 Okay, good morning, good afternoon, good evening from where you're joining us from. Welcome to today's. Welcome to this financing locally lead adaptation actions as session, all lead by care. K international in collaboration with other Luxembourg and was set in network in Malawi. I would like us to kindly mute ourselves if we are not speaking. It's, and also use the chat box to ask any questions or comments. Also, please introduce ourselves on the charts. As we proceed with the session. My name is Malina Choki, I will be the facilitator for today's session I work with the care international as the global policy leads climate justice and I'm based in Nairobi. So today we have six panelists who will share with us different experiences from different regions on how financing locally lead. Adaptation experiences is being viewed in different in different countries. Before we start I would like to quickly introduce our panelists. And I will share my slides. These are our speakers for today we have ever should have from policy policy coordinator climate change Minister for affairs in Netherlands. We also have Julius Goma, the national coordinator at CISONEC civil society network on climate change from Malawi. We are also joined by Willie Misak, a founder and executive director learn to serve from Vanuatu. We have Dr. Bimal Raj, who's the team leader UK AIDS policy and institutions facility. We are also privileged to have a field about joining us was the head of knowledge management from other Luxembourg and Peter Cooper senior policy officer on climate ministry, a foreign affairs. I would like to invite Inge climate justice center director to welcome us to this today's session before we continue with the with the session in terms of the next activity. Welcome Inge. Thank you very much Marlene and good morning good afternoon good evening to all of you depending on where you are. I'm really honored to welcome you all to today's CBA 16 session led by care and key partners as Marlene just told you about the important topic of financing locally lead adaptation actions. It's great to see so many of you joining today from all parts of the world and it's great that you're starting to introduce yourselves through the chat function. To know this year's CBA's focus is on the principles for locally lead adaptation. And the CBA ensures that we as an adaptation community can come together to share knowledge and expertise on how to put the locally lead adaptation principles into practice while recognizing the complexities and challenges that we must overcome and the innovations that we must develop. Today's session will provide the space to drive our joint ambition for a climate resilient future by looking more closely at financing locally lead adaptation actions. The principles for locally lead adaptation are intended to guide the adaptation community as it moves programs funding and practices towards adaptation. We are increasingly owned by local partners at cross with levels at care care international we believe that there is a need to shift from top down approaches to new models, where local actors have greater power and resources to build resilience and adapt to climate change and that is why we as care and as one of many organizations actually have signed on to the principles for locally lead adaptation. The principles for climate adaptation is still inadequate unfortunately, and it's not sufficiently reaching the poorest, most vulnerable and most marginalized communities. There are efforts in place to enhance this, but we are not there yet. The IPCC has highlighted that current adaptation measures are insufficient progress is uneven and that the world is not adapting fast enough. What I'm concerning is that only four to 8% of all climate finance has been allocated to adaptation action, and it is estimated that less than 10% of mitigation and adaptation finance from global climate funds is focused at the global at the local level. And that means two things. First, there is an urgent need to scale up the provision of climate finance for adaptation with predictable funding and big steps must be made as we all know. Secondly, there is an urgent need to make this funding more accessible to local actors. Multilateral funds such as the Green Climate Fund, but also those actors who can access finance from these multilateral funds have an important role and duty to play in making finance accessible to local actors. They should actively embrace approaches such as on granting to in-country stakeholders to allow communities and other local stakeholders to access money for effective adaptation. That would prevent them from having to go through very long complex and bureaucratic international procedures. At CARE we believe that financing locally led adaptation actions will empower communities to lead sustainable and effective adaptation to climate change at the local level. And I'm looking forward to hear from the distinguished speakers today, how they look at this. And therefore I will no longer hold you up, but I wish you all a very inspiring webinar, which is hopefully helpful in your daily work. Thank you for joining and enjoy the discussions. Back off to you, Marlene. Marlene, we cannot hear you, you are on mute. Yeah, I was animating myself. So thank you so much, Inge, for setting the scene and demanding us about the theme for CBA 16 this year, and also the session, what it's all about in terms of financing locally led adaptation actions. I would like to, we are going to hear from the different panelists on what are the different experiences from different regions. Basically what are the barriers, what are the challenges, what's not working, what's working and what can we do to make it better. And from the eight principles for locally led adaptation, we know that climate finance is one of the principles, the third principle in particular, which really looks into ensuring that the community and the grassroots communities at the grassroots level are at the center of decision making on different adaptation actions, but also of importance to have them making decisions on how to implement the programs but also we have a role to provide and finding that is easily accessible, finding that it is long enough for communities to be able to see transformative actions, but also finding that is not in terms of long that would keep communities build their burden to addressing the impacts of climate change. So before we start with our listening to our speakers for today, I would like us to do a small exercise on Mentimeter. My colleague, I will lead us on this. So we have two questions on Mentimeter that would like to engage the participants on before we start engaging with our panelists. And the first question is, what are the biggest barriers to financing climate action at the local level? What are the biggest barriers to financing climate action at the local level? And the second question that we will tackle on Mentimeter is how can financial institutions support transformative local adaptation actions? IA is going to share with us the links on chat. I'm also going to press the questions again, but they're also on Mentimeter for us to do this. We have 10 minutes to engage on this session before we start engaging with our panelists and hearing the vast experience that they're going to share with us today. So let us all head to the Mentimeter. IA, do we have that on board? Yes, can you see my screen? You can access this Mentimeter in two ways. You can go to the link that I put in the chat, or you can go to menti.com and key in the code here written on top of the board. It's 891-337-00. Thank you. We have nine minutes both for the session now. So kindly let us put our comments and ideas to extract our session for today on the Mentimeter. Thank you. Don't forget to answer the second question. So once you submit your answer to the first one, you will be directed to the second question. And this is how the second board looks like. There's some answers already. Yeah, I'm seeing a number of feedback coming in for the first question. What are the key barriers? We have lack of proper targeting of adaptation interventions. Bureaucracy and the wrong idea of accountability is one of the challenges that we have actually identified here to accessing climate finance at the local level, understanding how long to fund and at what level. How do we ensure that local actors are appropriately engaged and colleagues? The lack of evidence is a key barrier here. There's still not enough overall funding for adaptation to allow multiple initiatives