NDC Partnership’s Skylar Bee in Devex on Technical Assistance for Climate Finance
In a recent article published in Devex, NDC Partnership Climate Finance Associate Skylar Bee highlighted the importance of technical assistance for climate finance as countries look to implement policies designed to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Below are some key excerpts:
- [Technical assistance] is widely considered important because accessing finance and developing credible projects “requires a high level of technical capacity that many ... countries with developing economies don't necessarily have,” explained Skylar Bee, a climate finance specialist at the NDC Partnership, an organization that helps lower-income countries meet their climate commitments. “Countries struggle to make the economic case for climate projects, they often don’t have the data ready to be able to clearly articulate the climate rationale and then they lack the technical skills to demonstrate the technical and financial requirements — for example, [the skills] to do a feasibility study that would underpin a well-prepared project proposal.”
- “We see a huge number of requests coming in from partner countries for technical assistance for climate finance,” Bee said. The NDC Partnership has received 1,460 finance requests from 64 countries since it became operational in 2017 — “and I would comfortably say that almost every country has given us some kind of technical assistance finance request.”
- In the [NDC Partnership’s] experience, the most requested type of technical assistance is strategic support to governments developing climate finance road maps, according to Bee. Once climate change-related adaptation or mitigation projects have been identified by a country, a plan for financing them needs to be developed, looking at how much international finance is needed, what funding sources are most appropriate, and what the money will be spent on.
To read the full article, click here.