How climate finance is coming out of its silo

Climate finance should be integrated into projects across the development sector, rather than existing in a silo, speakers at a Devex event held on the sidelines of the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference said last week. The audience at Devex @ COP 27 heard that increasingly, some of the largest donors are having success integrating climate into all of their funding. But there is still more work to be done to make sure that climate is considered often enough and early enough. “We're working with a lot of existing projects that weren't designed with climate in mind to determine how to drive climate more deeply in that project.” --— Eric Reading, chief climate officer, Abt Associates Speaking during a session on integrating climate solutions across silos, Eric Reading, chief climate officer at Abt Associates, said that he had seen an explosion of interest among clients such as the United States and Australian governments, including much more interest in integrating climate across the whole portfolio. He singled out the U.S. Agency for International Development as having made remarkable progress since implementing a new strategy after the last climate change conference of the parties. He said USAID had successfully made a rapid transition toward more and deeper climate funding using existing resources, without any new allocation from the U.S. Congress. Reading said that in some cases, existing projects saw “retrofitting” to introduce a climate element. But in others, projects in sectors of development were being designed with much greater awareness of the need to consider climate impacts. “We're working with a lot of existing projects that weren't designed with climate in mind to determine how to drive climate more deeply in that project,” he said. “In some cases, that's demanded by the client. In other places, we're seeing the opportunities and we're saying, you know, here's a way that we can take this agriculture project, and really focus on climate-smart agriculture instead of just improving farmer incomes. In other places, the programs are explicitly designed to cut across sectors.” He said it was necessary to work not just with funders but with implementers around the world to help them apply a climate lens to all projects. “As we work with our local partners around the world, they're often very specialized in the … area that they're focused on,” he said. “They're not necessarily widening the aperture to look at how agriculture fits into environment or how health care fits into environment. In many places, it's a new conversation at that ground implementation level; climate just hasn't been a factor that you're thinking about.” Jennifer Sara, global director for the Climate Change Global Practice at the World Bank, said that more work was needed to break down the silos, involve all decision makers, and bring climate into every conversation. “The challenge is really mainstreaming it,” she said. “It's a change of mindset. It's a change of the way you start looking at any dialogue, any operation. It's not just a small team of people on the site. It's every single person.”