In today’s episode of The Arc, we’re sharing a panel discussion from the Forum on Advancing Inclusive Climate Action in Foreign Policy and Development, an event hosted by the Wilson Center in collaboration with the White House and USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, and with support from the USAID Climate Adaptation Support Activity.

The panel featured today focuses on how to accelerate climate finance while ensuring equitable access to resources. The panel was moderated by Jake Levine, the Senior Director for Climate and Energy at the National Security Council. The experts on the panel include Dilafruz Khonikboyeva, the Inaugural Executive Director of the Home Planet Fund; Jacqueline Musiitwa, the Deputy Assistant to the Administrator for the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance at USAID; Bella Tonkonogy, Senior Advisor at the Department of Treasury’s Climate Hub; and Laura García, the President and CEO of the Global Greengrants Fund.

On the Biden Administration’s approach to the global energy transition

Jake Levine: The thing that this administration did that I think was different from the old playbook was that it recognized something critical about this thesis for growth, which is that you can’t have a clean energy transition without making it a just transition. You can’t generate new investment without ensuring that those investments are made equitably and in the places that need them most.

That is the type of work that enables us to start looking at the scale of the challenge with serious and meaningful tools to address that enormous workload in front of us. We can’t forget that we remain somewhere between four and five trillion dollars shy of what we need to help emerging economies get on a track to a climate-resilient future. And we have an enormous management challenge in terms of allocating that funding to the people and the communities that need it the most.

On reducing the barriers for organizations and communities to access finance

Dilafruz Khonikboyeva: We know that to put this money into communities is not only an issue of access and equity, but also an issue of durability and practicality. In many of these contexts, the rule of law is not strong. And frequently, I think the discussion becomes, “Okay, the rule of law is not strong. Therefore, we can’t support this context.” But the reality is that where rule of law is not strong, communities are stronger. And so, if the infrastructure is there for people to take care of each other, to manage their finances together, to think about communal space and communal growth, we must fund that. So, what Home Planet Fund does to meet that need is target underfunded people, underfunded solutions, and underfunded contexts.

Jacqueline Musiitwa: A lot of what we’re dealing with is not only the macro but also at the micro level of financing in places that are hard to reach. From a USAID perspective, we do have $150 billion in climate finance targets between 2022 and 2030, implemented by different bureaus working in different ways. And some of the ways that we’re looking to break access barriers is by working across the interagency. For example, we support our Treasury colleagues as they engage with the multilateral development funds and with the likes of the Green Climate Fund, making sure that we are including the communities in the fragile states that we represent. And we also make sure that there is an understanding of how US Government money positively impacts those communities.

As far as access, we rely a lot on our partners and our USAID missions around the world, as well as our foreign service nationals. They have lots of strong local contacts and local knowledge, and they are able to help us shape how we translate US foreign policy and funding into local development priorities in the countries that we operate in.

Bella Tonkonogy: We are trying to drive investment. Yes, but we’re trying to add that incentive on top of it to channel that investment to the communities that most need it. And what we’re learning from the IRA is that we can achieve that goal. We’re seeing results all over the country. The IRA is driving investment, more investment to lower-income communities with college graduation rates less than the national average, incomes less than the national average, and higher unemployment rates than average.

So, we’re seeing how these incentives can work together domestically, but also internationally, where the Treasury Department oversees and is responsible in the US government for oversight of many of the multilateral development banks as well as the multilateral climate funds.

Laura García: It is political will that is behind our inability and lack of interest in responding to and addressing questions such as “why are women not showing up in our calls for proposals?” “Why are organizations not being able to register?” “And why is it that we are not seeing indigenous folks in this table?” I don’t think that is in the interest of many in philanthropic and aid organizations to respond and to address those questions. And I think that’s where our focus needs to be. Obviously, there’s also a lot of architectural challenges that we can also address. There’s a huge bottleneck happening between the supply and the demand of social and environmental justice action and financing. But I think that at the core of this is that we have a collective problem here.

On how USAID’s humanitarian efforts has evolved

Jacqueline Musiitwa: My job is really to make sure that when there is an emergency, we can go in and provide an immediate solution. Then we hand over the baton to different parts of USAID to carry on the support. But we still need to figure out how we can better sequence our humanitarian work to make sure that the communities we help are self-sustaining later.

The development community, which was rooted in the Marshall Plan, has since evolved to consider the fact that the world has changed in the communities USAID, in particular, is working.

So, whether we are talking about youth pushing back on the establishment and asking for more, or whether we are talking about the impacts of climate, we are figuring out how to be more systemic in our approaches to programming.

On how to bring philanthropic capital into the climate finance space

Laura García: These huge investments of capital are not necessarily walking the talk in terms of climate financing. But, in their absence, this immense, vast, and rich ecosystem of action is happening in communities, despite the fact that they’re not receiving money.

So, this is just a note or a footnote to just say that’s where the power lies. They don’t even need the money to start climate adaptation, but they do need the money to be able to succeed beyond their current capabilities. For example, there is the increasing creation of community-led movement accountable funds that are tackling what we need to tackle.