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February 27, 2024
International climate finance has received a lot of attention in recent years during the annual United Nations climate change summit. But there’s a lot of work that needs to be done in between the climate summit every year, when developed countries need to follow up on their climate finance commitments and help implement project plans for the developing countries striving to reach their emission reduction and climate adaptation goals. Organizations like the Green Climate Fund, the world’s largest multilateral climate-focused fund, dedicate themselves to facilitating this work through international partnerships all year round. For today’s episode, Green Climate Fund Deputy Executive Director Henry Gonzalez joins Dan and Alison to talk about the role of U.S. leadership in international climate finance, and why an investment abroad is an investment at home.
Show notes:
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Episode Transcript:
Dan Bresette: Hello and welcome to The Climate Conversation. I'm Dan Bresette, president of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. And with me is my co-host, Alison Davis. Hey, Alison, have you been?
Alison Davis: Hi, Dan. I’ve been looking forward to today and I’m so glad it’s finally here because we have a very exciting guest from the Green Climate Fund joining us to talk about international climate finance. We’ll tell you all about our guest in just a minute, but first, let’s cover some quick background information on the Green Climate Fund (or GCF for short) and why it is so critical for climate action across the globe.
Dan: If you followed EESI’s coverage of COP28 in Dubai last November and December, you might have noticed that we mentioned the GCF several times throughout the two weeks of the UN Climate Summit. GCF has a strong presence at the conference every year because it's the world's largest multilateral climate fund and a key financial mechanism of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change or UNFCCC. After being conceptualized at COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, the fund was established in 2010 to help developing countries—those with less historic responsibilities for greenhouse gas emissions—to meet their climate mitigation and adaptation goals, and they do this by supporting impactful projects in accordance with a country-specific needs. Since then, GCF has supported 243 projects that, when complete, are expected to increase the resilience of about 1 billion people worldwide and avoid 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
Alison: To date, the GCF has mobilized $51.9 billion in support for these projects—this includes GCF financing and co-financing. And it is just one slice of the overall global climate finance picture. EESI’s briefing on this topic last October highlighted the Climate Policy Initiative’s Global Landscape of Climate Finance tracker, which identifies $1.27 trillion in annual average climate finance flows for 2021 and 2022. These are big numbers, and our work today is to break down for listeners what this actually looks like on the ground and why it matters to communities here in the United States.
Dan: Even with the dollar figure in the trillions for global climate finance flows, the financing required to deploy climate solutions at scale remains a huge hurdle in many countries, including the United States. And this challenge is especially daunting for developing countries, many of which faced outsized impacts of the climate crisis, and have limited financial and institutional capacity to prioritize climate mitigation and adaptation. And that's just where the GCF comes in.
Alison: Using an approach driven by the needs of developing countries and guidance from the UNFCCC, the GCF works through intermediaries, called accredited entities, that manage climate investments in collaboration with partners on the ground. This structure ensures that developing countries have an active role in the decision-making process. Here to tell us more about how GCF operates and why this work is important for the United States is our very special guest, Deputy Executive Director of the Green Climate Fund, Henry Gonzalez.
Dan: Henry has over 25 years of professional experience across sustainable and impact investing, emerging markets, and political and economic development. Prior to joining GCF he was an Associate Fellow at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. He previously served as a member of Senior Management and Global Head of Research & Advisory at responsAbility Investments AG Henry has also held positions at Morgan Stanley, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, and the Government of Costa Rica. Henry, welcome to the show! It is a pleasure to meet you today.
Henry Gonzalez: Thank you, Daniel, it is a pleasure for me to be here with you.
Dan: I'm so excited to talk with you about this. This is a topic that we've started to get to know in the last few years at EESI. And really, really looking forward to learning from you. I'd like to start by asking you if you could describe GCF’s approach to international climate finance in general and, given GCF’s status as one of the newest yet largest climate finance entities out there, how has the organization evolved its approach, including by learning from other funds, like the Global Environment Facility that's been around for much, much longer?
