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Home / Nature & Environment / Climate Change / Making Climate Adaptation Happen: Governing Transformation Strategies for Climate Change / How effective are climate funds?

How effective are climate funds?

In this video Hellen Dawo looks at how to increase funding for climate adaptation and opportunities to direct the money where it is needed most.
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HELLEN DAWO: During this course, we have looked into various aspects of climate finance and climate funds for adaptation. We have seen that climate adaptation costs money, and that this money is made available as climate adaptation finance. However, governments find it difficult to mobilise climate finance. There are two reasons for this. The first reason for this difficulty is limited access to funds such as green climate fund. Such funds receive numerous applications, yet they have insufficient resources. Another reason is that there are many organisations and companies that carry out activities related to climate adaptation. However, these companies may not cooperate with governments. As such, the funds they use is sometimes not recognised as climate finance, even though it is.
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In addition, the lack of cooperation results in missed opportunities to learn from each other and innovate more. Nevertheless, we need to remember that funding for climate violence is not up to governments alone. The private sector and the general public both have a role to play. Cooperation between governments, private sector, and the public make it possible to think out of the box and create new financial instruments. An example of such a cooperation is the Adaptation Fund. This fund was initiated to assist developing countries who are signatories to the Kyoto Protocol. It provides them with finance to build resilience and adapt to climate change. The fund enables national implementing entities to access finance directly.
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In this way, the local government is able to manage all aspects of climate adaptation projects, from design and implementation through to monitoring and evaluation. That Adaptation Fund has supported projects such as the use of ecosystem-based adaptation techniques by rural farmers in Mongolia. It has also helped raise awareness on sustainable land use in Georgia in order to manage landslides and floods. Although there is a lot of talk over the need to increase climate funds, governments, the private sector, or the public are still not doing enough. The major criticisms to how climate finance is organised are, first, it is a lack of meeting agreed obligations. For example, wealthy states pledged to mobilise $100 billion annually during the COP-15 meeting in Copenhagen.
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This is yet to be realised. Second, the increased focus on private finance by institutions such as the Global Climate Fund is a challenge. This is because such funding may bring with it interests different from the fund’s original goal. Third, climate funds provided as loans cause increased dependency on the creditors. An example is indebting of less wealthy countries such as Mozambique. In order to overcome these challenges, there is a need for consensus on who is to contribute, how much should be contributed, what are the contributions used for, and in what form should the financial assistance be given.
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Such a consensus can only be reached if governments and other relevant stakeholders are able to overcome prior perspectives, be transparent, think innovatively, and abide by set agreements. Without this kind of cooperation, collection, distribution, monitoring, and evaluation of climate fund streams will continue to be difficult.

In this video Hellen Dawo looks at how to increase funding for climate adaptation and opportunities to direct the money where it is needed most.

Governments find it difficult to mobilise climate finance. There are two reasons for this. The first reason is limited access to funds. Another reason is that there are many organisations that carry out activities related to climate adaptation and these companies sometimes do not work with governments.

Cooperation between governments, private sector, and the public make it possible to think out of the box and create new financial instruments. An example of such a cooperation is the Adaptation Fund.

There is a need for consensus on who is to contribute to the funds, how much should be contributed, what are the contributions used for, and in what form should the financial assistance be given.

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This content is taken from University of Groningen online course
Making Climate Adaptation Happen: Governing Transformation Strategies for Climate Change
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Making Climate Adaptation Happen: Governing Transformation Strategies for Climate Change

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