Climate Action
OCHA
OCHA

CERF’s Climate Action Portfolio

Climate change is driving global humanitarian needs. Over the first two decades of the millennium, climate-related humanitarian appeals have surged by 800 percent. It is a particularly grave injustice that climate change disproportionately affects people and communities that are least responsible for it. As a further inequity, vulnerable communities affected by violence and conflict rarely receive adaptation funding.

Since its inception, CERF has been at the forefront of the response, allocating over a quarter of its funding to respond to climate-related hazards, primarily in fragile and conflict-affected areas. Recently, this has increased to nearly a third of CERF's annual allocations. 

CERF not only provides much-needed rapid response funding to climate shocks but also spearheads innovative finance solutions to climate-related emergencies. CERF is the world’s largest investor in anticipatory action to mitigate humanitarian impacts before climate-related disasters strike. And CERF is routinely funding life-saving activities that enhance community resilience and adaptive capacities to climate shocks and stresses. For instance, CERF partners often distribute drought-resistant seeds and conduct trainings on climate-smart agricultural practices and technologies during droughts, which address immediate needs but also strengthen the capacity of communities to better withstand future shocks and stresses resulting from climate change.

OCHA launched the CERF Climate Action Account at the 28th Conference of Parties in Dubai in late 2023. The Account provides an efficient and impactful avenue for donors to channel additional financing to CERF to: 

  • Support and incentivize life-saving actions that reduce exposure or vulnerability to future climate shocks and stresses, thus helping to build communities’ resilience and adaptive capacity to climate change,

  • Scale anticipatory action for predictable climate shocks,

  • Boost humanitarian responses to climate-related disasters, and

  • Foster innovation and advance best practices in impactful climate action across the wider humanitarian system.

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. 

Donate

OCHA is deeply grateful for the strong donor support the Climate Action Account received upon its launch:

Donor

Amount in USD

Year

Luxembourg€500,0002024
Chad$50,0002024
Ireland$5.5 million2024
Luxembourg$541,0002023
Latvia$110,0002023
Making humanitarian action more climate smart

The Climate Action Account is up and running. At the same time, OCHA is implementing several changes to better position CERF in addressing the climate crisis, incentivize more and different climate-smart programming for adaptation and resilience, and accommodate to internal or external donor reporting obligations. 

Going forward, CERF funding requests will require grant recipients to provide information on whether planned life-saving activities support adaptation and resilience. This will incentivize improved humanitarian programming in the future in support to climate-vulnerable communities. 

Additionally, CERF will provide enhanced reporting on its climate action portfolio on an annual basis. As a first step, OCHA in early 2024 published the inaugural annual report on CERF-funded climate action covering 2023 allocations. Future reporting will be enriched with newly captured information on CERF-funded actions with adaptation and resilience benefits as well as through additional climate-relevant indicators, analysis, learning and case studies about CERF’s important niche in responding to the climate crisis. Reporting will also attribute results to the Climate Action Account and demonstrate its added value in strengthening CERF’s overall climate action. 

Useful links and documents