2024: A year in review

Sowing seeds of change

In the last year, GCF initiated a series of changes to increase efficiency and maximise impact. We look back at 2024 to highlight some of the progress we have made in our commitment to supporting developing countries as they grapple with the climate crisis.

We’ve refined our Concept Note process to be more responsive to developing countries and their climate priorities.

We're tweaking our processes to make it faster and easier for developing countries to get the funding they need for their climate action priorities. A key way of doing this is streamlining our concept note documentation.

We supported the world’s first debt-for-climate conversion transaction.

We invested USD 70 million to finance an infrastructure project for climate adaptation impact. Approved last year, this world-first approach will reshape Barbados’s economy while advancing the nation’s climate action agenda. Converting high-interest debt into lower-interest financing will unlock funds to modernise sewage wastewater treatment, achieving ambitious adaptation goals while safeguarding fiscal stability.

Our new and improved Readiness Programme aims to better support developing countries.

Managing the world’s largest climate action capacity-building programme has uncovered valuable insights that have led us to expand grant cycles from one year to four. This extended cycle will help developing nations to reduce transaction costs, streamline access to Readiness support and enable long-term planning to address their capacity gaps more effectively.

We’re extending our support to the hardest-to-reach and underserved communities.

Conflict-affected countries typically receive a fraction of the climate funding compared to non-conflict-affected countries. In the past year, we’ve been working hard to change this with a renewed focus on vulnerable communities and underserved countries. For example, we invested in our first single-country projects in Iraq and Somalia to address climate vulnerabilities and ensure growth and stability.

We boosted forest finance with our new REDD+ policy.

The protection and restoration of forests is the world’s most effective and low-cost solution to fighting the climate crisis. Trees act as a carbon sink, absorbing carbon dioxide from the air. That’s why we believe it’s important to put in place incentives for developing countries to protect forests while supporting economies to transition to low carbon, climate-resilient pathways. Explore our new REDD+ policy.

We committed USD 2.5 billion to 44 new climate action projects in 2024.

Through the tireless efforts of our Accredited Entity and National Designated Authority partners, 44 new projects were approved by the GCF Board last year, committing USD 2.5 billion in resources. These include GCF’s first single-country projects in Albania, Angola, Azerbaijan, Iraq, and Somalia; funding proposals submitted by AEs for the first time; and the first project put forward under the Project-Specific Assessment Approach (PSAA).