Climate & Environmental Policy

On paper, the GCF can accept considerable investment risks in order to achieve impact and innovation, while maintaining rigorous fiscal standards, environmental and social safeguards. However, various evaluations by the GCF's Independent Evaluation Unit have identified shortcomings in policies and practices that have so far prevented the GCF from achieving this goal.

 At COP26, it is up to the rich industrialized countries to take bold actions to address their collective shortcomings and unfulfilled promises, and to give up on false solutions.

We chronicle here some of the insights and contributions shared by the first cohort of young climate leaders participating in the CLI, including on raising ambition for the climate negotiations as well as recognizing and sharing indigenous and ancestral knowledge from their respective countries in strategies to address the climate emergency.

Differentiating finance types, developing countries’ needs and the lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic

12 December 2020 marks the fifth anniversary of the adoption of the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Five years after Paris, the climate crisis has worsened, impacting the poorest and most vulnerable countries the worst, and inflicting already severe loss and damage. Signatory states are preparing to submit updated and more ambitious greenhouse gas reduction pledges, the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) for Glasgow in 2021 - with the United States under a Biden Administration expected to join in the effort. How can we increase targets to remain below 2 degrees Celsius global warming and finds ways to achieve them in a socially and gender-just manner? What financing contributions are needed to support developing countries? What false solutions must be avoided? And how can we push the urgently needed radical course change in pursuit of climate justice? We explore those questions in various contributions.