Colombian President set to open GCF’s first Latin American Dialogue

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos Calderón will open the Green Climate Fund's first Structured Dialogue in the Latin American region tomorrow.

The four-day event brings together about 150 GCF Partners to learn more about how to access the Fund's resources. They include National Designated Authorities (NDAs) and Focal Points, Accredited Entities, Readiness delivery partners, private sector representatives and civil society organisations.

Also attending will be several Latin American government ministers, reflecting a high degree of regional importance attached to rapidly changing climate in the region.

The Structured Dialogue will provide 19 Latin American countries an opportunity to explore climate responses in many areas including urban development, transport, renewable energy, early warning systems, and forests and agriculture.

The region has an important role to play in addressing climate change as it is home to some of the fastest growing cities and 22 percent of the world's forests.

Discussions will cover the potential for enhancing cross-regional resilience links between the Latin American region and the Caribbean across the Dry Corridor. This is a strip of tropical dry forest, one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change, that stretches from the Pacific side of Central America to Panama.

Many GCF Partners in Latin America, and in the neighbouring Caribbean, point to increasing concerns about climate impacts in their countries. Both regions have been hit hard by wild weather during the past year. Peru experienced its most destructive rainfall in decades in March 2017, while Hurricanes Irma and Maria devastated a number of Caribbean countries in September.

The Structured Dialogue will contribute to GCF efforts to enhance the resilience of Latin America to withstand such wide-ranging disasters in future.

Common with all GCF Structured Dialogues, the Bogota event will feed into the Fund's development of a roadmap to identify regional climate priorities based on different country programmes.

GCF anticipates the first event of this kind in Latin America will lead to new, innovative ideas on how to address a wide spectrum of mitigation and adaptation needs.