Webinar: Frontline funds: investing in grassroots-led responses to climate change

This online event as part of London Climate Action Week on 30 June 2021 will explore the role of frontline funds as effective mechanisms to build resilience for grassroots-led responses.

Climate change has a disproportionate effect on communities at the frontlines. Despite experiencing first-hand the impact of the climate and nature crises, these communities continue to be among the most overlooked as solution providers and knowledge holders. 

This online event will explore how civil society-led mechanisms can deliver the solutions that are urgently needed at the local level.

Grassroots organisations have a demonstrated ability to innovate and produce solutions that work and can be replicated. Networks of organisations have produced, organised and mobilised communities and, with the right support, are well placed to champion climate change processes that can rapidly increase community resilience and reduce vulnerability. Support is growing for locally led initiatives, with more than 50 organisations now having signed up to the principles for locally led adaptation.  

The urgency of climate action and what is at stake at UNFCCC COP26 provides an opportunity to reshape conventional narratives – to promote ‘business-unusual’ approaches. 

We want to move away from business-as-usual approaches and design transformative long-term mechanisms that ensure that:

• Money gets where it matters
• Accelerate local climate resilience and adaptation
• Multiply the potential of grassroots organisations as change-makers
• Advance climate justice
• Respond to the needs, priorities and interests of grassroots organisations and vulnerable communities, and
• Place values of equity, solidarity and human dignity front and centre of climate action.

This event will bring climate finance providers, foundations and multilateral organisations together with grassroots organisations and social movements to discuss the role of frontline funds as effective mechanisms to build resilience that is driven at the local level.

Drawing on lessons learned through grassroots action, our panel will discuss how to increase financial streams that place resources in the hands of organised communities groups, empowering poor women and men to take short- and long-term measures to build resilience to multiple threats?

This event is hosted in partnership with Huairou Commission, Slum Dwellers International, Climate Justice Resilience Fund and Global Resilience Partnership as part of London Climate Action Week 2021. 

About the speakers

Welcoming remarks by Andrew Norton, director of IIED

Panel

• Tracy Kajumba is a principal researcher and team leader in the Climate Change research group at IIED
• Edel Monteiro is programme lead for the India Climate Collaborative (ICC)
• Additional speaker information coming soon
• Sinead Walsh is the deputy director general of Irish Aid and Africa and climate envoy at Ireland's Department of Foreign Affairs
• Sheela Patel is the founder and director of the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC) India
• Sarah Nandudu is national coordinator of the National Slum Dwellers Federation of Uganda (NSDFU)

About attending

Webinars are online workshops that people can attend via the internet from their desk or portable internet device.

This webinar will use the Zoom video conferencing platform. For those who have not attended a Zoom webinar before, please read this guide to participation as an attendee.

The event will be recorded to be distributed publicly afterwards. By registering for this event, you agree to give your consent for this.

The information you provide will be held on our database to process your booking. We do not share data with any third parties. We may contact you in the future about other IIED events. Please let us know if you do not want to receive any further information from us.

Time

12:00 - 13:30 BST