BURLINGTON, Vt. — The Global Environment Facility was born out of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and tasked with mobilizing financial resources to help countries achieve their environmental conservation goals.
Almost 30 years later, faced with dire climate change projections and a combined health and economic crisis that will force a long and complex recovery, it is time to revisit that original partnership and find new ways to unlock transformational change, according to Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, who will take over as the institution’s CEO and chairperson in September.
“Nature provides us with roughly 40% of the global GDP [gross domestic product], and we are investing about .006% of global GDP in nature conservation,” Rodríguez, who served three terms as Costa Rica’s minister of environment and energy, told Devex.