Henry: Thank you, so the Green Climate Fund is today the largest multilateral climate-focused fund. We've been operating since 2015, when we did our first transaction right before COP21 in Paris, and today we have 240 projects across 130 countries. And we've been able to allocate $13.5 billion. Right from the start, we were created as a country-owned fund, meaning that we are supporting countries reach their national determined contributions, which were agreed at Paris, meaning that every single investment that we do is supporting one of those countries in the developing world reach some of those indices are targets that they attempted to do. We're also very privileged to have a governance where we have equal voice and vote from contributors like the U.S., as well as recipient countries from Africa, Asia, Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, Small Island Developing States, least developed countries, and East European countries. So we are, I would say, a very balanced fund, when it comes to governance, we are also very innovative, because we're able to do every single financial instrument out there from grants to loans, to guarantees to private equity, venture capital, all the way to bonds. And also, we are a climate-focused fund, meaning that in every transaction, we need to have clear benefits or co-benefits in adaptation and mitigation. The other important element is that we are a financing mechanism of the Paris Agreement. But also, we work and get guidance from the United Nations Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC, and we get guidance from COPs. Now, we are not alone. As you said, we are part of a broader climate finance architecture. And there are what people call vertical funds, like the GEF, the global environmental facility. We also have the Adaptation Fund, we also have the Climate Investment Funds housed at the World Bank. And we are always trying to find ways where we could complement and have coherence in order for us to not duplicate, but hopefully support and get things to scale. We perhaps have the most flexibility, because we're able to do larger ticket sizes, we are also able to work with the private sector as well as the public sector. So we do have, I would say, a very catalytic role in the climate finance space. And that's what I believe stands out from some of our peers, but we work very closely with them, in order to make sure that there is alignment and complementarity.
Dan: That's great. It must be a super exciting place to work these days, with progress coming out of the recent COPs, and just all of the additional attention that the challenges and needs of international climate finance are getting these days. But I'm curious what this looks like in practice. So for our audience—which EESI, typically, we think of our audience as being Congress, members of Congress themselves, but also their staff—so for those folks, U.S. policymakers, could you tell us about a specific project that received early support from GCF? And what were those key elements and what has been the outcome so far in real terms, whether its emissions reductions, or resilience or adaptation benefits? What does this look like on the ground to the people who actually, you know, are benefiting from these projects?
Henry: So we have a partnership model. So GCF works with what we call accredited entities. And these are, the range is from ministers, all the way to NGOs, to private sector financial institutions, private equity funds, impact investors, right. So we work with a very large range, we've got 120 entities accredited at the Green Climate Fund, some of those are international entities based in the U.S. or in other large capitals, and we also have domestic, which are coming from those markets. So what we do is that those entities work very closely with countries in order to get that country buy-in, that country ownership. And they bring together a funding proposal that the Green Climate Fund will be assessing, and we will be making sure that our funding proposal meets our investment criteria on areas like the contribution to climate impact, the efficiency, also the sustainable development angle, the country engagement, etc. And then once we are able to assess that the project is mature, and we are able to commit the capital that we want, it goes through an external party that provides a final review and then it goes for board consideration. So one example is we are working with a very, I would say innovative, U.S. based impact investor, it’s called Acumen Fund. They are New York-based, but they also have operations in many countries in Africa, as well as South Asia. And we actually started, one of our earlier private equity investments was in a fund that is called the Acumen Resilient Agriculture Fund, ARAF. And what we are aiming in this fund is providing digital and financial innovations to support the entire agricultural value chain in embedding climate in green practices in order for them to increase their impact both in mitigation, meaning because they could use certain technology to reduce emissions, but also in adaptation by improving livelihoods. This project is targeting Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda. We've been able to make several disbursements, we've been able to invest in local companies. And these local small and medium enterprises are also providing jobs and are also providing development at the country level. And I think that this is one of those examples where we are shifting from a grant-based model that, as you know, tends to only get official development assistance support to a market viable model, where we are providing private equity investing, and really trying to see those companies grow and get the right capital. And I think this is in line with some of the U.Ss objectives where the U.S. would like to see how you know, aid or how donations can support crowding in private capital. And this is one of those success stories where we're trying to sort of innovate, create a market shift from donor-led to market-led, and at the same time, be able to bring agriculture and climate together in addressing some of those elements. The project, as I said, is being implemented, there have been very good lessons on how we could do other similar projects. And we now have, about 15% of our portfolio is in private equity investing, trying to expand this very great experience in Africa. You know, there are areas in Latin America, or Asia Pacific or other developing countries.