in multiple countries to get to scale. Good initiatives have to compete with each other. Very key. There's a think lack of commitments here. Also, as one of the barriers, there's disconnect between requirements for finance provision and local scale needs. We also have barriers like lack of trust on the local actors, especially grassroots organization. This is interesting. Decisions are being made at national and international level. One of the key barriers here and we end up losing the local communities inputs into decision making. We have lack of focused budgets from central and local governments that are not targeting adaptation interventions. Timeframes and requirements for completing access forms or systems are also a key barrier here. We have accountability challenges. Corruption is a key barrier on how the finance is provided already are being used. Planning and scaling experience. Definition of adaptations that can accommodate the diversity of actions involved probably is not clear. Most organizations want to engage at the boardrooms and hotels for getting action is at the community level. And this is what we actually seeing happening. We do have a lot of meetings. Yes, in boardrooms and hotels planning, instead of actually doing this with the communities at the local level where they are. Can we see what we have in the second question? How can financial institutions support transformative local adaptation actions? Get rid of long bureaucratic procedure. I think that is very key. And we have seen this with the already financial mechanisms that we have. The Green Climate Fund is one of them. And we will hear from one of our panelists on how the experience is in engaging with Green Climate Funds. We need to have better reporting systems. We need to reconsider the scale and prefer delivery channels for finance. We need to commit to long term partnerships at least seven to 10 years and not the normal two to three years that we see, because in that case we might not be able to see good transformative actions. Law interest is the access loans and credits should be available to attract more community actors to be part of the process. Long time frames for finding you can't do transformative change in two or three years. Yes. That's correct. This is on policy engagement and core development, monitor and evaluate progress. Yeah, we need to evaluate some of the actions and progress that we have for us to improve on next programs or improve on the challenges that we've had, let's say in the past two, three years of implementation if the project has longer lifespan. It's very important to understand that transformation involves fundamental changes in systems, especially those that impoverish populations and marginalized communities in favor of rapaceous corporations and institutional corruption. It's very important to target local institutions to access the funding. Invest in local actors and particularly women's organizations who have transformative solutions, but they are frequently overlooked. It's very also important to see here to channel finance through local government institutions. Building capacity of local organizations for them to be able to do this and we don't have to always play in experts to do some of the work that local institutions can actually do. Do we have any additional long term and institution building supports related to just the previous statements combined top down and bottom up approaches to ensure that this data participatory approaches to work with communities, but also to bring in new information that is needed if it's technology and and and all that creating small grants between big donors and grassroots organizations to provide adequate capacity for the implementation of local adaptation actions. And finally, prioritize local organizations to accreditation and program development. We have seen that the accreditation processes for one to be an accredited entity to actually access the climate finance mechanisms that we have. It's actually very robust and most of the time it locks out local organizations because of the the fiduciary standards that are set for that. Ensure local government accountability very important. We must want to follow up on what's what's being done. And if it's not being done, why is that so very important to monitoring is too complex and costly. But I think it's it's it's an important aspect for us to always keep planning and improving on our actions. And finally, bridge gaps between the financial institutions and local knowledge. These are very, very great inputs to start us off with our panelists on discussing this important topic of financing locally led action. I would like to start with one of our panelists Bimal from Nepal. Bimal thank you for joining and Bimal is a team leader UK aid police and institutions facility from Nepal. So Bimal, what are the different enablers and barriers in accessing climate finance for local climate change actions. Would you also tell us what evidence and experience can you share with us from the Nepal context. Thank you, Marlene. Hello, everyone. So thank you so much for providing me this opportunity to share. It is a very, you know, interesting topic, yet very important for least developed countries and communities who are at risk and vulnerable due to climate change. So it was fascinating to see a lot of responses earlier in the discussion about your perception on some of the enablers and barriers. So based on experience of Nepal. Let me highlight some of the enablers for accessing climate finance for local climate actions. So one that we really see because Nepal has been piloting implementing and scaling up local adaptation plans of action as one of the first country to initiate locally led adaptation. So we think that the supportive legal provision is one of the enablers, because our climate change policy has the provision of 80%. So any climate finance that comes from international, you know, sources has to be, you know, the 80% has to be spent at the local level. So this is a policy provision that is there. So the legal mandate is legally binding for every institutions that, you know, access or that fund climate change. And it has been proved one of the very effective legal provisions. Similarly with the framework on local adaptation plan of action. So Nepal has a framework on local adaptation. So that adheres the federalism and really recognizes the role of local communities and local institutions. So that is one. The second enablers based on our experience is we if we have a vibrant institutional mechanism, particularly the community based organizations are crucial leadership and role. That will lead to, you know, effective access of climate finance at the local level and more loving from the community based organization. So Nepal has a history of active community based organization, playing crucial role in cross management and addressing local issues. So these vibrant institution mechanism has provided grounds for, you know, advocacy and lobbying with the government to really fund local actions that is related to climate change adaptation. The third one based on our experience is the participatory and consultative approaches that are key to, you know, enablers for accessing climate finance because it helps to identify local priority and needs, give more emphasis to the local vulnerable communities and households. This is another, you know, enabling factor. The fourth one I see is integrating within the government planning and budgeting process. We all know that public finance is not is one of the major, you know, vehicle for funding local climate action. The whole of government approach so integrating in the policies plan budget and in the fiscal cycle governance mechanism is very crucial in terms of facilitating the access of climate finance for supporting local action. And the final one among the most important ones is scaling up good practices. Those allocation based on risk and vulnerability. So this is more of targeted approach. So Nepal government has, you know, piloted this approach. So based on the risk and vulnerability of the local governments, they allocate the percentage of financing. So this has proved to be quite effective in terms of targeting the local climate actions. And these are some of the enablers for accessing climate finance for local climate actions, among many that we have discussed earlier, as well as maybe my fellow panelists will highlight more. So can you go to the second slide please. Given the barriers for accessing climate finance for local climate actions, there