$2.5b Green Climate Funds for Pacific Islands

PACIFIC Island countries reeling from the impact of climate change are encouraged to apply for the Green Climate Fund which has set a target of $2.5 billion for projects.

The fund's co-chair, Zaheer Fakir, said regional leaders needed to know about the needs of their countries and developing proposals and projects that their countries needed.

The fund is a unique global initiative within the framework of the UNs Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) founded as a mechanism to assist developing countries in adaptation and mitigation practices to counter climate change.

Two Pacific Island states have already been given the greenlight to get funding.

Fiji was given a $31m climate adaptation grant for the Asian Development Bank's (ADB) planned Fiji urban water supply and wastewater management project last year while $36m was approved for the Tuvalu coastal adaptation project with the UNDP for next year.

"The idea of developing projects is how you develop projects that are country-driven, that are country-owned and that are going to catalyse action.

"It's doing an initiative that's going to allow countries to catalyse and allow others to invest in that, maybe private sector, to put money into that area.

"We have set an ambition of $2.5b at the end of this year for programs we have. "In order to trigger replenishment of the GCF, we need to program 60 per cent of the resources so we need to program another $6b in total. That will take you into a replenishment cycle and those are arbitrary figures."

Australian diplomat and GCF co-chair Ewen McDonald said they encouraged regional and multi-country proposals, particularly in the mitigation side of the equation.

Losalini Bolatagici