IFAD

IFAD and Alliance to End Hunger held a webinar on climate adaptation financing with reps from State Dept, USAID and Opportunity Intl in April 2022

• Apparently the recently released IPCC working group report has some stats on climate adaptation and their main takeaway is that action is fragmented, unevenly distributed and not enough. Maybe be a useful reference to cite as we prep intro materials for the funding platform 

• PREPARE is Biden's flagship adaptation initiative co-led by State Dept and USAID. Want to drive $3bn in adaptation finance annually by  2024. Christina Chan walked through PREPARE and highlighted a few things: 

  • Keen to bundle climate info with other advisory services (climate info services, early warning systems)

  • Need to better understand risks and vulnerabilities; need to dig in more but I think there may be potential for farmer groups to share local context to inform this 

  • Critical to build capacity of national and local govt to assess climate risk and vulnerabilities reference made to WRI's locally led adaptation principles which seem like a good anchoring framework

  • Critical to mobilize public adaptation finance (WB, IBRD, IDA, IFC, EBRD, ADB) and private. The Global Innovation Lab (which is a great resource) was called out as was CRAFT (commercial investment to expand adaptation). There is a TA facility for CRAFT which is managed by Lightsmith who happens to be an investor in Waycool. Lightsmith has some good resources incl a taxonomy of adaptation solutions (another good resource for funding platform) 

• IFAD spoke about the importance of measuring resilience and impact of adaptation investments; various instruments (results based financing, etc) can be unlocked if one can credibly measure the impact. Jo's claim is that IFAD is at a point where they can measure this (need to learn more about how). She threw out a stat that $1 invested now is $7 saved in humanitarian assistance and characterized adaptation finance as preventative rather than curative medicine 

• USAID has a draft climate strategy which will apparently be finalized in the coming weeks 

Opportunity Intl

• 18 to 1 investments in mitigation vs. adaptation

• adaptation is behavior change, varies based on context, not one size fits all 

• climate change education is critical 

• OI works through farm service support agents who promote climate smart practices

• incentivize behavior change: example = couple land restoration agreement with a loan

• Need to train local financial institutions and farmers to come up with this 

Presenters

• Alliance to End Hunger (Eric Mitchell)

• IFAD, Jo Puri (Associate Vice-President - Strategy and Knowledge Department, IFAD) 

• Christina Chan, US State Dept (Climate Adaptation)

• Corteva, Jennifer Billings (Global Agriculture Development Leader)

• USAID, Patrick Smith (Agriculture Dev. Officer & Climate Lead, Center for Agriculture Led Growth, Bureau for Resilience and Food Security, USAID)

• Sandy Roberts, Opportunity Intl Ag Finance