Local climate resilience finance: how can mirage become reality?
Climate resilience is an increasingly pressing need in forest and farm landscapes. Rural communities in the global South are hard hit by temperature extremes, variable rainfall, droughts, fires, storms, flooding, pests, disease, landslides and, in some places, salination and sea level rise. Despite that, this briefing reveals that for most of the world’s 1.5 billion forest and farm producers, a helping hand from external climate finance (that controlled by national and international agencies) remains a mirage: as little as 10% of global funds reach the local level, with just 1.7% accessible to locally controlled organisations.
As agencies grapple with how to ‘build back better’ from COVID-19, investing in the resilience of local organisations could offer a range of beneficial outcomes. To enable this, according to the author, donors and national-level decision makers must urgently:
- Improve the representation of national and regional federations of Indigenous Peoples, forest communities, and forest and farm smallholders in funding processes related to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) — including the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), Green Climate Fund (GCF) and bilateral aid;
- Channel much more external climate finance to and through local organisations;
- Ensure processes for funding accreditation and receipt are practicable for local organisations;
- Sharpen indicators around how much climate finance reaches local-level organisations, to concretely measure progress.