Cabo Verde’s growing vulnerability towards environmental instabilities as well as its high level of poverty and dependence on fossil fuels present significant challenges within the country. The Government of Cabo Verde has made solid commitments to confronting the challenges of climate change, by proposing mitigation and adaptation measures to successfully achieve targets made in its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC). Cabo Verde’s Strategic Plan for Sustainable Development 2017-2021 (PEDS), identifies key sectors with great potential of improvement, such as the energy, water and food sector, and their cross-sectoral challenges and opportunities. At the national level, Cabo Verde has developed a Grand Strategic Plan Options for Sustainable Tourism Development for 2018-2030 (GOPEDS-Tourism 2018-2030), identifying sectors that are strongly interlinked with the tourism and hotel industry, such as the energy, water and food sector, and their cross-sectoral challenges and opportunities. Most of the tourist resorts are mainly located along the coastal areas of the archipelago and are highly vulnerable to climate changes. At the same time, the sector has high potential to increase its sustainability and even more so after the exposure to the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences. Whereas tourism contributes to only 10% of the GHG emissions of Cape Verde directly, the sector is heavily reliant on other sectors and supply chains that are major drivers of GHG emissions such as water desalination, electricity, food production, waste management, etc. Hence, as part of efforts to successfully address the existing national commitments and progress with the fulfillment of Cabo Verde’s NDC targets, the country’s National Designated Authority (NDA) and the Ministry of Tourism and Transport requested the support for a GCF Country Programme development and a programmatic sustainable tourism planning.

The proposed readiness programme seeks to identify climate change priorities, including a pipeline of projects that the country seeks to develop with GCF. It will furthermore be addressing cross-sectoral challenges and aiming at the identification of opportunities within the tourism sector to foster sustainable decision making. As a result, this should unlock climate finance flows towards inter alia circular and sustainable tourism interventions.