Closing the Climate Finance Gap: CARE’s COP29 Policy Paper

Locally Led Adaptation & Resilience

Advocacy

Ecosystems & Nature-based Solutions

Sustainable Livelihoods

Gender

Disaster Risk & Humanitarian Action

Extreme weather undermines socio-economic development. The cost of climate inaction exceeds the cost of climate action.

Ferocious wildfires, devastating floods, and sweltering heat waves are hitting increasingly hard. From the US to the Philippines, from the Amazon to the Horn of Africa to Europe, countries in all corners of the globe continue to endure extreme weather events, which affect millions of lives.

Climate records are tumbling like dominoes. The summer of 2024 was the hottest on record, breaking the ceiling reached in 2023, when extreme heat smothered multiple continents and ocean temperature rose to alarming highs, spurring dire warnings about the impacts of climate change. The State of Global Climate Report illustrates how extreme weather undermines socio-economic development, threatening CARE’s vision of a world of hope, inclusion, and social justice, where poverty has been overcome and people live in dignity and security. The cost of climate inaction is higher than the cost of climate action.

Climate change touches all of us, yet it is those of us who are already vulnerable who suffer the most. Its impacts cut across issues like poverty reduction, gender equality, and food security, and compound risks relating to infrastructure, politics, and security.

Climate change is a “threat multiplier”: it amplifies existing inequalities, and it smashes through silos that typically dictate how we address development challenges.

Poor women and girls in vulnerable communities are disproportionately affected, yet they have contributed the least to the climate crisis and are marginalized from conversations on how to respond to it.

At CARE we try to see the whole picture: as advocates, we take our experience as a 75-year-old humanitarian and development agency into the negotiations. As we stand on the frontlines of the climate crisis we also see power, resilience, and the potential to adapt. By advocating for inclusive, just and gender-transformative climate policies and actions, CARE aims to strengthen the resilience of the poorest and most marginalized people on the frontlines of the climate emergency.

Parties are descending to the Conference of Parties in Baku, Azerbaijan, to agree on a new post-2025 climate finance goal, a new ‘quantum’, commonly known as New Collective Quantified Goal. It is not just the money: as the Gender Action Plan (GAP) is being reviewed, it is essential for parties to ensure that gender equality is central to this new financial objective and all the other issues on the negotiation table.

At COP29, dubbed as the finance COP, CARE is looking at parties to commit to an ambitious, fit-for-purpose, and responsive climate finance goal, integrating a gender approach that protects the most vulnerable.

Download the full policy paper below: