CERF’s Climate Action Portfolio

The Account ensures that CERF evolves to keep pace with new demands. Importantly, it helps catalyze the systemic change needed in a reality characterized by increasingly frequent and severe climate disasters. The aim is that as the Climate Action Account grows, it will increasingly drive innovation and generate best practice on climate-smart humanitarian action in fragile contexts, including by building adaptation and resilience of the most vulnerable communities.  

The Climate Action Account is designed within the Funds' mandate and preserves its established, needs-based decision-making processes, and administrative and operational frameworks. 

To ensure additionality of funding to the Climate Action Account, contributions should be funds that would not have been available to CERF otherwise. 

Since its launch in late 2023, the Climate Action Account has been instrumental in strengthening and expanding support to those most impacted by the climate crisis. 

The second CERF Underfunded Emergencies (UFE) round of 2024 included a first-ever dedicated climate action envelope of $10.5 million, made possible by the Climate Action Account. The envelope supports additional and dedicated catalytic initiatives that build resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related shocks and stresses. Building on the success of the pilot and incorporating key lessons learned, the ERC allocated an additional $9.5 million climate action funding envelope as part of CERF’s first UFE Round of 2025. This funding reaches more people in fragile and violence-affected contexts with climate-smart humanitarian action. Many initiatives funded as part of the two climate action envelopes are innovative pilots with potential for scale-up and replication.  Several projects   are community-driven, involving local partners including women-led and youth organizations in planning and implementation. Gender considerations are central, and involving women and girls is key for project design and implementation. Many activities specifically address the gendered dimensions of climate change. Additionally, the funded initiatives support local, national and international climate-related strategies, including National Adaptation Plans and Nationally Determined Contributions.

Projects under the first climate action envelope are already delivering tangible results: in Burundi, FAO is strengthening food security and resilience through nature-based solutions for communities affected by recurrent climate-related shocks. In Cameroon, UNHCR is helping refugees adopt sustainable farming practices amid the combined pressures of climate change and conflict. In Haiti, FAO is boosting climate-smart food production with drought-resilient crops and improved irrigation. In Mali, WFP is supporting smallholder farmers to construct beehives, improving food security while strengthening rural livelihoods and community resilience. And in Mozambique, FAO is safeguarding livelihoods against recurrent droughts through conservation agriculture, drip irrigation, and Farmer Field Schools. A deeper dive into the climate envelopes and their impacts is available here. 

Since 2024, CERF funding requests require grant recipients to provide information on whether and how planned life-saving activities support climate-related adaptation and resilience. This is fostering climate-smart humanitarian action. It also allows CERF to facilitate the identification and dissemination of good practices, better track and analyze funding to climate-smart humanitarian action. CERF also launched new climate-relevant indicators, which better capture CERF’s role in addressing the climate crisis at an activity level.

CERF has been providing enhanced reporting on its climate action portfolio on an annual basis .  In early 2024, OCHA published the inaugural annual report on CERF-funded climate action covering 2023 allocations. In early 2025, OCHA launched a subsequent report on CERF-funded climate action covering 2024 allocations, which features more granular data, in-depth case studies, and insights into the CERF Climate Action Account’s critical function in supporting the most climate vulnerable.