Adaptation Fund Year in Review: 2019 Key Highlights and Accomplishments

The Adaptation Fund embarks on the new year with a busy and exciting calendar after a successful 2019, which concluded on a positive note with a record 11 contributors raising nearly US$ 90 million in new pledges for the Fund. Further, the Fund solidified its institutional arrangements to help serve the Paris Agreement smoothly.

The Fund continued to receive record numbers of requests for its work from developing countries throughout the year as the urgency of climate change increases, including US$ 268 million across 40 proposals in February. The Board approved a record US$ 188 million in new projects during the year, further reflecting the increased demand.

As a response, the Fund continues to innovate growing its pioneering Direct Access modality that fosters country ownership in climate finance and bringing forward new opportunities to vulnerable countries through its Medium-Term Strategy. These include new learning opportunities such as e-learning programs to enhance access to climate finance, and new grants that foster innovative adaptation practices on the ground, as well as scale up of effective projects.

The Fund held its first ever ‘Country Exchange‘ in May to bring together Adaptation Fund Direct Access national implementing entities from around the world to learn and share together from a project firsthand in Chile, and further convened the first Community of Practice meeting of Direct Access entities in June along with the Green Climate Fund and other partners in South Africa to further build capacity of organizations to efficiently access and utilize project funding.

As another sign of the Fund’s growth, the Technical Evaluation Reference Group (AF-TERG) was fully established in July to engage in independent monitoring, evaluation and learning with the aim of adding value to the Fund’s work. It follows two phases of earlier independent evaluations that showed the Fund to be effective, efficient and relevant, and adding value to climate finance through Direct Access and its concrete adaptation projects.

In October, the Adaptation Fund reached the milestone of 100 concrete adaptation projects on the ground, serving 8.7 million direct beneficiaries. It has projects and programmes in about 90 countries. Often its projects are the first adaptation actions in many vulnerable places, helping communities with immediate needs and creating valuable models that have later been scaled up with other resources.

The Fund was also honored for having been selected to receive a portion of the Normandy Liberty prize money donated in April by inspirational youth activist and Time Person of the Year Greta Thunberg. Youth are actively involved in many Fund projects, and were featured in December at the Fund’s exhibit during COP25 in Madrid as well as the launch of its new innovation grant program.

While ambition will need to be increased and sources of funding expanded in 2020 to meet the tremendous adaptation needs the world is facing, the Adaptation Fund remains poised and ready to continue to effectively deliver to those who are most vulnerable to climate change.