Delegates from 185 countries to the Global Environmental Facility ratified and launched a new fund with more than US$150 million for improving how Earth's resources are managed in developing countries.
The Food and Agriculture Organization, which partners with the GEF to address the most critical issues at the nexus of agrifood systems and the environment, considers the new fund to be "an essential part of climate action," FAO's Deputy Director-General Maria Helena Semedo said on Friday.
The Washington-based Global Environment Facility's assembly in Vancouver, which drew 1,500 people from around the world, set up the new fund on Thursday with key initial investments from the Canadian and United Kingdom governments.
It will ramp up starting with 200 million Canadian dollars (US$146.8 million) and 10 million pounds from the U.K. (US$12.58 million).
"This is a hugely positive moment that will be remembered far into the future," GEF's CEO Carlos Manuel Rodríguez predicted.
He praised the assembly for showing the world that "even in difficult conditions – with wildfire smoke as our backdrop – we can move forward to build a more biodiverse planet for everyone’s benefit."
The GEF is a multilateral environmental fund that holds an assembly of environment ministers and senior officials once every four years to survey how it mobilizes billions of dollars for projects; this one met met as Canada grappled with a record wildfire season.
As the main source of money for protecting the planet's biodiversity – the variety of life in all of its forms around the world – GEF distributes over $1 billion a year and calls itself the only such fund working on all aspects of environmental health.
Semedo noted that GEF also recently approved 26 FAO-led projects that involve US$174.7 million in GEF funding and US$1.2 billion in co-financing.
The GEF's new Global Biodiversity Framework Fund is supposed to help poorer nations better protect their wild species and ecosystems that are threatened by wildfires, flooding, extreme weather and human activity, including urban sprawl.
More focus on gender and Indigenous peoples
Canadian environmental officials said the new fund will help halt and reverse biodiversity loss in developing nations – where the impacts of nature loss are highest – by 2030, and put nature on "a recovery path" by 2050.
“Biodiversity is the critical foundation of our well-being and the health of our planet," said Canada’s Minister of International Development Ahmed Hussen.
The new fund also will work in a "gender-responsive manner, including through cross-sectoral partnerships," he said, and it also will do so in "collaboration with Indigenous peoples, the original guardians of the lands and seas."
GEF, which partners with other international organizations to create and manage projects, provides money for nations to deal with issues such as biodiversity loss, chemicals and waste, climate change, international waters, and land degradation.
It was created out of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Since then it says it provided more than US$23 billion in grants and blended finance and mobilized $129 billion in co-financing for 5,000 national and regional projects. It lists projects in more than 160 countries.
GEF's money and policy support help developing nations fulfill five treaties: the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity: Minamata Convention on Mercury, Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification and U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.
