Climate Finance
Climate change affects every country and everyone. However, developing countries, small island countries (SICs) and least developed countries (LDCs) are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Historically, developing countries have contributed the least to climate change, yet suffer the most from the climate crisis. They are often the poorest countries, with the least resources to tackle climate change. Tackling this means investing in resilience and mitigating its effects, and for many developing countries, it means rebuilding after severe climate disasters. These efforts require substantial climate finance assistance.
Point persons
Intro
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) (1992), the Kyoto Protocol (1997) and the Paris Agreement (2015), all require developed countries to provide climate finance to developing countries. The UNFCCC specifically highlights SICs and LDCs as those in urgent need of climate finance. Climate finance is crucial for mitigation, because large scale investments are required to drastically reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; for adaptation, which allows countries to adapt to and reduce the impacts of climate change; and for loss and damage, providing relief and help to vulnerable communities to recover from increasingly severe climate impacts. It is also important that the climate finance channelled to developing countries is gender-transformative, integrating a gender perspective from the outset of any programme or project. Climate finance is therefore key to fighting inequalities, eradicating poverty, ensuring human rights, and achieving climate justice for all.
Eurodad contributes to advocacy and policy work on climate finance through cutting-edge policy analysis and research, information dissemination, and convening CSOs for joint strategising and advocacy. This work focuses on ensuring that the needs of the most vulnerable and frontline communities are addressed through highly concessional climate finance. Impact, effectiveness, and equity are the guiding principles for our policy and advocacy work. Eurodad strives to ensure that climate finance is gender-responsive, and that it integrates social and environmental safeguards.
Key workstreams of Eurodad on climate finance include:
- Ensuring climate finance is new and additional to existing finance commitments, and ensuring it supports those most impacted by climate change.
- Championing the use of robust transparency mechanisms to ensure that climate finance is effective.
- Promoting the use of innovative finance mechanisms to increase the amount of public finance.
- Supporting the creation and use of sustainable finance mechanisms to enable greater accessibility to climate finance for regional and local communities.
- Ensuring finance flows are aligned with climate and environmental protections, standards and policies.
- Promoting the use of policies and accounting methodologies that integrate climate risks, local needs, gender equality, women’s empowerment, and social practices.
