Partnership for effective financing of climate change adaptation and resilience

There is a strong public interest in financing climate change adaptation and resilience – hundreds of billions of Euros have been pledged, not only by the public sector but also by large investors (such as pension funds) and other financiers. In the energy sector, there has been a significant use of blending techniques to crowd in private funding for sustainable energy projects. But in agriculture there remains a large gap between the funding that is in principle available for climate-smart projects, and that which effectively reaches smallholder farmers. Smallholders will have to act to make farming more sustainable and resilient, for example, by investing in climate resilient seeds, greenhouses or small-scale irrigation projects, but need the means for this. The conference will discuss what structures can link such smallholders to the international capital market, and what roles international and national agencies can play to reinforce this link (by supporting the upfront development costs of such structures, engineering them so that returns meet private sector benchmarks, absorbing excess risks and meeting gaps in available financing like the shortage of longer-term funds).