Dan: And as you work through some of these projects, you're always learning about, you know, what's working, and what can be done more efficiently, what can be done to encourage faster uptake at the local level or at the community level. Are there any lessons learned that stick out to you, in your experience that you are working to apply to new projects that are funded or financed through the GCF?
Henry: So great question, Daniel, because I think capital is only one part of the equation. One thing that we've faced, and we've learned through some of these execution of projects, is how do we increase capacity at the local level. And some of that capacity has to come through either technical assistance, or it has to also be from capacity-building projects. We have two windows that we could use, we have one window that supports the strengthening of funding proposals, it’s called a project preparation facility window. But we also have a policy de-risking window where we are also working to improving local policies or public policies in our countries in order for those countries to be friendlier to attracting investments. So we work through the readiness. Another important element in trying to indeed create local capabilities is how we could partner with some of our peers. In some projects, we've been able to work with USAID, for example, where we've been also able to bring USAID as a partner, either as a co-investor or as a provider of technical assistance. So I believe capital can only flow if we've got the right market-ready solutions, and some of those solutions, in order to be market-ready will require, as I said, technical assistance and other ways of support. Another important element is how do we work with the local private sector? How do we also work with local investors? And we recently did an Africa Infrastructure Fund that covers about 20 countries where we are trying to also mobilize co-investments from local pension funds or from local institutional investors. And this is an important element because this is no longer just a North-South equation. It is also South-South equation. And in some middle income countries in this developing world, there are opportunities to also use their pockets of asset owners in order to co-invest with us. And we could provide that de-risker or that sort of catalytic approach in blended finance to crowding some of those investments. So I believe that capability at the local level and the mobilization of private sector, and investors at the local level are some of the areas where we feel that we could have a more impact. It is clear, Daniel, that public capital has limitations. And we have recently been able to, for example, almost raise $13 billion for the next four years of what we call GCF-2 which is the programming between 2024 and 2027. We're very thankful to the U.S. for the $3 billion commitment. However, we believe that we would be able to leverage this even further by crowding in other investors by creating strategic investment partnerships with global and local players in order for us to hopefully continue having a bigger impact and it is the need of private sector to actually bring that to the right level of amplification.
Alison: Well, that dynamic between public and private investment is something that we definitely want to talk a little bit more about shortly. But first, I'd like to say that, you know, it's just really so inspiring to hear about what GCF is accomplishing in other countries. I think it might be helpful for our congressional audience to get a better understanding of why this work matters for communities in the U.S. So could you tell us a bit about why is GCFs work in developing countries, and international climate finance more broadly, important for people here in the United States?
Henry: Sure. I mean, I believe an investment abroad is an investment locally, as well. I believe the U.S. has always played a leading role in the international finance architecture. But you know, climate finance goes beyond the climate agenda. Climate finance is also linked to the security agenda. It is also linked to the vulnerability agenda. It is also linked to the geopolitical agenda. And I think that you know, as a as a world leader, as the U.S. and having the important international power that it has, leading on the practice and leading on championing the climate finance architecture is an important element. The U.S. was the co-chair last year of the Green Climate Fund, and under co-leadership of the U.S. and Pakistan who were able to really launch a very substantive strategy for the next four years. They also were able to lead the replenishment. And here, the way it works is that in the past, there was a little bit of a dichotomy between development and climate. And today, it is clear that the sustainable development goals and climate are intertwined. When we talk about education, there is a climate element. When we talk about health, there is a climate element. When we talk about agriculture, infrastructure, we talk about fisheries, every single sector would have a climate element. And we believe that, you know, if these countries are able to address their matters at the country level, they don't need to be displaced, or they don't need to be going in the large migration flows that we've seen, because hopefully their situations will be resolved. It has been clearly an important element. Recently, the Pacific leaders held their annual meeting in the Cook Islands. And you are probably aware that Tuvalu signed an agreement with Australia because it is clear that their land might be affected because of the rise of the sea level. I mean, imagine if that were to happen in the Caribbean islands that are closer to the U.S., what would this impact be? So I believe that, you know, the leadership that the U.S. is showing, it is also a domestic angle. It is not just an international angle, because these two things in a very connected world are indeed linked and intertwined. And I am very grateful for the U.S. citizens and it’s authorities for having trusted and having been a pioneer with the Green Climate Fund right from the start.
