 So I'm Tamara with the Micronesia Conservation Trust. I am here on behalf of Willy Kostika, our executive director. He's unfortunately unable to be here today. So a little bit about the Micronesia Conservation Trust. So we're a private non-government organization, a non-profit corporation. Our mission is to provide sustainable financing and support for biodiversity conservation, sustainable development, and environmental education, as well as livelihoods. We are based in the Federated States of Micronesia. If you think about the Pacific Ocean, and you think about Hawaii, and then you think about Japan, we service the area in between. So it's the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of Palau, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and then two U.S. territories, the U.S. territory of Guam, and then the Commonwealth, the North, and Marianas. These five entities or jurisdictions also make up the context of, or sorry, the membership of what's called the Micronesia Challenge. And the Micronesia Challenge was a commitment by the chief executives and the presidents of those five jurisdictions and countries to effectively conserve and manage 50% of their marine resources and 30% of their terrestrial resources by 2030. But they need funding to be able to do that. When you close off an area for effective conservation, it means that you have, you might be contributing to climate adaptation and conservation, but you have a serious gap in livelihoods and communities are affected. So we all, we work in that area. We mobilized funding from a diversity of sources, and we provide long-term sustained funding. I heard through the last two presentations a lot about the need for long-term funding as opposed to one-offs, and MCT works very hard to provide that. We're also, yeah, so our impact areas are conservation, sustainable livelihoods, and climate resilience. And we partner with a wide range of organizations. So local community organizations, women's groups, community organizations, state governments, national governments, church groups, any community group that is prepared and willing to implement a project on behalf of their needs, their management needs. So MCT's journey, we were established in 2002 by Mr. William Costa Carr, our executive director, and we were established in order to be able to provide funding to communities, but also to house what he saw as an important aspect of, which was an endowment. So if you look at this to the right, these figures were taken from our, sorry, I'm seeing that someone wants me to speak slowly. My apologies. I'll try to be slower. In 2019, these are our figures. So in that, in 2019, we sub-granted or we funded approximately $1.6 million across the region in small projects to communities, but we also hold an endowment. So we have an endowment, this says $23 million, but it's actually currently worth $25 million. And this endowment are contributions from government entities and also some donors. And we hold it and we invest it. And then we're able to give it back to the governments of these five regions in order for them to continue to support communities in their region. We also have, since 2002, we've been holding endowments, but we're also able to receive, we've been receiving a lot of funds from private donors, such as the Margaret A. Cargo Foundation, the, sorry, the, the Wait Institute. And then we have a number of international large donors, so UNAP, UNDP, and a lot of bilateral government funding as well. And we also have our part of a number of large networks, including Glispa and others. But I think importantly, one of the things that makes MCT really unique is we are the smallest entity in the world to be accredited by both the Adaptation Fund and the Green Climate Fund. So as a pretty small, intermediate organization, so far we've received a $1 million grant for our under Adaptation Fund for the Federated States of Micronesia. And we're currently implementing and supporting that. We also recently received our first Green Climate Fund on behalf of the government of the Federated States of Micronesia. And that's a SAP project that we will begin to implement. And that's, that, that is under the, sorry, that, that one is, that is for food security. And then we also have an up and coming grant that we're working with the GCF that will be with the board soon that will be for the region. And that one is specifically for regional capacity. So I don't think I need to go through this slide. I, I, I, we prepared this because this is the experience of MCT, but I think that this was already shared quite succinctly. Some of the issues faced by local partners to access funding and implement locally led adaptation. So, you know, climate access to climate finance capacity in terms of due diligence and reporting donor priorities, one-offs versus long-term funding, and then the sustainability. So we were asked to consider MCT in response to the, the principles, the eight principles. And I did see some, some mention in the chat about their great principles, but what do they look like on the ground? So I just want to go through how MCT has been addressing these principles. So the first one, developing decision-making to the lowest appropriate level. So I think MCT, importantly, we aim to deliver grants to regional, national, local, municipal, and NGO actors, as well as, and it doesn't say here, communities and church groups and any groups that are willing to apply. And we do this mostly through a request for proposals. So a small granting scheme. And we support, we, we not only offer funding, but we, we support the communities in a collaborative process to, to develop their proposals. And then importantly, 90% of MCT staff are from Micronesia. I'm one of only two people that's not from the region. And I think that because they're community members and, and, and this is, this is their home, that it's, it's really easy to assume that the, that this is at the lowest appropriate level. Number two, addressing structural inequality. So we're very inclusive and we ensure gender equality and, and, and rural, remote and underservice communities, almost all of the communities in Micronesia are either rural, remote or underservice. We provide a predictable funding. So through our small grants to local organizations over long time frames, we had, we considered a snowball effect, I think for the Pacific, maybe it's a sandcastle effect, but we fund projects. And then they'll, we'll fund a project and then we'll have another call for proposals and that community will be able to apply for more funding. And we hope we, we, some of our projects, some of our partners have been receiving funding for over 10 years. We invest in local capabilities. And through that, we have a full capacity building program. So through our capacity building program, we offer financial management training, M&E training, climate change, adaptation and planning training, ecosystem conservation. And I think what I'm most excited about at MCT is, is our Bill Rainer Micronesia Challenge Scholarship. So we've funded over 16 graduate and PhD, or master's and PhD students from the region. And all of them have come home. And they are all working in either government or in local NGOs. Important to, what is really important to us is that we fund local knowledge. We fund observational knowledge and, and we also fund scientific data. So we fund a lot of research. And then we, we support the, you know, scientific monitoring over long time frame, so a science to management model. And as an intermediary, one of the things that's really good is that we're the ones who speak with the larger donors. So we are able to be more flexible. And we're also able, able to advocate. So when a project is delayed or that any problems happen, COVID has obviously been a big issue for a number of our partners, we're able to sort of go to bat on their behalf. Ensuring transparency and accountability, I think this one is really, really one of the biggest risks. And how we do that is ensure that the local governments, the civil society and communities are structured right into the project and they're part of the design, so that they have ownership. And we do a lot of monitoring and visiting and capacity building. And then collaborative action and investment, we've been working in the same communities for over 18 years. And like I said, most of the team are from the region and they're known by and they know of, you know, our partners. So I just want to share, I think what we've learned and to be the best mechanism and the best mode of supporting locally led adaptation is small grants. So over the past, for instance, five years, we've probably sub-granted almost maybe two, two and a half million US dollars into communities. And we support that to recall for proposals, local community organizations, local governments, and the benefits of this and how this supports locally led adaptation, they identify their own projects, their own budgets and their own components. The funding is prioritized for communities that have already developed their own plans. So they have their own local management plans and we fund the actions under those. We offer a fiscal sponsorship pairing if necessary as well. So we have a number of partners that can receive the funding from us to them and then can support them. We offer a lot of capacity and technical support. And our grants are small. They're 10 to 50,000 US dollars. And we found that 50,000 is about the about the capacity of most of our small partners. And I think I just wanted to end with a recommendation. So the two most important recommendations I would share are with larger donors and just to consider. And these might be a little redundant, but I think that we forget these trust. We need to trust local entities that know their own context on the ground. And I think another one that I've learned over the course of my time in the Pacific is to remain open. So we need to remain open to what may seem like an unexpected or a counterintuitive solution. Just because it comes from a community and it might be something outside of the box or some other way of looking at things. Oftentimes they tend to be how things start and then we end up being able to learn from them and then scale them up.