are few that I have highlighted here in the slides and I just want to discuss. One is the direct access issues. So we all know that fund is negotiated at the international and national level with the limited role of local actors in this negotiation. The negotiations are done by the national government. So these direct access issues remain one of the bottlenecks for accessing climate finance to support local climate action. The second one is the train has been towards limited access to grant based financing as financial institutions, international agencies, priorities towards loan. So now you can see the debate around loan versus grant. So in the past few years, we have seen in different financial instrument or mechanism whether it is GCF or other mechanism. The priority is on loan and there is less priority and grants. That means it is one of the barrier for supporting local climate actions that are mostly grant oriented because we're talking about very poor marginalized small world of farmers. Third one we have experiences is limited institution capacity at the local level to observe and mobilize climate finance because the institutions are very new, they're evolving so the capacity less and their experience in fund mobilization is quite limited. So this is one of the barrier that really hinders in accessing climate finance at a larger scale. The fourth one is local is often misinterpreted as poor variables, which is really a core issue, you know, like funding at the local level is often determined and often decided by few elites. And this is social structural issues. The advantage group priorities reflected so you can see that even the financial flow at the local climate supporting local climate actions are invested in infrastructure and general public goods and not really specific to the needs of vulnerable and poor people. The fifth one I see as very important bottlenecks is the equity issues are challenging the intersectionality and intergenerational issues. We often don't talk about it. We talk community as a general blanket approach. We talk local as very general blanket approach and these intersectionality and intergenerational issues, the issues of women within women this disabled the poor the marginalized youth people who are in the remote areas were very limited access to resources. They are often disadvantage. So I think one of the challenges for reaching them in terms of their access to climate finance is one of the barrier. And the last one that I really want to highlight is the mismatch of priorities of the local government who really want to invest in local infrastructure, their priorities are driven by their vote bankers, and they are more political motive in nature. Similarly with, you know, other institution show the, you know, actual need of really poor and vulnerable action households mostly investment in building their livelihood asset is often undermined because of this mismatch of priorities. So, I just want to end my deliberation here. So thank you so much. So I think this will open more avenues for discussion on what could be no enablers and barriers for accessing climate finance. The most important thing is a way forward on how we can ensure climate finance better access of local communities in supporting local climate action. I'll be happy to discuss that later on. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. So much dr be mal and just to add that dr be mal is a climate resilience and natural resource management expert with more than 21 years of experience in supporting the national and local climate change adaptation priorities in Nepal. And we have seen some similarities from dr be mal's presentation and some of the feedback that we just did in our earlier exercise in terms of what are the enablers like supportive legal provisions of climate like climate change policies adaptation plans. We also have vibrant institutional mechanisms in Nepal that support accessing climate finance at the local level is also talked about integrating within the government planning and budgeting processes in terms of adaptation priorities for communities. And this is very important for the purpose of ensuring that this budget allocated for local adaptation priorities. Dr be mal has also talked about scaling up good practices and resource allocation based on needs vulnerability and risks. This is very important to ensure that the actions are well targeted to really who the people who need it the most. He's also highlighted the barriers that they face in Nepal in terms of accessing local climate finance. Dr be mal has talked about limited access to grant based financing. And we have seen this course in crisis even to other countries in terms of countries have to having to deal with them. And climate debt because they are taking loans to build the resilience of their countries and communities. And we are and while we are advocating that climate finance for adaptation should be grant based and not alone. Another key barrier here is limited institutional capacity to absorb the different impacts. Dr be mal we have a number of questions for you on the chat. Please feel free to look at them. We will come back to the questions after we have listened to our other speakers. And we will, when we start the question segment we will start with you so kindly look through the questions that some that have been raised I've seen a number of them on the chat and then we will respond to them afterwards. Our next speaker is Matilda bound. She's the head of knowledge management at the Luxembourg and Matilda is responsible for the collection creation and management of knowledge on several topics. And these include social performance green microfinance alternative finance for micro and small entrepreneurs. Matilda also works on project evaluation and design and implementation of an impact measurement system within other as an qualified auditor. We would like to hear your experience from Luxembourg. How can climate finance facilitates or support the adoption of adaptation practices for populations who are vulnerable to the effects of climate change and how can we make adaptation attractive for private finance. How can we make adaptation attractive for private finance at the local level. Matilda, please. Yeah, thank you very much, Marlene and thank you very much for inviting me to take part in this webinar. Maybe if I may I will start with a very short introduction of other just to set the context and explain why we are able today to talk about climate finance and private finance for adaptation. So Ada is an NGO based in Luxembourg. So we are an NGO supporting the development of inclusive finance for almost 30 years now in Sub-Saharan Africa in Latin America and in Asia. So what does it mean concretely to support the development of inclusive finance. It means that we have been working mostly with microfinance institutions in our countries of intervention so at the local level. Mostly microfinance institutions but more and more also other types of financing institutions such as FinTechs for instance or insurance brokers and we work with them to help them. Maybe we can mute. Yeah, thank you. So we work with these financing institutions, local financing institutions to develop financial products and services adapted to the needs of the population in the field and especially to the needs of vulnerable populations. So as you may know, microfinance for a long time has been expected to reduce especially socioeconomic inequalities in the countries by providing easier access to financial services to the people who were excluded from traditional financing systems. But today it has become obvious that these vulnerable populations are also the most affected by climate change. So what does it mean for microfinance institutions then it means that their clients are among the most affected by the effects of climate change and microfinance institutions support the economic activities managed by these people. So if we take the example of smaller farmers for instance microfinance institutions or other local financial institutions support the economic activity of smaller farmers and if they are more affected by climate change. It means that their production decreases over years or is more at risk over years. It means that they may be less able to produce maybe less able to sell and then less likely to repay the loans they got from these local financing institutions. So if vulnerable people are more and more affected by climate change, it means that it represents also a financial risk for these local financing institutions