On May 23, the National Planning Department and the NAP Global Network held the Finance for National Adaptation to Climate Change event in Bogota, Colombia. This event, which aimed to strengthen institutional coordination to advance national climate change adaptation processes, was held under the framework of the climate adaptation and resilience group of the Intersectoral Commission on Climate Change and the Financial Management Committee of Colombia.
The meeting participants presented institutional advances at the national level and the current state of adaptation financing. Additionally, they featured typologies of adaptation interventions for different sectoral portfolios and financial instruments that can contribute to mobilizing resources in this area. For example, the Climate Finance Broker Facility is a mechanism that seeks to connect the supply of financing resources with the demand for projects focused on climate change management.
The workshop was attended by representatives of public and private institutions, as well as international organizations. The participants represented the five sectoral clusters: Housing, Water, and Sanitation; Energy; Trade, Industry, and Tourism; Transportation; and Agriculture, Forestry, and Land Use. The active participation of the attendees was key to enriching the conversation through concrete examples and generating a space for discussion on the role of financing for adaptation.
One of the highlights of the meeting was the information gathering and participatory creation workshop, which was carried out through sectoral working groups. Each sector had the opportunity to exchange knowledge about the sources of information used to identify climate risks, the financing mechanisms used in adaptation projects, the collaborative linkages for adaptation governance, and the regulatory barriers identified for project implementation. These aspects are crucial to increase the effectiveness of national-level work on adaptation financing in the face of the growing impacts of climate change.
Against this backdrop, Ana María Vargas, Deputy Director of Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management of the National Planning Department, emphasized that “despite Colombia’s extremely high exposure to the effects of climate change, we do not know how much adaptation is worth, but we know that not implementing measures to achieve it would cause an average loss of 0.5% of GDP every year for 89 years, almost 8 trillion pesos every year between 2011 and 2100. For this reason, we socialized institutional advances at the workshop and presented intervention typologies and alternatives to mobilize resources.”
Meanwhile, Mauricio Luna Rodríguez, senior policy advisor of the NAP Global Network, indicated that “supporting the strengthening of the adaptation elements of the Climate Finance Broker Facility is an important step in the horizontal articulation between development sectors and in the vertical coordination with the territories most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change in Colombia.”
In the steps that follow, the inputs from each cluster of the Climate Finance Broker Facility will be compiled to identify the opportunities and barriers in each sector and the priorities they have identified, as well as explore possible financing routes for the processes that each one of them leads.
Colombia’s collaboration with the NAP Global Network commenced in 2017. Since then, both parties have worked together to strengthen the NAP process. This ongoing commitment will allow us to continue joining efforts to advance the implementation of strategies that allow Colombia to respond comprehensively to the challenges of climate change.