Board Decisions Aimed at Meeting Rising Urgency of Climate Change; Board Also Approves Nearly US$ 20 Million in New Concrete, Local Adaptation Projects

Washington, D.C. (October 17, 2018) — The Adaptation Fund Board made several substantial decisions during its 32nd meeting in Bonn, Germany last week, which will contribute to implementing the Fund’s medium-term strategy to respond to the urgency of climate change by accelerating and enhancing the quality of adaptation actions in developing countries, scaling up innovative projects and disseminating knowledge of effective Fund actions.

The Board approved three new small grant funding windows outside its regular processes for submitting project proposals. The windows carry an initial funding total of US$ 5 million, which is expected to increase about threefold over the next four years.

These include new “innovation grants” aimed for the Fund’s accredited national implementing entities (NIEs) and eventually outside entities, as well, to provide funds to speed development of innovative adaptation practices. An initial US$ 2 million in proposal requests to NIEs will be launched later this year, with NIEs able to submit proposals for the new grants directly to the Fund. A multilateral implementing partner of the Fund will be selected to administer innovation grants for outside entities through an ‘innovation facility’ in a subsequent call for proposals with additional funding expected later on.

In addition, US$ 1 million in new “project scale-up grants” will be made available to NIEs over the next five years. These grants provide readiness funding to NIEs to support plans and designs for scaling up Adaptation Fund projects currently under implementation. The implementation phase of these scaled-up designs would be expected to be funded by other sources.

The Board further approved US$ 2 million in new “learning micro-grants” over five years that are expected to assist NIEs in enhancing their systems to capture and disseminate adaptation experiences and knowledge.

The new funding windows are considered ‘additional to’ funding amounts each country can currently access through the Fund for concrete adaptation project needs.

During the meeting, the Board also approved or endorsed 13 new project proposals and nearly US$ 20 million in new projects, lifting its total number of concrete adaptation projects for the most vulnerable to 80 worldwide with well over half a billion US dollars in funding.

Read more...