With the Paris Agreement in force, 2016 will be remembered as a landmark year for climate action.
As the year draws to a close, 115 parties (and counting) have ratified an agreement over two decades.
With the Paris Agreement in force, 2016 will be remembered as a landmark year for climate action. As the year draws to a close, 115 parties (and counting) have ratified an agreement over two decades in the making and that paves the way for a legally binding commitment to keeping global warming at no more than 2C above pre-industrial levels.
For the $8.3 billion Climate Investment Funds, which was launched in 2008, at a time when there was no global consensus on climate change, 2016 is also notable for the progress made by its four funds in this year’s results reporting.
The Clean Technology Fund – CTF – reported 169,000 passengers per day now using low carbon transport, in Mexico and Colombia. And Global GHG reductions equivalent to taking 1.4 million cars off the road. Over the lifetime of its endorsed investments CTF is expected to deliver emission reductions totaling 1.5 billion tons of CO2 emissions.
CTF Results
The Forest Investment Program – FIP – for the first time ever included results on GHG emission reductions, reported from a project in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And forestry communities in countries like Ghana and Mexico are also seeing impact on the ground -- from over 64,000 people that have received livelihood co-benefits from FIP projects to progress on tree tenure rights, including female cocoa farmers in Ghana, who historically could only gain land through husbands or male relatives.
FIP Results
The Pilot Program for Climate Resilience – PPCR – has reached 2.8 million beneficiaries by the end of 2015. These numbers are expected to swell to 30 million once all programs and projects are implemented across the full 29 countries. PPCR also empowers countries to mainstream climate resilience into national development planning and invests in the development and testing of tools and instruments to make climate information and early warning systems available to the most vulnerable countries. Already over 25,000 businesses, one million+ households and and 5,000+ communities have used PPCR-supported tools in response to climate change.
PPCR Results
The Scaling Up Renewable Energy Program – SREP – reported results for the first time ever in electricity output achieved from a project in Honduras. The projected produced 276 MWH annual electricity output from renewable energy, avoiding the equivalent of 174 tCO2 emissions. With its focus on clean energy access in low-income countries, SREP is eventually expected to deliver new or improved energy access to 16.8 million people - about the entire population of Malawi.
SREP Results
CIF investments provide urgently needed resources and help to fill the financing gap for climate action. Through its concessional financing, the CIF helps lower the real and perceived investment risks and costs of climate financing and attract other public and private sector finance to green investments.
Innovation is at the core of the CIF’s way of doing business. It is the only climate fund to work through a country-led programmatic planning process, in which governments, supported by multilateral development banks – MDBs – plan long-term sequenced investments in partnership with diverse stakeholders to achieve national or sector-wide transformation.
Five MDBs implement CIF-financed projects:
This unique approach also champions first-movers, stimulates markets, and bridges financing and information gaps as a result.
CIF investments are at work in 72 countries, supporting over 300 projects all over the world, which are expected to mobilize an additional $58 billion in investment co-finance – about $7 for every $1 provided by the CIF.