for these microfinance institutions. So actually, this is why microfinance institutions or other local financial organizations should have an interest in supporting the adoption of adaptation practices. This is also a matter of survival for themselves as financing institutions, otherwise they will be also at risk themselves. So this is why adaptation can be attractive for local private finance at least. However, from our experience, developing such specific financial products is not easy for these local financing institutions actually developing what we call climate smart financial products requires more investments from these microfinance institutions than other usual let's say more than usual microfinance products. For instance, to finance adaptation practices. First, it means that these financial organizations have to promote the adoption of adaptation practices and usually it starts with raising awareness among people to make them learn about these adaptation practices. It's also necessary to train people to adopt these adaptation practices, technical support is needed. And this is not the core business of financial organizations of microfinance institutions. One of them with which we work actually do it. So they are involved in awareness raising they are involved in the promotion of adaptation of adaptation practices, but it's not their core business so it means they need to create partnerships with other civil society organizations. Training centers, as local associations, local NGOs, which are more experts in adaptation practices to make sure their clients get the support they need financial services are necessary are useful, either loans or even insurance, but they are not enough actually to facilitate the adoption of adaptation practices. So these partnerships are necessary with other local organizations. And this is where public climate finance may be useful to complement these private local financing mechanisms offered by microfinance institutions. Because indeed, some people have someone has to pay for this technical support provided to facilitate the adoption of these practices. And, and usually as I said, it's civil society organizations, associations. So these organizations need grants, indeed, as it was said just before. So there is a need. One of the enabler let's say could be the partnerships between private and public organizations or between profits for profit and non for profit organizations, and especially what we can call blended finance mechanism right complements private finance with public finance targeting the same kind of population to provide them with the mix of diverse services, financial services but also technical and non financial services. And I would I will end now for now at least saying that this public climate finance is also more necessary. As I said, developing specific financial products for microfinance institutions targeting climate change issues requires more investments for them. So it also requires to train their staff more than for other products. It also requires to raise awareness among their staff to train train them about how to convince people to adopt this adaptation practices. And so it requires more effort. And this is where public climate finance could provide an additional incentive for these local private financial institutions to develop this type of service because indeed one of the problem. One of the problems we see from our experience is that it is very difficult for these microfinance institutions to scale such climate smart financial products. We support them in the development of these products in the delivery of these products but what we see is that usually they have difficulties in scaling them. So this is where they need incentives from elsewhere and I can stop here for now and develop a bit more on this topic a bit later. Thank you. Thank you so much Matilda and that's very intriguing in terms of how the microfinance partners view impacts of climate change and how it's affecting their clients and how this has a ripple effect in terms of less able to produce less able to less likely to sell less likely to pay the loans. And also, what does it mean for the partners from the microfinance in terms of they need to do more, they need to put in more effort in terms of training, raising awareness to ensure that their clients are actually equipped with the necessary information. So that when they're provided with resources they're able to do interventions that will be able to pay back the resources and this is very interesting discussion, especially on the challenges I really like some of the examples that you have shared. And I've also seen a few questions and comments on the charts. Secondly, have a look at that and we will come back to you in terms of responding to the request that we have from from the participants. Our next speaker is Willie Misak, Willie Misak from Vanuatu. And Willie Misak is the founder and executive director of land to serve Vanuatu. He's also secretariat advisor for Vanuatu climate action network. Willie is also a queen young leader from the Vanuatu and Royal Commonwealth Society associate fellow. So, share with us my experience in terms of what are the Vanuatu experiences in accessing climate finance to support adaptation initiatives. What are the experiences from Vanuatu, what are the challenges, what's working, what's not working, what can you say about Vanuatu in terms of accessing climate finance. Willie, over to you. Thank you very much, Malene, for this invitation and also greetings from Vanuatu in the Pacific Ocean. Just to give a little bit of the background of Vanuatu. Vanuatu is a very tiny little country in the Pacific Ocean. In all the past, we bought from the World Risk Report, Vanuatu is always, you can find it in the past World Risk Report, around the first in as one of the very riskiest countries in the world. Because of two things, one that we are, we are located in the chain of fire and then two, we are in the ring, we are in the middle of the belt of cyclones. So, very exposed to different disasters. In terms of access to climate financing, Vanuatu civil society organizations and private organizations, we have a lot of challenge to access those financing, not only from the grassroot level but at the national level as well. For example, the Vanuatu government is not accredited to any of the international funds like the climate funds, adaptation funds. So, what we are doing is that we are working through a great entity like FAO, and we have the Pacific community and all those regional and international organizations that are accredited allow us Vanuatu and civil society organizations to access those different grants for climate financing. And this is a great challenge for small island states like Vanuatu. And I also acknowledge some of the point that my previous colleagues as I mentioned, and one of the things that we see as enablers in accessing climate financing is finding the alternative for a middle organization between a big, a great entity and a grassroot organization like I just mentioned that we're looking at microfinance institutions. And this is one of the things that we in Vanuatu, especially grassroot organizations are getting climate finance through the microfinance institutions. And this is what, for our experience, you find it very useful because it breached the gap between big complex mechanism of understanding how to apply for those and also having that knowledge on what is happening at the grassroot level. And one of the other things that really makes that those climate financing are very hard to reach, especially small island states in the Pacific like Vanuatu is that the knowledge about the reality of what is happening in the ground is very blurred at the regional and international level. So, one of the things that they can pose a question, why should we give this because there are no really good understanding of the reality that is happening in India in the Pacific. And with the Vanuatu Climate Action Network, we came up with one of the strategy and then we find that very meaningful and very effective is to create a very meaningful collaboration with all the institution. So we create the Vanuatu Climate Action Network and the Vanuatu Climate Action Network has the NGO international non-government organization, government institutions, academia, private sector, businesses, and also faith based organization within that network. And these provide us a strength on accessing all different funds for climate finance in the region. And I think this is one of the very