Alison: Long lasting and durable change in communities takes a lot of time, money and trust. How does GCF take this into consideration when developing its projects? And how do we make sure these climate actions funded by the GCF are durable for the long run?
Henry: So great question. And that's why I mentioned at the start of this conversation, that we are a country-owned fund, meaning that every single project that comes to the Green Climate Fund has to have an endorsement of the country. And we believe that the best projects are those that are as local as possible, and that are targeting the most vulnerable communities in the most vulnerable and fragile areas. For us, we're here to create markets, we're here to test models. We hope that with the work that we do, as a catalytic investor, we're able to prove in some of these areas, that private sector can come later and take it to scale and take it to the next level of development. But we do focus a lot on that sort of country engagement from the very, very early start. In this current strategic plan. We are going to be focusing a lot in what we call “locally led adaptation projects,” where we feel that we could also work especially with small island development states or least developed countries in bringing solutions that are aligned to the local needs working at the sub-national level, working at the municipal level, trying to make sure that you know climate finance is not only a national wide area, it is also starting from those communities engaging Indigenous communities engaging minorities are working closely with those that are at the front of the vulnerability that climate finance and climate change actually is posing on some of those people. So this is very much aligned. And that's why one of our investment criteria is indeed around country ownership and country-led. And this is what I believe makes us different, unique. We're not top down, we are bottom up in that regard. And we hope that as we also learn from projects, because we are also learning organization, we could even do this better. Our board is going to be discussing this year regional presence. At the moment, we have been very grateful to our host country, the Republic of Korea, for hosting us here in Songdo, however, we do believe that maybe in this next maturity phase of the Green Climate Fund regional process can get us closer to some of those countries in order to make sure that we remain focused on the beneficiaries, those that we are working for, and that we believe are the most impacted by the climate change agenda.
Dan: I think both of us have mentioned the $3 billion pledge from the Biden-Harris Administration for GCF. $3 billion is a lot of money, but it pales in comparison to the actual need for climate mitigation adaptation. And so there's a limit to how much the public sector can provide. How is GCF going about leveraging those public dollars that it does have access to with private investment and climate action? And how do you see that evolving as more and more public dollars become available for GCF and for the other facilities, and more and more private capital is mobilized on an annual basis to be leveraged basically, to get these projects into place?
