UN Adaptation Fund greenlights its first four projects

Rina Saeed Khan in Reuters AlertNet: Proposals to tackle rising seas in the Solomon islands and the threat of flooding from glacier lakes in Pakistan are among the first four projects to be given the go-ahead by a U.N. climate change adaptation fund. Officials of the Adaptation Fund, set up by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) two years ago, met in Bonn this week to consider proposals for eight adaptation projects from developing countries, including Senegal, the Solomon Islands, Turkmenistan, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Egypt, Mauritania and Pakistan.

The meeting, which ended late Wednesday, finished on a celebratory note as the fund's board endorsed its first four projects for funding. The Adaptation Fund is the only mechanism at present that allows the UNFCCC to give money directly to developing countries for addressing climate change issues.

"This is a moment of celebration; we have been working for a while now. We are confident that it is a model that is working," said Amjad Abdulla, the member of the board from the Maldives who is in charge of the Projects and Programme Review Committee. "We have now given the green light to four projects to go ahead."

…The four projects that have been endorsed are: a proposal to tackle sea level rise in the Solomon Islands, an effort to adapt to climate change in the coastal areas of Senegal, a plan to improve watersheds to better deal with droughts and floods in Nicaragua, and a proposal to reduce risk and vulnerabilities from glacier lake outburst floods in the mountains of Pakistan….

Dudipatsar Lake in Pakistan, shot by Chumer, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license