Green Climate Fund (GCF)
Climate Finance Readiness E-book
July 2023
The global landscape of climate finance is highly fragmented and complex, involving multiple pathways, actors, institutions, and instruments. Funds provided by developed countries to developing countries for climate adaptation and mitigation actions are channelled through various multilateral funds – both within and outside the scope of the operating entities of the UNFCCC’s financial mechanism.
Developing countries indisputably need climate finance to flow at a sufficient scale and in a timely manner. While the options and possibilities for countries to access climate finance are expected to increase, with a multitude of funding channels, this can also make the process even more complicated and confusing. Which funds to turn to? For which activities? At what costs? These are a few of the many questions that climate change decision-makers must contend with. Each fund is administered with complicated rules and procedures, which makes it very challenging for developing countries to navigate when seeking to fund their domestic climate actions. There is currently no ‘one-stop-shop’ to provide useful and quick answers.
The Climate Finance Readiness E-book is a series of short briefs prepared by the South Centre to provide developing countries with a «help desk» to access and more effectively and efficiently utilise the complex web of climate finance information available to them. This brief will be updated periodically and will shine a spotlight on different geographical areas. The South Centre welcomes questions, comments, and suggestions for this series of briefs to continuously improve its help desk function on Climate finance.
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South Centre Semester Report, July – December 2021
The South Centre undertakes policy-oriented research on issues, as defined in its Work Program (https://www.southcentre.int/work-program/), that are relevant to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. It supports the countries of the South to effectively participate in negotiating processes in order to build up a multilateral system that supports and does not undermine development efforts. It also provides policy and technical advice and capacity building in support of countries and institutions of the South. Catalogues of the publications of the Centre can be found at https://www.southcentre.int/publications-catalogues/.
The South Centre expands its reach and impact by leveraging cooperation with other international organizations, research institutions, academia and civil society.
This Semester Report is an account of how the South Centre’s Secretariat has fulfilled the Centre’s mission through the different workstreams for the period July – December 2021.
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South Centre Semester Report, January – June 2021
This Semester Report summarizes the activities undertaken by the South Centre during the period 1st January to 30 June 2021. It is intended to provide information, organized by themes, about recent developments in the areas covered by the Centre’s Work Program, meetings organized or co-organized by the Centre to examine particular issues or provide analytical support for negotiations taking place in various international fora, and conferences and other meetings where the Centre has participated. It also informs about publications of the outcomes of internal policy-oriented research and external contributions made as a result of cooperation with the Centre.
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South Centre Semester Report, July-December 2020
This Semester Report summarizes the activities undertaken by the South Centre during the period 1st July to 31 December 2020. It is intended to provide information, organized by themes, about recent developments in the areas covered by the Centre’s Work Program, meetings organized or co-organized by the Centre to examine particular issues or provide analytical support for negotiations taking place in various international fora, and conferences and other meetings where the Centre has participated. It also informs about publications made.
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South Centre Semester Report, 1 January to 30 June 2020
This Semester Report summarizes the activities undertaken by the South Centre during the period 1st January to 30 June 2020. It is intended to provide information, organized by themes, about recent developments in the areas covered by the Centre’s Work Program, meetings organized or co-organized by the Centre to examine particular issues or provide analytical support for negotiations taking place in various international fora, and conferences and other meetings where the Centre has participated. It also informs about publications made.
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Flirting with the Private Sector: The GCF Private Sector Facility — achievements, challenges and constraints in engaging the private sector
By Rajesh Eralil, Mariama Williams and Dianyi Li
The Green Climate Fund (GCF) is committed to include the private sector as both driver and beneficiary of climate action. It envisions in particular the inclusion of not only large enterprises, but puts much emphasis on the cooperation with micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in developing countries. This paper evaluates the state of play of the GCF work with the private sector and its MSMEs. It finds that the fund’s success in stimulating private sector engagement has been underwhelming and imbalanced. To begin with, only a minority of GCF projects are in fact private and a considerable amount of these projects operate through multilateral and other public institutions. GCF’s private sector projects show on top of that a strong bias towards energy access and generation, while only little funding goes to adaptation. Attempts to include MSMEs in developing countries have moreover been largely unsuccessful, although MSMEs constitute an important pillar of developing countries’ economies. It is suggested that there is a need for a bottom-up approach when dealing with the private sector in developing countries, including a more sustained and sustainable focus on MSMEs, including capacity building of MSME networks.
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The State of Play of Climate Finance – UNFCCC Funds and the $100 Billion Question
By Mariama Williams; editing support and data by Rajesh Eralil
Climate finance is key to achieving the ambitions set out in the Paris Agreement as well as in fulfilling the climate actions that developing countries have proposed to implement in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the key vehicles for implementing the agreement reached in Paris in 2015. However, there is much concern that the current flow of finance is inadequate to meet the expectations surrounding both the NDCs and the Paris Agreement. This brief presents quick snapshots of the state of play of climate finance of one dimension of the broad, complex and increasingly fragmented universe of climate finance. It focuses on the flow of climate finance that can be monitored and tracked under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in the context of the developed countries’ collective goal of mobilizing US $100 billion annually to support developing countries’ climate actions. The issues on both the demand and supply side of climate finance flows are explored, with specific attention to the ebb and flows and achievements of the multilateral public funds. After highlighting some of the more serious challenges with the flow of climate finance, the brief ends with an overview of the key negotiating issues around future climate finance flows.
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Collection of Resources on Climate Finance by the South Centre
This Collection contains various types of resources ranging from analytical & research papers, step-by-step guidance documents, short policy briefs, infographics, websites and digital tools dealing with the thematic area of climate finance that are all published after 2010. These resources are curated to support decision-makers and practitioners in finding, easily and in one place, practical resources to navigate the fast-changing and complex climate finance landscape. The resources focus specifically on International Climate Finance and multilateral financing mechanisms without going into detail on climate change & sectoral issues, national (public/private) climate financing and other financing mechanisms. For each resource, a short summary is provided to give the reader a snapshot of its content along with a link to access the full resource.
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Climate Finance Readiness Brief E-Book by the South Centre
In the last years, governments around the world have set collective climate and sustainable development goals that go far beyond previous agreements and commitments in terms of scope and ambition. There are clear synergies between the three independently adopted but deeply inter-related milestones of 2015: the 2030 Development Agenda including the SDGs, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda and the Paris Agreement.
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