unique thing that we see in Vanuatu and also globally, because we have a very collaborative way to work with our government, we even see it within national institutions to make decisions with our government. And this is not common anywhere in the world. And this provide us with this opportunity that we're looking at the accountability of financing between NGOs and government. And even the government to hold NGOs accountability to also provide implementation of the climate finance activities at the local level. And I think, as my two colleagues mentioned, lack of understanding of the different mechanism on accessing climate finance is one of the major thing that we see. And it's not only at the project level, but also at the national level as well. This is where we're looking at capacity building and knowledge about those different funds are becoming another barrier for us. And knowing the different sources of climate finance, it's the other thing that we find it very challenging for us because some of the adaptation, for example, Vanuatu we don't have, we never have access to the adaptation fund, for example. And this is the other thing. And maybe there is other more multiple different fund that out there that we don't even know about it. And I think that this is one of the things that if the project level we have understanding about that we can start pushing up and trying to looking at different ways to have access to it. And I think to do, I will just shorten my, I think most of the thing that my two colleagues share really, but I think that at the heart of the, the, at the heart of the way of accessing climate finance is the true meaningful collaboration between all the organizations within the sectors or within the area where we are working on. And I think this is really create a powerful tool that we can use to have access to climate financing. For the Pacific region as a whole, I think the review of the climate finance policies must be changed, because not on not all the governments in the Pacific have access to those finance, like even some of the AIDS are not directed to all the countries some countries in the Pacific have access to it and some not. And this is one of the things that we see as one of the challenges we look at those policies to make it more accessible to everyone. Thank you. Thank you so much, really, and really thank you for the efforts are joining us this time, we understand and we acknowledge the, that it must be really touch night in Vanuatu but thank you so much for setting time aside for this. I see a set of questions and comments for you in the chat. So, please have a look and we'll come back to you on that. I would like to move to our second last speaker with Julius Goma. Julius Goma is from Malawi. And Julius Goma is the coordinator for civil society network on climate change in Malawi. Julius has been leading the network since 2014. And he leads the network at national level in different platforms and committees. For example, the national technical committee on climate change and disaster risk management in Malawi. He also supports the working group on adaptation in Malawi coaching for development on the national adaptation plan in Malawi, and also the expert working group on red plus in Malawi. Julius has also represented the network at international level by serving as alternate active observer to the green climate fund process. He has been representing the civil society organizations in the global south until 2019 for two years. Julius welcome so much to the session and thank you for setting the time aside to be with us. We would like to hear from you. Julius are sitting at the board of the Green Climate Fund as an alternate observer representing the non-state actors from global south. How do we get climate finance to the local level, particularly for locally led adaptation initiatives. How do we get to ensure that we have climate finance trickling down, getting down not even trickling but getting down to the local level to support adaptation initiatives. Julius are you there? Yeah, yeah, thank you. Thank you Malin and thank you all and thank you for the big question and I hope you can hear me. Yes. Okay, fine. So I think I had two slides. Yeah, Aya is setting that up right now. Yeah, there you go. All right. So for the… Julius, sorry you have five minutes, you really are running out of time. So please try to make it short and we have more time for the discussions. Thank you. No problem. I think I will not take much of your time because I was listening closely to what my colleagues were also presenting. I think they touched on so many issues that I also wanted to point out. My duty here is just to maybe emphasize on one or two points. I had two slides to actually focusing on two issues. The challenges are opportunities, but also talking about what are the real experiences and what really needs to happen on the ground to ensure that the local communities are actually benefiting from the different resources. So I wanted to just emphasize on one or two points here on the challenges. One thing my colleague, the previous speaker, just mentioned about the non-availability of direct access entities for instance in developing countries. This is not only the case for GCF. There are so many other funding mechanisms like the adaptation fund. You also need to have different access modalities and what is really lacking is countries to actually have direct access entities. For us, it means you are actually connecting the local communities to actually to the national institutions. So these national institutions can actually play a very big role in terms of ensuring that the resources that are coming either from GCF or from adaptation fund or anything, any mechanism at international level gets down to the real action on the ground, especially on adaptation and letting intervention. So I think that's one of the key things that is lacking. We also, the issue of stakeholder engagement strategy to facilitate local CSOs and community involvement. I think that's one thing that has also been mentioned here, but I wanted to emphasize because there's a disconnect between what we do at international level, what happens at national level and what really is happening on the ground. So if the disconnect that is there is actually making it very difficult for proposals or for projects to actually respond to the actual needs and priorities of the poor and the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. So that already leaves the implementation of projects or programs or activities at the very terrestrial level and that doesn't really go on the ground. And finally, I think we need to, I think one of the colleagues also mentioned about the inadequate involvement of the local councils. This is a local district council and the structures on the ground. We might have so many of these international NGOs, national NGOs, which are actually when they come on the ground, they will create parallel structures, trying to create their own structures of implementation, and devolution of some of the activities. But that really leaves us on the peripherals, the local communities in terms of them implementing their own activities that they would want, that might really support their initiative. So final on the next slide. Next slide please. Okay, so I had six points there, which I'll just quickly mention, and how do we facilitate committees access to funds, especially for local, local aid adaptation. So one of the things is about the building capacities of national and even local actors. So the emphasis here should be the local community structures. Let's ensure that we, the countries, actually, those that, for example, my country doesn't really have a complete devolution plan for in the different districts so we need to complete that we need to make make sure that we formalize the local structures because we need to make sure that these structures are the ones that are actually being supported to so that they can be able to implement, even concept, conceptualize but also implement some of the projects. We need to nature partnerships. There are so many CSOs on that national level. There are so many local CSOs at, at some national level that would actually, actually lacking any kind of linkage that is there between the funders and so on. So we need to make sure that these local community structures are also, you know, linked up with some of the funders and make sure that these are able to actually implement together with the other organizations, whether governments, some of the interventions at