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Building climate-resilient landscapes by investing in people and small businesses
The Goal
Climate change exacerbates natural hazards, food insecurity, and protracted crises. It poses a significant threat to those most vulnerable such as smallholders and communities in developing and least developed countries that need to adapt urgently. But even in 2021, climate adaptation remains underreported and underfinanced, while extreme weather events ravage the world. The Landscape Resilience Fund aims to take down the barriers that hinder investments in climate adaptation being scaled up. It has been a 'winner' of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) Challenge Program for Adaptation Innovation (through WWF-US as a GEF agency), supported by the Least Developed Countries Fund and the Special Climate Change Fund.
The Challenge
The numbers seem to speak for themselves: A 2019 report by the Global Commission on Adaptation concluded that investing $1.8trn globally from 2020 to 2030 could generate $7.1trn in total net benefits. But currently, only a fraction of this amount is deployed. The United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative has identified three main barriers that hinder such investments being scaled up:
No value for positive externalities – when private investments generate benefits to society that cannot be captured by a company because they do not generate an additional cash flow, the incentive for them disappears
Imperfect capital markets – an instance is the lack of longer-term credit, which inhibits the ability to finance the investments required to cope with distant climate impacts
Incomplete or asymmetric information – when critical information, such as on the expected impacts of climate change is unavailable, inaccessible or distributed unevenly among different actors
The Solution
The Landscape Resilience Fund aims to close these three gaps. It supports the most vulnerable people in rural landscapes to effectively adapt to climate change by providing knowledge to and investing in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that target adaptation and resilience through sustainable land management. The fund accompanies SMEs on their pathway to financial profitability through an approach of three funding windows: a landscape window connects local stakeholders and their projects, identifies opportunities in value chains, and mitigates social and environmental risks; pre-investment funding builds investment-readiness for SMEs; soft loans to SMEs help scale effective adaptation business models.
Talk to us today
Urs Dieterich
Manager, Land Use Impact Fund
Talk to us about getting started on your Climate Journey.
South Pole has submitted the project "Investing in Climate Resilience for the Landscape Resilience Fund" to the Global Environmental Facility under its Challenge Program for Adaptation Innovation. By publicly sharing the project's Stakeholder Engagement Plan, South Pole seeks to receive feedback from any interested stakeholders.
If you have any concerns, recommendations or suggestions on how to improve our Stakeholder Engagement Plan, please send us an email to
landscaperesiliencefund@southpole.com with the subject Stakeholder Engagement Plan for the LRF GEF Project.
This document will be available for 30 days starting 29 April 2021.