Henry: As you know, we've been actually short of delivering what COP attempted to deliver. And that was that they were hoping to have $100 billion a year, I believe, following the OECD latest statistics, we might have reached that last year for the first time. But this has been indeed something that we've been short of getting there. And even if we were to get to 100 billion, the needs are in the trillions. So this is something that will really need to make sure that the entire system is working towards doing a lot more. Now, what I see and why I believe this taxpayers money is so important is that there is a little bit of this pioneering gap, meaning in order for us to be able to go to that J-curve, where you are able to really scale up and bring a lot more capital, there's gonna be a lot more done earlier to prove the concept to actually test the market to understand how we could engage. And here is where the Green Climate Fund will play a very, I would say differentiated role that no one else is playing. I mean, we have to work very closely. And as you are following the US is leading and Secretary Yellen has been quite vocal on the importance of reforming the multilateral development banks, and aligning them also in the climate finance agenda. And we are actually working with some of those banks, the World Bank and others, some of our accredited entities, but because of rating matters, or other matters, sometimes they do not take the risks that we are able to take. And I think you know, some people could say small is beautiful. And I think that could be true. Because here we don't have the limitations, we are not rated. We don't have an internal rate of return that has been imposed by our board. We are pretty flexible in looking at viable commercial opportunities that have a high climate impact potential. But we're able to take high risk, our board has our high risk appetite statement or that allow us to go where others don't go. We'd let's say program $3 billion a year, this high risk appetite where we are able to take the let's say the most, or the riskiest of the tranches in a financial structure is allowing us to crowd in. We've committed about $13.5 billion. As of now, we're going to go to a neck to a board in the next few weeks in Kigali, Rwanda, we're going to be bringing 11 more new projects. But as of now 13.5 billion have been approved by the board and expected co financing from both public and private could bring this to over 50 billion. So we could say that we're trying to go into, you know, 123 or 124 Leveraging. And this is indeed something that we are aiming for. Our new Executive Director, Mafalda Duarte, launched at the UN General Assembly last September her vision for us to be a $50 billion Climate Fund by 2030, where we would be able to also crowd in even more capital. So we believe that While public capital is finite, we are providing a proof of principle to crowding others public or private investors who could take us there. And once we go through these, let's say, testing grounds, then the market would actually take this to the next level. And we are already seeing some of that some of our earlier investments in our portfolio were very focused in renewable energy, we were able to do a project with Mitsubishi bank in Chile, South America. However, later, as the project was being implemented, we realized that the market had actually moved on, and they did no longer need our capital. So we had to somehow cut our implementation short, and we were able to utilize the rest of that committed capital for other projects. So I believe we could certainly see that this market is evolving. And what we would like to do is always be where our limited but impactful, blended finance and catalytic investing is needed.
Dan: So you've mentioned the role of the board and GCF, and there's nothing quite as much fun as the lead up to a board meeting. So good luck with all of that hope it all goes well, my guess is that the board is very interested in volume. And those numbers are very impressive, but they're probably also very focused on results. And I'm curious about metrics, and specifically the challenge of establishing metrics to evaluate progress on adaptation. And that's something that GCF and other international climate finance facilities have been grappling with for decades. And it was a topic at COP 28. Within the context of the global goal and adaptation, how does GCF approach adaptation metrics in a way that can be applied globally, but also incorporates context specific strategies.
Henry: Our new Executive Director really wants to deepen our work around results and impact. Because now that we have about, you know, out of the 13.5 billion, about 4 billion have been disbursed. That was remember that there is a little bit of a lag in our disbursement because in some of our investments are very long term investor investments, that there are certain schedules for, you know, drawing down from the investment schedule. So these are the they were working. I mean, when we looked at the adaptation and the mitigation, we tend to use emissions reduce on the mitigation, and beneficiaries on the adaptation. But those are, I would say, the the easiest of the data that we're able to collect, we need to collect data from our partners that are accredited, who then need to get those reports by the communities. And as you know, in impact management, sometimes there is so many demands from different contributors that put a lot of burden on the recipients. So we've been trying, we've tried to do that in a very high level, we are a second level to diligence entity, we're not making direct investments. So this is what we are trying to gather. Now, what you just mentioned is something that I think we are going to be evolving. And that is, Well, besides those number of beneficiaries or those reduction of emissions, what other co benefits have we seen, what other areas have we seen in regards from job creation, to gender inclusion, to social inclusion to engagement in indigenous communities. So we're trying to now expand and get a lot more of that. The importance here is that we would like to use sort of standards that are not recreating new reporting burdens for our recipients. And as you know, we don't have a lot of those yet agreed in the broader ecosystem. But we are really trying to work on those that I just mentioned, we are, we are also not only tracking quantitative data, we're also looking at qualitative assessments. We're trying to also do evaluations of our own projects. We have an independent evaluation unit, they look at different parts of what we do. So in our next board, for example, they're going to be presenting an evaluation of our energy portfolio. So we try to take lessons from those evaluations and improve how we are tracking our impact and how we are able to also go to our board and present to our board. We do have a board approved results management framework that was actually recently updated and relaunch in 2022. Therefore, we have a an enhanced resource management framework that we are you Using for some of these important elements of assessing our impact, I guess we might need to do better in how we communicate some of these, how we create the right stories. And that's why we are going to be enhancing the unit of results, evaluations and learning in order to be able to also project that to our stakeholders.