local levels of adaptation. The third one is simplifying accreditation processes. I think someone do it on this. There's so many issues I talked about direct access entities not available, for example, in most of the, of the countries but we need to actually simplify more of these processes so that we can reach out to those communities on the ground in terms of implementation of some of the projects. We need special finance, finance windows for different groups. We know, for example, GCF can be very competitive but I think it doesn't do any harm if we want to, to actually advocate for special windows. Jeff has done that. It has some, you know, small grants which can actually go to the local communities for them to implement. I think we can do so with the GCF adaptation fund and others. There is a robust stakeholder engagement strategy by the UNFCC focal points. Sometimes these focal points, whether NDA in the case of GCF, they would always want to take things on their own and then in their own hands without necessarily opening up to other stakeholders. And finally, we also talking about robust engagement of local CSOs and local councils. We, when we're doing the, for example, the process of developing the NDC for Malawi, we realize that the first version of the NDC, I think the local councils were, most of the local councils were left out. And then during implementation, they could not even support the national government. So that already was a disconnect and we need to actually ensure that we have an engagement plan that incorporates the CSOs and even local councils for us to actually implement and make sure this financing actually going to the ground. And finally, sustainable micro grants. I think somebody mentioned about this. I also, I think this is also connected to the special financing windows I was talking about. So we need to actually make sure that we put this in place so that those that have, we are calling them with little capacity can also be able to benefit some larger grants so that they can be implementing small activities in terms of local adaptation. Thank you, Malin. Thank you so much, Julius, for that interesting presentation, especially in partnerships is really coming out as a key point here on how to enhance local aid adaptation. So our next speaker is Eva. So we from the four panelists, you've heard about the different challenges. Today's a diplomat and a foreign policy professional with experience in a broad range of topics, including international justice, human rights, migration affairs and climate change. Eva is currently deputy head of the climate team at the Minister of Foreign Affairs and deputy head of the Netherlands delegation to the UNFT policy negotiations. In the negotiation, Eva has a special focus on climate finance. And Eva will also be joined by a colleague who will also add up to more information on some of the interesting discussion that we would hear from Eva. And Eva would like to hear from you from experience leading the Netherlands delegation to the UNFT policy negotiations, but also your expertise on climate finance at the negotiation level. How does Netherlands allocate climate budgets for the countries impacted by climate change. And in your opinion, Eva, what are some of the main areas global North countries need to think differently to reaching out to communities at risk. In terms of financing local aid adaptation initiatives and ensuring that we have committed at the center so how does your government and how could other global governments allocate climate budgets for the countries impacted by climate change. Eva, over to you. Thank you and thank you very much for this introduction and it was very interesting to listen to the previous presenters. Like you said, my focus mostly in my work is on the UNFT policy negotiation process and on the sort of international climate finance discussions. So I think from that perspective, I could say a few words and then give the floor to my colleague Peter Cooper who is here, who is very knowledgeable on the more on locally led adaptation and initiatives that we take as the Netherlands. So and also because I think we're running out of time, I will be sure just discussing here a lot about adaptation finance and access to adaptation finance. I think one of the other discussions that is held within UNFT policy is more about the quantity of finance. And as you probably all know in the negotiations in Glasgow last year, we agreed that we would collectively double our adaptation finance from 2019 to 2025. So I think looking ahead of COP 27, this doubling commitment that we made will be one of them, one of the topics that will be central stage on on the agenda. And what I would also like to mention here is related to the interventions that were made that within UNFT process, there are quite a few initiatives that focus on improving the access to adaptation finance or climate finance in general. And I would just like to mention them here briefly because it may be interesting for those in the call to see in what form they can link to these initiatives. And one of them is the task force on access to climate finance. The task force links by UK COP 26 presidency and really is trying to see through dedicated country partnerships, how the international community can sort of more coherently and effectively support developing countries in their effort to adapt to climate change. So that's one and another one that you perhaps known about is the initiative of the UN nation secretary general adaptation acceleration program. Sorry, the adaptation pipeline accelerator. Sorry. That's also initiatives that really aims to improve collaboration for adaptation finance and develop adaptation pipelines in individual countries. Perhaps another initiatives and I think that's also where the Netherlands is very active on is we've launched. It's called champions group on adaptation finance. That's a group of 14, 14, 12 countries and to European Commission and African Bank. And what we also try to do within the UNFG UNFCC process is to really well champion adaptation finance both the to increase the quantity of finance. So related to doubling the quality and also the aspects of access to climate finance. So that's to say that how adaptation finance is also discussed within the international framework and then maybe one word on on what the Netherlands is doing. What we always want to do on adaptation finance is to also lead by example in a way and that means that we are scaling up our finance for adaptation quite significantly over the next couple of years. What we also do is that almost all of our public climate finance is in the form of grants. And over half of our climate finance total is spent on adaptation. And I think with that we also engage in discuss discussions with other donor countries to see how they can also gradually. Yeah, perhaps see if they can spend a greater percentage in the form of grants and spend more of climate finance on adaptation in general. Well, I think I can say a lot more on the specific specific activities that we do. But I think for now I leave it here and give it to my colleague Peter, who's also on the call. Thank you. Thank you ever sharing your experiences from the UNFCCC point and yeah, we saw from the last couple that the commitment to double adaptation finance for the next five years. Because I think when you're doing the round of answers would like to hear from you, where is the progress in terms of this. If you have any information on apart from Netherlands on how other countries are doing on that. And Peter, in two minutes, could you please show us the government of Netherlands initiatives towards financing locally led adaptation initiatives. Thank you. In two minutes is definitely too short for that but what what I can say to answer your question and hello everyone by the way great great to see familiar faces and new ones here to to answer the question in terms of what what is needed from the global the South, even though I don't like that divide too much to be honest but I think, you know, from from development partners perspective I think I think we can do more to make sure that the local level is reached we know that the financing isn't isn't coming to that level that oftentimes climate finances is left so I think you know as as the Netherlands we do a lot of multilateral finance but we particularly also try to look at national sub national levels and so we have programs at that level to to to make sure that we we reach the the communities and the people that are on the frontline and that