Funding climate resilience on the ground: How global funds can reach local actors

How global funds can reach local actors

- By Dennis Mombauer

THE impacts of the climate crisis are highly context-specific and manifest most acutely at the local level, where communities and other stakeholders face a complex landscape of risks. Beyond extreme weather events and other direct losses and damages, climate change also has a variety of cascading long-term consequences that affect livelihoods, economies, ecosystems, culture, health, and human lives.

However, while many climate impacts happen at the local level, local actors often don’t have the resources or capacities to adequately respond to them. They require means of implementation—finance, technology, and capacity-building that is commensurate to their challenges and aligned with principles of equity, fairness, and common but differentiated responsibilities.

What needs to be funded?

Quantifying exact numbers for loss and damage—particularly for non-economic and/or indirect losses—can be challenging, but the general needs on the ground are clear.

Local actors, such as farmer cooperatives, community associations, municipal councils, civil society organisations, or women’s groups, are aware of their challenges and possible actions to address them. For example, this could entail investment into disaster-resilient infrastructure, new crop varieties, restoration of tanks and traditional water management systems, or seed funding for climate-friendly entrepreneurs.

However, these actors are often unable to access the necessary resources to develop or implement such interventions, which is further compound by gaps in data, risk and vulnerability assessments, available technology, and other factors. Due to their lack of technical capacity for proposal development, fiduciary management and monitoring, as well as requirements to co-finance projects or absorb upfront costs, local actors are not in a position to effectively tap into climate funding, especially from multilateral funds and entities.