By The Feminist Action Nexus for Economic and Climate Justice and The Women and Gender Constituency

Climate finance funds climate action, and climate justice activists are particularly concerned with how — and how much — climate finance flows from the Global North to the Global South. Feminist frameworks and analyses of climate finance underpin demands for true transformation toward the climate-just, feminist future we know is possible.

Feminists and activists follow the UN climate negotiations, including the recent 27th Conference of the Parties (COP27) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to ensure that not only decisions and processes “do no harm,” but that they also fund transformation and not false solutions. Negotiations on climate finance are often inaccessible, inefficient, heavily influenced by the private sector, and lack transparency. Many of the systemic issues prioritized by activists and feminists do not reach the negotiating tables, except perhaps during civil society interventions.

Our advocacy in the UNFCCC and beyond is grounded in an understanding of climate finance as an obligation of the Global North to pay its historical climate debt to the world. It should not be regarded as a matter of solidarity, but of obligations, including legal ones, and reparations. With this core understanding, climate finance should also be grant-based, gender-transformative, human-rights-centered, have public funding at its core, and be directly accessible, including by enhancing direct access for affected communities. Most importantly, climate finance pledges must go hand in hand with structural change, aligning finance flows with a climate just world and dismantling the unjust global economic order.

COP27 by Five Key Climate Finance Issues

During COP27, which took place in Egypt from November 6–18, advocates from the Women & Gender Constituency (WGC) and the Feminist Action Nexus for Economic and Climate Justice were on the ground following key finance agenda items and advocating for feminist climate finance. Read our summary and analysis of five key areas of negotiations and discussions below, including some of what was on the “Sharm El Sheikh Implementation Plan” (CP.27, CMA.4), this year’s COP cover text.

1. Setting a New Climate Finance Goal (aka the NCQG)

One of the key finance discussions at COP27 was on the continued process of setting a new global climate finance goal (New Collective Quantified Goal or NCQG), by 2024—marking the most substantive climate finance discussion since the Paris Agreement was signed. While Global North countries’ failure to commit to adequate funding and an over-emphasis on private finance threaten to derail the potential of the NCQG, opportunity still exists to integrate fundamental feminist climate finance principles.

2. Providing Loss & Damage Finance

Loss and damage (L&D) is a term for the effects of the climate crisis that go beyond what can be mitigated or adapted to. The long overdue agreement on the creation of a L&D Finance Facility at COP27 is monumental. We must now ensure that this fund becomes fully operational and is guided by the needs of those most affected by L&D.

The quality of this L&D finance must be just, grant-based, gender-transformative, human-rights-centered, and directly accessible, with public funding at the core.

3. Calling for the Transformation of the Global Financial Architecture

At COP27 there was a clear message from both civil society and a rising number of Global South governments that climate justice requires transforming the global economic architecture. As a result of this building pressure, for the first time, the COP cover text calls for reforming “the practices and priorities” of MDBs and IFIs to define a new vision and operational model that address the climate crisis. Feminists are campaigning in key, upcoming advocacy spaces, like the spring and annual meetings of the World Bank / IMF, to continue to challenge the power of MDBs and IFIs.

4. Making Climate Funds Work for Climate Justice: the GCF, the GEF, and the Adaptation Fund

The Green Climate Fund (GCF), the Global Environment Facility (GEF), and the Adaptation Fund are funds designed specifically to deliver multilateral climate finance to the Global South. At COP27, we heard continued calls from countries for (at least) doubling adaptation finance, which while still insufficient, would make progress towards balancing adaptation and mitigation. This year, we need to focus on demanding that Global North countries contribute their fair share, especially in the upcoming GCF replenishment. Countries will need to pledge higher amounts than in previous cycles, and some, like the U.S., will need to recommit as well as make good on past promises.

5. Addressing Debt Justice

Feminist calls for debt justice recognize that only with relief—and preferably cancellation—of unjust debts can countries appropriately invest in climate justice and gender justice. COP27 provided an excellent platform for civil society to advocate for debt justice and for countries to make announcements and proposals related to debt relief. For climate finance to truly be equitable, we need it to be delivered in the form of grants or any non-debt creating mechanism, and it should be transparent and free of conditions.

Read the analysis in full on Medium.