This toolkit helps governments and project developers understand how to fulfil the Green Climate Fund’s requirements when developing a fully-fledged funding proposal.

Responding to climate change challenges requires collective action from all countries, governments, cities, communities, businesses and private citizens. With US$10.3 billion currently pledged, the Green Climate Fund (GCF) is the world’s largest fund dedicated to the fight against climate change. Designed to be the main financial instrument to mobilise US$100 billion per year by 2020 from both public and private sources, the GCF is the centrepiece to address the pressing mitigation and adaptation needs of developing countries.

The GCF aims to support developing countries in achieving a paradigm shift to low-emission and climate-resilient pathways. This is achieved by funding innovative and transformative low- emission (mitigation) and climate-resilient (adaptation) projects and programmes developed by the public and private sectors to contribute to the implementation of national climate change priorities in developing countries.

While it is relatively easy to tell what a mitigation project or programme is (i.e. its contribution to the reduction of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and/or whether it increases the capacity of an ecosystem to absorb them), the blurred line between a general development project and an adaptation project has been a contentious issue in the international climate finance debate, including at GCF Board meetings. The relevant question is not whether a project is (also) a development project, but whether the project contributes to adaptation (i.e. what the adaptation/additionality argument is). Cross- cutting projects that deliver co-benefits in terms of both mitigation and adaptation are also eligible for funding.

This manual, from CDKN and Acclimatise sets out a step-by-step guide on how to prepare a project proposal for the GCF.

Download it here: Toolkit to develop a project proposal for the Green Climate Fund.
Image credit: Balaram Mahalder