Countries bearing the brunt of the climate crisis are increasingly choosing to respond at the local level, using the Local Climate Adaptive Living Facility. As a hunger crisis escalates in Eastern Africa, the number of countries designing or implementing their adaptation plans with LoCAL has risen to 34, of which 24 are in Africa. With the continent preparing to host COP27, the largest international climate conference on the global calendar, the call for innovative funding mechanisms to pay for unavoidable and essential adaptation is set to take centre stage.

Photo: Benin was the first country in Africa to deploy LoCAL ©UNCDF-LoCAL Sarah Harris

African nations Madagascar and South Sudan are the latest countries to sign up to the LoCAL Facility, which was designed and is hosted by the UN Capital Development Fund. They will now begin designing locally led adaptation activities that build resilience to the impacts of climate change at the community level.

“We look forward to working with Madagascar and South Sudan to help them deliver on their national adaptation priorities,” said the LoCAL Global Facility Manager, UNCDF, Sophie De Coninck, “The LoCAL Facility is delivering results for countries across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Pacific and this is driving uptake of the mechanism at a time when demand for climate finance for adaptation falls well below that needed by the developing and least developed countries.”

The African continent is hosting this year’s Conference of the Parties, or COP, amid an escalating hunger crisis in the East and Horn of Africa caused by failed harvests, livestock deaths and water shortages. African, developing and Least Developed Countries need climate finance delivery solutions that meet their national adaptation plan targets and prevent advances made on delivery of the Sustainable Development Goals from being eroded.

To date the LoCAL Facility has mobilised some US $125 million for adaptation, benefitting over 12 million people by working with over 300 local government authorities around the world. LoCAL channels climate finance to local government authorities, working with them to become change agents and enablers of impactful adaptation that meets local needs. LoCAL is owned by countries implementing the mechanism through the LoCAL Board, which also provides opportunities for South-South cooperation and joint action on shared priorities.

“There are lots of countries that want to partner with the LoCAL Facility,” said Appolinaire Gnanvi, Director General of the National Fund for Environment and Climate (FNEC) in Benin, which was the first country to implement LoCAL in Africa and today has, with LoCAL support, accreditation from the Green Climate Fund and is securing resources to roll-out LoCAL across the country. “It’s important that we maintain our course for national roll-out of LoCAL across the 77 communes of the country; the problem Benin has is at the commune level and it’s a problem of adaptation.”

Photo: In Ghana, GrEEN uses Cash for Work to implement a range of adaptation actions using the LoCAL mechanism ©UNCDF-LoCAL Wewe 2021.

A number of developing and least developed countries, facing a growing bill for adapting to the impacts of climate change, are looking to the Paris Agreement to unlock increased capital for adaptation. Following the 2021 LoCAL Board, 17 LoCAL ministers signed a declaration calling for the LoCAL Facility to be recognised as an existing Non-Market Approach under Article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement. The Gambia, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Cambodia and the Least Developed Countries Group are among the Parties attending COP27 that have made submissions to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) calling for NMA recognition for LoCAL; with references also made by Kenya and the Africa Group of Nations.

Previous COPs have seen repeated commitments of increased finance for adaptation, notably a promise of US$ 100 bn a year for adaptation and mitigation in less wealthy nations by 2020. Two years after that deadline elapsed, developing nations are still waiting. All eyes are now on the Egyptian coastal town of Sharm El Sheikh to see if the Africa COP can deliver.

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