 23-25 in Geneva, the 24 members of the new Board of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) officially took charge, eager to decide the direction of the Fund and regain momentum as the Board begins the complex and ambitious work of fully operationalizing the GCF by early 2014.