Climate finance serves as a nexus point for environmental sustainability, economic development, social  equity, and global cooperation. – As such, accessing climate finance is essential for enabling cities to effectively mitigate, and adapt and respond to the challenges posed by climate change. Climate finance is fundamental to enabling cities to initiate and implement projects and programmes that build resilience, and enable the transition to sustainable development pathways.

Several factors have been identified that limit cities’ access to climate finance. These include a lack of internal capacity to manage complex application processes, political and bureaucratic barriers, a disjuncture between the scale of programmes and the budget or funding required, a lack of climate appropriate project solutions and an overall unavailability of resources, to list a few.

Inadequate climate finance as well as a lack of capacity to respond to its availability, results in negative impacts on cities. These include increasingly poor resilience to climate change, increased vulnerability and overall weakening of cities’ services and infrastructure systems. This has a direct impact on the future quality of life that communities and citizens will experience from economic, socio-economic, health, amenity, service delivery and related perspectives.

The City of Johannesburg (CoJ), through its Climate Action Plan (CAP), has identified critical sectors to target for climate action, namely energy and energy efficiency, transport, waste and water. Reviewing and mapping CoJ’s financial planning and budget allocation processes to pinpoint areas of intervention for climate action will be the initial step, followed by a capacity needs assessment to identify resource and capacity gaps in relation to climate finance. This will allow the OneWorld team to collaboratively develop targeted capacity-building initiatives for City officials, that will support the mobilisation of resources for climate change mainstreaming and resilience building in CoJ.

Project Data

Funder/Client

C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group

Region

Johannesburg, South Africa

Period

March 2024 – September 2024
Technical Support in Strengthening Capacities of SADC Member States in Articulating Water Issues in Climate Negotiations
A girl with long eyelashes looks upward while holding a multicolored scarf above her head. Yellow flowers surround her, and the background is blurred.Development of a Climate Landscape Analysis for Children (CLAC) in Ethiopia