GCF insight #4: “Cross-cutting” projects and adaptation-mitigation balance

1 December 2016, E Co., Category: All insights, GCF insight, Tags: adaptation, climate finance, cross-cutting, gcf, GCF insight, mitigation

GCF insight seeks to understand what’s working – and what’s not working – in Green Climate Fund (GCF) project development. This edition explores cross-cutting projects and the balance between mitigation and adaptation projects.

Key findings:

• The Green Climate Fund’s portfolio and pipeline clearly show the importance of cross-cutting projects, but it is unclear what that says about the adaptation-mitigation balance due to the lack of transparent, quantifiable rules for what counts as a cross-cutting project.
• While the majority of the Fund’s stakeholders believe that their cross-cutting projects strike a good balance between mitigation and adaptation, they also realise that labelling a project as cross-cutting can give them a competitive advantage.
• Determining hard requirements for the definition of cross-cutting projects is difficult, especially since national context should be taken into consideration in such a definition.
• To clarify the true balance between adaptation and mitigation in its funding, the GCF should provide clearer guidance with regard to what projects can be considered cross-cutting.

Download this edition of GCF Insight here.