Alison: I'd love to hear more of your insights on adaptation because adaptation funding has increased globally, but it's still far behind the level of investment needed. So how is GCF addressing this challenge, and especially regarding the gap in funding between adaptation and mitigation?
Henry: GCF from the start has a mandate from the call to keep a 5050 target between adaptation and mitigation on Grant equivalency basis. And today, as of today, this is a moving target in each board meeting, we will be shifting some of these numbers. But we are actually from a grant equivalency, we are at 54 adaptation, and 46 mitigation on a nominal terms is a little bit the reverse. So we've programmed about 54 or 55% in mitigation, and 45 in adaptation, but as I said, it’s a moving target, but we're not off from that target. And I think this is important because even in the private sector, where adaptation is getting very few resources we've been leading on that, actually, through a new U.S. private equity fund that is called Pegasus Capital Advisors, we were able to approve a project in 2021, it is called Craft, which is a project that is trying to you know, work on technology and adaptation, and use some of those technologies to be implemented in emerging economies. And we've been able to, you know, we somehow accord that 200 million fund, we provided about 25% of that funding. So our adaptation funding is not too off vis-a-vis our mitigation funding. And as I said, even following or benchmark of grant equivalency, it is a bit higher at the moment, there has been a lot of intentionality, I have to say meaning, when we are working in adaptation, we have to provide more support, we need to provide a lot more readiness or project preparation, support to those countries. We're working a lot in the small island development states, both the Caribbean and the Pacific Islands. But it is it is trickier, you know, the low hanging fruit. And if you look at our first investments, you know, GCF did what we call the initial resource mobilization, which was the first programming cycle, it was very energy focused, I think about 85% of our private sector money went into energy. Then we went into GCF, one which was the program in between 2020 and 2023. And we started diversifying, and shifting those figures to get to where we are, we just closed GCF, one in December, and GCF, two if you look at our new strategy is going to have a strong focus in adaptation working a lot on providing the tools for countries for early warning action on working in locally led adaptation as I mentioned. Lastly, our board and the cop has given us guidance that are of that 50% of the adaptation target. At least 50% of that has to go to the most vulnerable countries defined by small island development states, least developed countries or African states.
Alison: And now looking ahead to the next COP coming up this year, which will sneak up on us much faster than we expect. I'm sure countries are set to determine a new collective quantified goal on climate finance or NCQG at COP29 in Baku, this should surpass the target that you mentioned of $100 billion per year that first emerged in 2009. I'd love to hear about GCF’s role in the dialogue leading up to this year's negotiations. And how would you recommend policymakers and other stakeholders in the United States engage with this process?
Henry: So great question and I think we are indeed involved. You know, the G20 has a sustainable finance working group. We are members of the sustainable finance working group, China and the U.S. are leading some of this work. We had a meeting or COP in the Emirates in Dubai, where we actually discussed with some of our peer vertical funds. So GCF, GEF, Adaptation Fund, and Climate Investment Fund. And we agreed that we're going to be working in a more intentional alignment on how we could program and support the work that we do. And while in the past, we've always talked about complementarity and coherence. Now, the four heads for the first time actually, we held a joint pavilion with we created what we call the climate finance hub. And this pavilion brought us together, but also, we will be showing by July, our progress, and hopefully bring to the COP29. Our value add it. I also think that this whole MDB reform, we are part of those conversations, I know that Treasury has been also leaning a lot on those conversations. Because if I may, and just being candid, a goal is easy to establish, reaching it or understanding how to reach it is where it becomes a lot trickier. You know, aid budgets are being squeezed, given political and geopolitical realities with, you know, what is going on in Gaza, what is going on in Ukraine, some of the geopolitical issues with China, as well as what is going on in the most vulnerable countries, like Yemen and others. So there's so many different variables, that then it does get complicated, but I do feel that giving that to G20, led by Brazil was also going to be preparing or paving the way for COP30 to be held in Brazil in 2025, there was a lot of intentionality of working around sustainable financing climate finance, in hopefully bringing a lot more coordination and complementarity and coherence across all players. We have committed to do that, at least among the four largest vertical funds of climate, and we will see how things will pan out but we do participate. We do we do we go to the to the midterm meetings that take place in bond, the sips standards bodies that meet in, in between, so we're part of those dialogues, we have a whole team dedicated here to engage with the UNFCCC. So we will be providing our inputs, providing our lessons, but at the same time taking guidance on where we could be more effective in helping that new quantifiable goals.
