Kenya Launches Green Climate Fund Readiness Program

Climate change is already making a significant dent in Kenya, severely impacting water and food security. Lake Turkana, for example is experiencing cyclical drought exacerbated by climate change, decreasing not only supply of fish but also food availability for livestock and drinking water from seasonal rivers. Coastal cities like Mombasa are exposed to extreme weather events like floods and are threatened by sea-level rise which may turn large areas into uninhabitable and infertile land. These events are putting human, animal and fauna populations at great risk. At the national level, climate change continues to take a toll on economic growth and attainment of sustainable development goals.

While determining Kenya’s contributions to the global agreement on climate change signed in Paris in December 2015, it was estimated that over USD 40 billion would be required for adaptation and mitigation across sectors up to 2030. Domestic and international finance needs to be materialized quickly in order to fully achieve Kenya’s targets. A key player in facilitating international finance for this will be the Green Climate Fund (GCF) – a multilateral fund established under the UNFCCC which aims to provide $2.5 billion by the end of this year and US$6 billion by mid-2017 to countries to tackle climate change.

In order to prepare national and local systems to access and manage additional climate finance, in particular from the GCF, the Government of Kenya, led by the National Treasury as the Fund’s National Designated Authority has strategically requested the coordinated support from different international delivery partners, including the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Environment Programme(UNEP), the World Resource Institute (WRI), the Government of Germany (GIZ and BMUB) and the Green Climate Fund Secretariat.

http://reliefweb.int/report/kenya/kenya-launches-green-climate-fund-readiness-program

Neil Palmer/CIAT

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