 Welcome to our Marketplace Store at CBA 15, Unlocking Climate Finance for Locally-Led Action in the Caribbean. Thank you for joining us. My name is Aninkar Granderson, and I'm Senior Technical Officer and Resilient Lead with the Caribbean Natural Resources Institute, or Canary for short. I would like to take a few minutes to present findings from a project funded by the Green Climate Fund on enhancing Caribbean civil society's readiness and access to climate finance, which is being implemented by Canary and national authorities from Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, Grenada, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia and Suriname. The technical support from the International Institute for Sustainable Development and Climate Analytics. So, why unlock climate finance for civil society organizations, or CSOs? While CSOs, including national, NGOs and community-based organizations, play a unique and important role in locally-led climate actions as part of a whole-of-society approach. They help increase resilience through projects advocacy and awareness-raising efforts, connect communities and governments, amplify and advocate for community voices, ground-truth local climate change realities, and extend government capacities to implement local projects. So, our assessment, looking at the states of CSOs in the Caribbean community, or CARICOM region, and their access to and delivery of climate finance, involved desk-based research, interviews with key CSOs, government agencies and funders across the region, development of a database of CSO-led climate change projects and key stakeholders, and validation of findings and recommendations at a recent regional dialogue in March 2021. Based on our scoping, we identified 40 climate change-focused projects led or co-led by Caribbean CSOs since 2017, including 20 adaptation and 20 mitigation projects and three that were cross-cutting. This is by no means an exhaustive list, as we only focus for this graphic on recent projects with grand funding of U.S. $50,000 above. As you can see, the Jeff Smovan program was one of the main funding sources and broadly seen as an effective mechanism for providing smaller amounts of funding that suit the needs of many smaller CSOs at the community level. This was seen as a model worth replicating by the other climate funds, which have recently begun piloting enhanced direct access involving small grants to CSOs and other actors. So what is specifically stopping CSOs in the Caribbean from accessing more climate finance? Through our assessment, a number of key barriers emerge, including their small size and limited geographic focus. This also typically means limited staff of less than 10, and there is often high staff turnover. In working on smaller local projects, CSOs on average operating with annual budgets of U.S. $250,000 that are much smaller than the minimum level of funding offered up by international climate funds like the Green Climate Fund and the Adaptation Fund. Where grants for full projects start as high as U.S. $10 million. There are also capacity constraints in terms of financial management, reporting, auditing, which are key requirements for funders. There's limited awareness and understanding of climate finance options, limited proposal development capacity and experience, and on top of this, there are onerous application processes for many of the international climate funds, which can be a key barrier. Further, government engagement with CSOs on climate action is often ad hoc based on personal connections rather than established structures. So how can we improve Caribbean CSOs' access to and delivery of climate finance to scale up the impact based on our assessment? Well, we can ensure CSOs are engaged in a full project cycle from project design to implementation and monitoring and evaluation. This will allow government and the implementing partners to tap into greater expertise and local knowledge, expand capacities to implement work on the ground, and broaden networks with communications and knowledge sharing. We also need to improve readiness and capacity building support for CSOs to strengthen their human resources, policies, and systems to deliver climate finance, including financial management and procurement that are critical for accessing further financing. We need to expand small-gram mechanisms, which is specifically designed to cater to the needs of CSOs operating at the local level to help ensure that funding is available for delivering meaningful climate action, building on the successes and lessons from the Jeff Small-gram program, and enhance the role of local intermediaries, including regional and national CSOs in these mechanisms to better channel finance to the local level for community-based organizations and other actors. We also need to facilitate integration of citizen science and local indigenous knowledge to help improve access to information on local climate change impacts and viable solutions to strengthen the climate rationale of projects and inform actions. We need to better support CSOs to play a key role in this process. It's also clear from the assessment that all partners would benefit from strong coordination mechanisms between CSOs, government agencies, and funders at the national and regional levels. Through this, we can ensure civil society has the funds and other resources it needs and can effectively tackle the climate crisis and build local resilience alongside CSOs.