Local climate resilience finance: how can mirage become reality?

Climate resilience is an increasingly pressing need in forest and farm landscapes. Rural communities in the global South are hard hit by temperature extremes, variable rainfall, droughts, fires, storms, flooding, pests, disease, landslides and, in some places, salination and sea level rise. Yet for most of the world’s 1.5 billion forest and farm producers, a helping hand from external climate finance (that controlled by national and international agencies) remains a mirage: as little as 10% of global funds reach the local level, with just 1.7% accessible to locally controlled organisations. Nevertheless, producers establish such organisations in great numbers, looking to them as trusted self-generated sources of credit and investment able to finance at least 30 proven options for increasing climate resilience. But this internal funding can only go so far. It is time for locally controlled organisations to take their place in a new climate resilience blueprint, as required beneficiaries and accredited partners for external climate finance.