Climate Policy & Finance

Why the focus on insurance to address loss and damage is a distraction from real solutions.

This booklet proposes six specific recommendations to the Green Climate Fund (GCF) Board, Secretariat and other relevant policy-makers to increase access of local actors to climate funds, and ensure accessible, gender-responsive climate finance decision-making processes. These proposals range from setting up small grants facilities to a complete revision of the operations and results framework of climate funds. The booklet is meant to stimulate more and deeper debate on the crucial role local actors play in the transformative change needed to deal with global climate change.

Further scaling up both climate adaptation and mitigation finance to the SIDS is vital - both to address the vulnerability of SIDS inhabitants by making agriculture, biodiversity and infrastructure sectors more resilient to climate impacts, and to shift the energy mixes of SIDS away from fossil fuels.

The countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are highly vulnerable to climate change, which is likely to compound persisting development challenges. The MENA region is already the most water scarce region.

The diversity of active funds in the region is not matched in the distribution of finance. Considerable amounts of finance have flowed to fast-growing economies such as India and Indonesia, primarily for mitigation projects. On the other hand, a number of populous nations at considerable risk to climate change, such as Pakistan, have received relatively little.

Grant financing continues to play a crucial role, especially for adaptation actions, in ensuring that climate actions secure multiple gender-responsive benefits for the most vulnerable countries and population groups in Sub-Saharan Africa, the region least responsible for global climate change and most vulnerable to its impact.

Latin America is a highly heterogeneous region, with differences in levels of economic development and social and indigenous history, both among and within countries. The impacts of climate change, in particular glacial melt and changes in river flows, extreme weather events and risks to food production systems affect development in both rural and urban areas in the region.

There have been some significant changes in the REDD+ finance architecture and increasing efforts to support developing countries’ move beyond readiness and capacity building to demonstration programmes and emission reductions with payments based on verified results.