CLIMATE CHANGE FINANCING

• The term climate finance has evolved in the last few years of climate negotiations to encompass many different things. It includes specific obligations by countries, parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Increasingly climate finance also includes the use of development finance, when that is used to achieve climate objectives. Climate finance is based on the premise that public funds will be needed for both adaptation and mitigation and that those funds will be needed to leverage private sector finance into mitigation and adaptation.

• So for Sierra Leone, the Government needs to include a line item in its budget for climate finance with funds raised domestically to support it or channeled through a multilateral development bank, through a bilateral development agency, or through the Green Climate Fund or a new mechanism that may be created. And that may be used in conjunction with development assistance, ODA, that is already given to the country. And the country will use those two things together to help, for example, farmers change their agricultural practices, thus, making their agriculture more resilient to the impacts of climate change, thus, an adaptation activity.

SIERRA LEONE CLIMATIC AND GEOGRAPHIC SPECIFICITIES

Its 465 km low-lying plain sandy coastline open to the Atlantic Ocean representing 7.3% of its territory, into which major rivers empty

The existence of vast water resources but geographically variable and scarcer during dry season with nine watersheds and twenty major rivers including Pampana Rokel, Sewa and Moa, Little Scarcies, Great Scarcies and Mano which have their sources in the neighboring countries of Guinea and Liberia

An essentially tropical climate characterized by high precipitation and humidity, varying in space and time, with heavy rainfall in the wet season and pronounced dry season

CLIMATE CHANGE PROJECT GOALS• TO ENHANCE SIERRA LEONE’S CAPABILITY TO PREVENT, MITIGATE,

PREPARE FOR & RESPOND APPROPRIATELY AND TIMELY BY:

(I) Preventing Potential Risks Becoming Real Risks

(11) Existing Risks Becoming Disasters (111) Localized Disasters Becoming National Scale Disasters

(1V) Respond To National Scale of Climate Change Disasters

STRATEGY• Empower Sierra Leone to be capable of responding appropriately and timely

to:

A. Localized climate change disasters in order to avoid them becoming national scale disasters

B. Respond to national scale disasters considering the importance of certain natural and man-made hazards and vulnerabilities

C. Empower Sierra Leone to be capable of preventing: (i) Existing risks becoming disasters(ii) Potential risks becoming real risks.

•

THE NEED FOR CLIMATE CHANGE FINANCING

PONDER ON THIS: Can the Sustainable Development Goals along with the international strategies and instruments aiming at poverty reduction and environmental protection, be successful without taking into account the risk of CLIMATE CHANGE hazards and their impacts?

CAN THE PLANET AFFORD THE INCREASING COSTS AND LOSSES DUE TO CLIMATE CHANGE?

THE SHORT ANSWER IS

NO!