Remarks at the high-level dialogue with friends of Global Centre on Adaptation

Excellencies and distinguished guests.

The urgency of today’s Dialogue is clear.

The IPCC’s 6th assessment report makes plain the scale of climate adaptation challenges, with the communities that are hardest hit being those least equipped to cope.

We need substantially higher levels of investment in climate adaptation. The cost of adaptation is expected to reach $500 billion per year by 2050.

Yet globally, only one fifth of climate finance funds are going to adaptation and resilience, leaving millions to face the effects of climate change alone.

This has to change.

GCF was established to promote a paradigm shift in our fight against climate change.

We are committed to allocating half of our climate funding to adaptation.

And close to 70% of our adaptation funding goes to the Least Developed Countries, Small Island Developing States and African states – those who are most in need.

To foster a paradigm shift toward low emission climate resilient development, we target four key drivers of change which are central to today’s Dialogue.

We support transformational planning and programming. For example, GCF is helping countries to design and integrate climate resilient COVID19 recovery measures into their NDCs, as well as to create National Adaptation Plans that provide a long-term, country- driven approach to adapting to climate change.

We catalyse innovation, for instance we are partnering with Acumen, an impact investor, to provide early-stage and growth finance to climate innovators developing new solutions for climate resilient agriculture in Africa.

We de-risk market creating investment to establish a commercial track record for new climate solutions at scale and crowd-in private finance for adaptation. We are implementing projects like the private equity fund managed by Pegasus to support investment in both adaptation and mitigation solutions at the sub-national level.

And finally, we are helping national financial institutions and firms access domestic and international markets to finance the widespread adoption of commercially proven climate solutions. For example, we support the Government of Jamaica in the development of Caribbean green bond listing to finance new climate solutions.

Ladies and Gentlemen.

The extreme weather events of the last months have shown once again that we cannot wait to adapt to climate change. The Glasgow COP represents an opportunity to accelerate action on adaptation. We must take it.

Thank you.