we always speak about and that are never actually mentioned so there's a couple of things we do we do that. We're looking at our flexibility so how can we be more flexible, because locally led is, you know, if you will bottom up even though that might not be the right wording as well but making sure that the communities that we're trying to reach are actually engaged in decision making as well. That requires flexibility because we don't know, you know, on the offset where the funding is needed what the demands are but we want it to be demand driven so we are looking at opportunities and ways to collaborate with those with those specific needs. We're looking obviously at financing mechanisms because it I mean it sounds really great nobody is against this, but there's all sorts of bureaucratic processes when you work for large organizations to make sure that you have the instruments and procedures in place that you can actually reach the level that that is needed. And so I think that's that's super important and we work with a wide area of partners and we have that conversation and quite frankly, we don't pride ourselves as as the locally led adaptation champion. But we do find it important and as I have mentioned we try to lead by example so what we do do is take the serious we've endorsed the principles of the locally led adaptation principles last year, and we're trying to put them in place and quite frankly it's a learning process and and we're keen to learn how others are doing that and and what struggles there are, but we're serious about it and so we're also trying to advocate for that local level so for instance that couple so you know amplifying the voices of local communities and not just us speaking but also having them speak. So I think those are just a couple of examples. I think in terms of what we're doing and perhaps how we can collectively move this agenda forward. Thank you so much for keeping to the two minutes, Peter and sharing some of the initiatives that the government of Netherlands is doing in terms of ensuring that these flexible funding, because it needs to target the needs of the people where the money is is in terms of addressing the needs of climate change. And now we have, I think about less than 15 minutes, I would like to request the panelists, I am sure you've all seen all set of questions that have been directed to you. I would like to request to each of the six panels here to take a case term in it to really try and summarize some of the responses to the questions that we have on the charts, and while doing that, also share with us some of the practical examples on how gender would be. I think Marlene got disconnected for now I will try to pin all the speakers and for all questions please direct them to the chat or you can also raise your virtual hand. Okay. Should I go ahead. Okay, thank you so let me be very brief so I think the experiences of Nepal is really valuable and we can use the learning hops regional sharing, including knowledge products in terms of making sure that we have you know we scale up this finance modality the experience of Nepal to other countries. So if you look into the funding you know dynamics larger you know of these you know financial resources available for locally led adaptation it comes from the international bilateral donors and less than 10% is you know directly funded by the government of Nepal. So still the dependencies on the international financing to support locally led adaptation and slowly the local governments are you know allocating budget to support the local climate action so that is happening. And it is quite encouraging to see the local governments taking that lead. There are some, you know, contestation in terms of prioritization, often the local leaders who are elected. They have you know priority to do, look into immediate actions that will benefit their boat bank boat boaters, but one way to influence them that we have tried in Nepal is to really influence them and integrate in their election manifesto in their parties manifesto so that the political leaders are means are able to mainstream climate environment issues within their political you know priorities that is happening slowly. It's not that encouraging but the but we have been trying to intervene in that way. So there are so many you know different ways through which the learning piloting the experience of local communities, the value of local knowledge, yet the need for, you know, getting support in terms of technology transfer the local communities very important to deal with this, you know, very certain and very complex climate induce ricks, which are beyond, you know, the capacity of local communities local government, and even national government to respond to some context. So I think those are some of the questions that has been raised I'll stop there because of the time. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Please continue. Yeah, let's proceed to the next ticket please. Yeah, thank you. So if I may, I will take the question about how gender could be integrated in financially locally led actions for transformative results as I got some very specific questions in the chat and not public questions. So I will take the one agenda. So very quickly from our perspective. Actually, I think it has been said already but everything starts with needs identification and problems identification. So we work with local financial institutions, which develop specific products for for specific vulnerable groups. And these financing institution support the economic activities managed by these groups. And we know that men and women are not involved in the same kind of economic activities, depending on the context so we had a very, very quick example with insurance We supported an insurance broker which offered an insurance product for Mali for my producers in Mali. And they realized after a while that mostly men were involved in such production. And they wanted to target women so finally they developed another specific product for another crop where women were more involved. So actually, if they had started with identifying where women are involved in terms of economic activities. In terms of economic activities, what types of specific risks they are facing. They could have developed a specific financial products for women from the very beginning. So we think that it's very important to include gender perspective from the needs identification and into the identification of adaptation solutions as well. And then to support specific solutions dedicated to specific risks faced by women. And for time reasons, I will also stop here but I'm happy to pursue the conversation later. Thank you Eva, Julius. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, thank you. So I was going through the chat. And what I noted was that I think there were some agreements to some of the points, especially on the issue of the special window for that can be often to support local CSOs and other local stakeholders directly. I think there was some debate about whether the small grants program is really a good program that can support local aid adaptation that maybe we can learn from that. We are looking at the, here we are looking at local aid adaptation interventions at local, in different, you know, districts and sub national governments. So it's the, what has been coming out very clearly has been the lack of capacities, for example, for local stakeholders to implement, to conceptualize, but also implement different projects and programs from financing that is coming from international sources and that's already is something that needs to be addressed. First of all, before we even go deep into implementation of some of the bigger programs with the local stakeholders. So they like the Jeff small grants program that has been implementing it so far in different countries. I think as multiple kind of lessons, some, some actually benefited as local stakeholders in terms of building their capacitors they are also implementing some of these programs. So why not take the, the possible lessons out of that, improve on that program and then see if it can also work for, for some of other, you know, funding mechanisms like the GCF, so that at least we are now dealing with the local capacities first and then see if we going in the long term we can improve the program to address seven challenges. Otherwise, those are some of the things that I wanted to, to also comment on thank you. Thank you so much, Julius. Really, your reflections on the questions and how over what to actually improve