Dan: Well, Henry, it has been a real treat for me and Alison—or Alison and me, I should say—to have an opportunity to talk with you. It means a lot that you took time out of your busy day. We're recording this, for me and Alison—or Alison and me—at least, on a Monday evening. It's Tuesday morning, I think, where you are in South Korea, so have a happy Tuesday. And good luck with everything. It's really incredible and really looking forward to tracking GCF’s progress in the lead up to COP29 in Baku and beyond. Thanks so much for joining us today.
Henry: Thank you so much.
Dan: Henry Gonzalez is a tremendous leader, and obviously someone who knows international climate finance backwards and forwards and is doing a great job mobilizing that organization to help bring climate finance to scale. One thing that I thought about is, you know, why this matters for a U.S. policymaking audience and just how these projects are impactful in the communities that they're serving, but also impactful for us as well here in the U.S. as one of the larger donors to GCF. So I hope our audience took that away. And, you know, one thing that Henry said that I learned since I've been in EESI, especially working around the Conference of Parties, which is the cop and the UNF Triple C is that, you know for EESI While we tend to focus on the cop itself and the lead up and during in the aftermath. Last year it was in Dubai, next year, it's in Baku, which is the capital of Azerbaijan. This work actually continues year round and whether it's people at GCF or people at UNF, Triple C headquarters in Bonn, Germany, this work is happening. And it's really important to recognize that even though COPPA is the big headline event, climate change doesn't just happen while COPPA is happening. These impacts are happening around the globe all the time. And it's really important for GCF and the other UN agencies, as well as the country organizations multilateral development bank's everybody doing everything they can to mitigate climate change, help communities adapt and hopefully avoid, hopefully help all of us avoid the worst impacts of climate change. So it's such a treat to get to hear from Henry
Alison: I'm so amazed at how much I learned from Henry during his interview. I thought I had learned a fair amount about climate finance after working on EESI’s COP newsletter and then also researching for today's episode. But after speaking with Henry, I realized I've only just begun to scratch the surface a little bit. I appreciated him bringing up that example of the Acumen Fund, attracting private investment dollars to support small scale agriculture in Ghana, Kenya and a couple other places. I think that will really resonate with our audience, many of whom are deep in the weeds trying to finalize a Farm Bill that could help catalyze climate smart farming practices here in the United States. I think he also made a really important point about how an investment abroad is an investment at home. Climate finance can be a hard sell for members of Congress who are on a short election cycle, especially during an election year. And sometimes the conversation about climate finance is framed around the question of culpability, which I think is relevant, but it's also a little beside the point. U.S. support for international climate finance is not important because we owe it to countries with developing economies, but ultimately, because we owe it to ourselves. And the only way to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis is to ensure the deployment of innovative solutions that are regionally specific and culturally appropriate across every corner of the globe. This is a tremendously daunting task. But fortunately, we have the Green Climate Fund and others who are working on the ground, like you said, year round, not just during COP but all the time, and they are fostering collaborations that will increase the capacity of the United States and the international community to respond to climate change. If you want to learn more about EESI’s work on climate finance, head to our website at eesi.org. Also, follow us on social media @eesionline for all of our recent updates. The Climate Conversation is published as a supplement to our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. Go to eesi.org/signup to subscribe. Thanks for joining us and see you next time!
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