Thailand Country Programme (TCP) has prioritized scaling up climate change mitigation actions at local level through improved energy efficiency, scale-up of renewable energy in households, and strengthened municipal wastewater management. Therefore, Local Government or City stakeholders are with strong potential for initiating projects/programmes on the ground to play a crucial role in turning TCP prioritized climate actions into practice.

Based on observation, experiences and regional studies, it indicates that there are a number of key barriers preventing the Local Government/City stakeholders to effectively implement TCP prioritized climate actions on the ground;

a) Insufficient capacity and knowledge on how to mainstream climate actions into development pathway at the city level, including inadequate information and knowledge on technology and financial mobilization;

b) There is a limited technical assistance and knowledge to assist the City’s Local Government to secure “domestic source of fund” by mainstreaming climate actions into City’s development plan and budgeting cycle; and

c) In terms of accessing to “international source of fund”, there are some Thai Local Governments actively playing roles on climate actions, however they identify their needs to further enhance their capacity to reach international fund access in order to leverage their climate actions. They strongly need financial, technological and capacity building supports to assist them in developing and appraising pipeline projects (bankable projects/programmes) with strong climate rationale and ability to attract financial resources (including from GCF) for their locally-driven climate actions.

There are 2 main objectives of this project:(1) Enhancing capacity and knowledge of Local Government stakeholders on mainstreaming the prioritized climate actions into city development planning processes; (2) Enhancing local government capacity on securing domestic sources of fund, in parallel with enhancing the local government skills on accessing international sources of fund by assisting them to develop the quality funding proposals, particularly to be in line with the Green Climate Fund (GCF)and other climate finance funds.