its experience only ensuring that gender is integrated in climate finance to support transformative action. Yeah, thank you very much. I think one of our colleague already mentioned about it. One of the truth is that when we're looking at how women are engaging in all the different projects. And this is also what we see at the grassroot level as well that are more sustainable projects and a more effective projects are always led by women at a local level. And this is one of the things that is a truth that I see across one more time even within the Pacific region on on different projects that are sustained over time. Maybe women are in the Pacific. According to the culture. They are the one that's spending more time see in at home and looking after kids and so on. And I think from that perspective, really give them this opportunity to, to be sort of a very manageable people at the very classroom to make things more sustainable and more much stronger. And I think when we're looking at developing all those finance and one of the things that I see is the lack is that how we send that we, we send it. There's a lot of finance around women where there are mainly people that are really sustained projects for a long term. And this is one of the things that we're, personally, I think that when we when we're looking on that will we have to have that lens of having women engaging in different level of climate finance and access to those kind of financing. This is one of the things that I see from from that perspective and also making sure that integrating that in all the different planning where they come from whether it's mitigation adaptation, climate finance, planning's integrating that within that it will be really help and really looking at the long term sustainability of all the different actions on adaptations at a very local level. Thank you. Thank you so much Willie for that. And please, I want to allocate Eva and Peter one minute each. Please share with us some of the feedback that you've seen on the chat on how developed countries would actually improve financing locally led initiatives at the local level. And ensuring that even the, the, the climate finance, especially I would give an example of let's say green climate fund that ensures that the principles for locally led adaptation are enshrined in this project. In one of the projects that our case running across the 10 countries we are seeing that the principles are not well integrated in the, for example, some of the finance mechanism projects. But before we get to that, which is related to key messages to COP 27. Please share with us how do we ensure that gender is taken care of from the global not a development perspective, but also how do we ensure that we don't leave out anyone at the local level in this year. Yeah, thanks. A lot of question I think much too, too much for one minute. Just one point on the question that you also asked on on on the progress towards the doubling I think you asked before how we're going to showcase or measure progress on the doubling I think for this COP it's the first COP after COP 26 that we announced, or that we committed to the doubling that we will try to show as I think all the international communities how we in general are going to increase our finance for adaptation. As developed countries we will do that amongst others to an update of the progress report on the climate finance delivery plan and I think on the margins of the COP 27 we will discuss with amongst ourselves and with with developing country parties on how we could best make progress on this doubling commitment because it will be a challenge and everybody is aware of that also considering the lessons learned from from reaching the 100 billion goal of climate finance in general. One point on gender is that we try in, in, at least in the climate finance negotiations to bring in the gender aspects and in all of our negotiations, it was, and also refer back to the gender action plan that we adopted at COP 25. So, yeah, from a negotiation perspective, we will try what we can to bring in the gender lens to all the discussions we have. I'm very keen to lead to read the answers to the your last questions on the mentor meter on what we can take forward to COP 27 and and I'll see what I am my capacity as climate finance negotiator and as part of the team can do to bring these messages forward. Perhaps Peter on on local adaptation. Yeah, maybe maybe one minute. Sure, one minute. No, maybe, maybe just slightly one thing to add and I mentioned it last time I think and I saw a lot of the discussions in terms of accreditation to the GCF and organizations like that. It's it's a super, you know, sticky process, it's very slow so I would think, you know, the best way to move this agenda forward or the best way one way to move this agenda forward would be to do as as again as developing development partners to work both at the multilateral level. So through the bigger funds, because that's how we channel large sums of money, but at the same time working directly also with, you know, communities and groups at the local level, whether this is I mean, and again local, we haven't defined we didn't have a discussion on what actually is locally led and what is local and etc. But I think finding opportunities to work directly more at the level that is is underrepresented here and I think forever for every partner that's that that are different actors, they're different opportunities. But as the Netherlands we try to find that entry point whether it's Bayra in Mozambique at the city level, or whether it's mole holder farmers or whether there are other local stakeholders where we directly through our programming try to try to reach them. Thank you. Thank you so much, Peter. Thank you so much all our super panelists. I think next time we'll have more time allocated to issues to do especially with climate finance, because it's at the heart of everyone. But before we close, I would like to hear your key messages to COP 27 on financing locally led adaptation initiatives. We know COP 27 one of the key issues would be to look into the global golden adaptation progress and how is that impact. And therefore what are the key messages to COP 27 for financing locally led adaptation initiative. Your thoughts here would be very much appreciated. I will quickly read through the comments. And afterwards, I will hand over to Palash to close the session also in one minute, just to keep time for the other sessions so fast. You can see some comments coming in here like there's need for inclusive finance and ever since we hear the lead climate negotiator for Netherlands and hoping that you will be able to get this message to the negotiation room and also represent all of us who are in this session today. We need a dedicated flexible and sustained financing for locally led adaptation, local adaptive solutions and impact measurements is very key. Where the key research gaps and how can funders design funding calls to address this particularly to ensure empowerment of local actors. We also have another additional message here finance institutions, particularly the adaptation fund and the green climate funds should be exploring how they can be more accessible to local institution in delivering adaptation and we've seen there's been a lot of barriers, especially for local organizations to access the GCF resources but also the AF. More comments are coming in, but in the interest of time I would like to welcome Palash to close our session and I would like to say thank you so much for the great comments and feedback from the participants and the panelists. It was my pleasure of facilitating this session and over to you Palash. Thank you Merlin. We are really at the end of the session. So time to say thank you. Firstly, I would like to start by thanking you all the speakers for their excellent thought provoking talks. The session moderator for organizing and animating the session and keeping things under control and reasonably on time. I would like to note my sincere gratitude to IED colleagues for excellent guidance and support. Most importantly, I would like to thank you all the participants without your input ideas and discussions. These sessions would not have been the success as it has. I would like to thank CISONEC and ADL Luxembourg for joining here as co-host for the session. It's been a pleasure being with all of you today. I wish you all the best. With this we conclude here. Thank you so much. Thank you all. Bye bye. Thank you. Bye bye. Thank you. Goodbye. Thanks everyone. Bye.