Event July 17, 2019

The CFF presents its framework for transformation at expert conference in Bonn

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  • EVENT Bonn Climate Change Conference
  • LOCATION Bonn (Germany)
  • DATE 21 June

To address the climate crisis, action needs to be of an unprecedented scale and urgency. Incremental change is insufficient to keep global temperature rise below 1.5°C or to adapt to the new climate reality. For this reason, ‘transformation’ has entered the lexicon over the last decade to describe the change needed. However, the term has been defined in different ways within academic literature and among practitioners, and there is limited guidance on how to measure, monitor and report on it.

A workshop co-organised by the NAMA-Facility and the Climate Investment Funds on June 21 in Bonn, on the sidelines of the Bonn Climate Change Conference, aimed to answer these questions. The workshop, titled ‘Learning about Transformational Change in International Climate Finance’, included contributions from the organisers, BMU, BEIS, the Green Climate Fund, UNEP DTU Partnership and the C40 Cities Finance Facility (CFF).

The CFF presented its transformation framework in a World Café session, sharing its report on how organisations working on cities, climate change, and finance can achieve transformation. The session also helped the CFF receive valuable feedback about how to think of transformation at a portfolio rather than project level, about how to consider risk and about how to define a timeframe for transformation.

The CFF follows a specific definition to guide how it understands, measures and aims to achieve transformation, namely:

The CFF seeks transformation through large-scale, sustained and catalytic GHG emissions reductions and enhanced resilience within cities, by supporting shifts in the systems of cities that remove critical barriers around access to finance and thus enable further action on climate change. The CFF achieves this by strengthening the capacity of cities to develop and finance climate change projects and by informing the thinking and practice of other cities, practitioners, and national and international policy-makers.

The CFF is continuously refining its framework for transformation to ensure its activities follow the overall definition and to maximise its impact. Close collaboration with organisations which have already undergone this process of internalising the concept promises to help the CFF in its journey.

Photo credit: Mirco Lomoth/NAMA Facility.