Call for collaborative aprpaoch for effective climate financing

Krishna Sapkota (Kathmandu) / April 5: A regional exchange on ‘Budgeting for Climate Change Finance’ concluded on Tuesday calling for fostering dialogue and collaboration among wide range of stakeholders to effectively respond climate change vulnerabilities in the Asia-Pacific region.

At the two-day exchange programme organized by UNDP’s Governance of Climate Change Finance Team for Asia Pacific in the capital on April 4-5, the regional participants shared key challenges and support mechanisms for collaborative approach to overcome bottlenecks commonly facing in the region with regard to climate finance and budget process.

The participants shared case studies of how Civil Society Organizations and parliamentarians have engaged in pre-budget consultation, budget formulation and oversight statge of the budget process and/or climate change finance.

They also identified the scope of collaboration among these different actors for the implementation of specific initiatives to take this agenda forwards both at the regional and country level.

Among the key observation of the regional exchange are importance of access to disaggregated information and data on climate finance for citizen engagement in the process, providing technical capacity support to climate finance actors including parliament and granting incentives for collaboration and using them for change to happen.

“CSOs and parliament should collaborate to provide inputs to the government for effective climate financing”, said Kairos Dela Cruz from Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities, Philippines, underlining that the parliament should have adequate information and capacity to act as a policy enabler in the spirit of the government to respond climate change induced vulnerabilities.

The participants also highlighted the need of sensitizing media, academia and bureaucratizes on climate finance for translating the policies into actions in a result-oriented manner.

As many as 30 participants representing government, CSOs, academia and knowledge construction and management organizations from Nepal, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Indonesia, South Africa and Vietnam, among others, took part in the exchange programme. RSS