Navigating Climate Finance in the Pacific: Lessons learned from Fiji, Samoa and Solomon Islands

On the 28 November, the Australia Pacific Climate Alumni Network (APCAN) in partnership with the Coalition of Youths for Environmental Sustainability  (COYES), Solomon Islands, Samoa Women’s Association of Growers (SWAG) in Samoa, House of Sarah in Fiji, Talanoa Consulting and UNDP in the Pacific through Gov4Res program hosted an online webinar attended by 27 participants representing various sectors across the Pacific region.

The objective of the online webinar was to share the findings of a recently published study on accessing climate finance titled ‘Can civil society organizations and faith-based organizations in Fiji, Samoa, and Solomon Islands access climate finance?’  The study was conducted by COYES, SWAG, House of Sarah and Talonoa Consulting with funding support from the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research. 

The talanoa session was opened with remarks from Ms Kayleen Fanega, Principle Climate Finance officer at the Solomon Islands Ministry of Finance and Treasury highlighting the role of their Climate Finance and Resilience Unit including the process of tagging and tracking climate finance which is supported by UNDP Gov4Res project.  She further explained that the findings of this new published study are useful and seen as a guide to feed into their climate finance data on how the government can collaborate more effectively with Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) and Faith-based Organisations (FBOs). 

The online webinar featured two of the authors of the study namely Dr. Kristina Fidali and Ms. Ofusina Toamua who highlighted the motivation behind the study as well as their key findings.  A key motivation for the study is lack of information on how accessible climate funds are for CSOs and FBOs in the Pacific Islands. The role to engage youth and women’s groups more in the research space was also highlighted as one of the drivers behind the study. 

Dr. Fidali and Ms. Toamua shared the findings of the study which included the following:

• Dissemination of sufficient information on the availability and suitability of funding sources for CSOs and FBOs;
• Overly complex donor processes and requirements hinders access to climate finance by CSOs/FBOs; 
• Insufficient capacity to write grant proposals and to manage funds; 
• To overcome some barriers, some CSOs and FBOs partnered with regional or global organizations with the capacity to absorb the administrative burden of writing proposals and managing grants. 

In the Pacific, CSOs and FBOs including local communities play a critical role in ensuring that community adaptation and resilience efforts are effective and that no one is left behind. And this requires successful mobilization of climate finance by CSOs-FBOs. 

Both speakers also called on 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference or Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC - COP28 leaders for a banquet of finance accessible to vulnerable communities with localised solutions in the Pacific.