LEVERAGING MULTILATERAL CLIMATE FUNDS TO TACKLE INEQUALITY AND THE CLIMATE CRISIS
Multilateral Climate Funds were established to operationalize the commitments of the Paris Agreement. However, these funds operate in a context of multidimensional, multiscale inequalities: economic, gender-based, spatial, racial, and intergenerational. Due to a siloed design of funding and implementation, the interaction between climate and environmental investments and inequality dynamics are often overlooked. As a result, there is a risk that opportunities to align climate, environmental and inequality goals will be missed. Indeed, there is also the danger that climate investments may even reinforce or exacerbate existing inequalities, by increasing unequal access to resources, deepening exclusion from benefits, or raising exposure to risk, harms and externalized costs.
The report introduces potential pathways through which committed volumes of multilateral climate funds could be redirected to effectively address these inequalities. Specific sub-questions that this report seeks to address include
- Does the current landscape of multilateral climate funds alleviate or perpetuate inequality?
- What are some investment domains through which multilateral climate funds could lower inequality?
We limit our analysis to existing multilateral climate funds. Listed in order of their creation, the five funds considered are the Global Environment Facility, the Adaptation Fund, the Climate Investment Fund, the Green Climate Fund, and the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage. With this report, the Solutions Lab suggests that multilateral climate funds can support cost-effective, high-impact investments that advance climate action and reduce inequality.