GCF investments reducing climate risk to feature at Climate Adaptation Summit

Green Climate Fund (GCF) Executive Director Yannick Glemarec will highlight the Fund’s key role in helping bridge the climate finance gap at the Climate Adaptation Summit 2021 starting today. GCF is central to the summit’s goal of ramping up adaptation measures, amid intensifying climate effects. 

GCF balances its portfolio equally between support for adaptation and actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. With global finance for adaptation falling well short of totals realised for mitigation actions, GCF’s unique commitment to balanced climate finance is more critical than ever. The Fund is also scaling up its total climate finance, leveraging the USD 10 billion raised to date in its first replenishment. 

Developing countries face a need for scaled up finance to adjust to the impacts of climate change . A UN climate adaptation report released earlier this month identified a huge gap in financing for developing countries’ ability to adjust to global warming. This gap is currently estimated at USD 70 billion annually, and expected to rise to USD 140 to 300 billion in 2030. 

Glemarec joins developed and developing country leaders and other influential global figures during the 24-hour, online Climate Adaptation Summit. The GCF Executive Director will describe how GCF’s USD 2.7 billion adaptation funding is helping developing countries build early warning systems and defences against climate impacts such as droughts, floods and sea-level rise. 

He will address a number of sessions that explore how GCF’s allocation of climate finance for developing countries’ adaptation projects can boost climate resilience in African countries, as well as raising the profile of adaptation in agriculture, in infrastructure, and in the finance sector itself. 

While highlighting the urgent need to upgrade adaptation action as global temperatures rise, the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) Adaptation Gap Report 2020 singled out GCF’s success in crowding in private sector investment in adaptation. 

GCF is supporting pioneering efforts to overcome traditional business aversion to financing adaptation efforts, especially at the small scale, including its anchoring investment in a resilient agriculture fund spanning four African countries. On a broader scale, GCF supports the mainstreaming of adaptation investments by creating new climate-resilient financial products to match the risk profile of products familiar to institutional investors. 

GCF is working with developing countries to expand adaptation investments that boost vulnerable people’s livelihood protection, as part of green stimulus measures reviving COVID-19 battered economies, for example, through debt-for-climate swaps. It is also exploring how policy integration across different sectors boosting national development can reduce the need for climate investments by up to a half. 

Find out more about the Climate Adaptation Summit 2021 here, and follow us on Twitter for GCF updates during the summit.