Executive Director’s remarks

Nearly a decade on from a Global Goal on Adaptation to balance funding for mitigation and adaptation – we are still not there.

The Green Climate Fund (GCF) provides more than half of our funding for adaptation. From the overall adaptation pot, the board has directed that half of the adaptation finances will go to least developed countries (LDCs), Africa, and small island developing states (SIDS).

In addition, 40 percent of GCF’s total portfolio of USD 16 billion is grant-based. For priority countries, such as LDCs in Africa, over 50 percent is grant-based. This is particularly important given the current debt levels many countries face.

In recognition of the burden of debt, we recently approved our first Debt for Climate Swap project (in Barbados), and we hope that we might replicate this project in other countries as well.

Another important element of GCF’s mandate is to work closely with national and regional entities. We work with a vast network of public and private organisations that are delivering resilient investments for the first time.

We are empowering a whole new network from development banks to other institutions to deliver adaptation and finance.

We also have the world’s largest capacity-building programme, the Readiness Programme, to support countries with their climate strategy mapping and capacity-building policies. In 2023, the GCF board approved a new allocation of USD 500 million in grant resources.

We stand ready and are working with many countries to help them increase their ambition regarding adaptation investments and deliver on that ambition.

Even though GCF has committed more than USD 7 billion of its resources for adaptation purposes, this is a drop in the ocean of needs. This is also why we have set an ambitious vision of efficiently managing and delivering USD 50 billion by 2030.

We know that it's not just about the quantum; it's also about quality and simplifying access. We are also making strides to ensure that we respond to that aspiration with increased scale and speed of investments.

We have already significantly reduced the time from project approvals to disbursements, and we will also see significant progress in terms of the time it takes to approve projects.

Making the overall climate finance system more complementary and coherent is essential to achieving more impact. We are committed to this and have been working very closely with other funds. We also look forward to working increasingly with multilateral development banks as they undertake their reforms to ensure further complementarity and coherence.