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| Ornela Çuçi at Global Environment Facility meeting, 2018 (archive) |
While since 2019 she has been part of the GEF Board (Global Environment Facility) which has a total funding volume of $ 32 billion.
"For several months now, we have been working closely with the Prime Minister's Office in order to promote a regional initiative, led by Albania, for a regional approach to the acceleration of funding for Western Balkan countries," she said after taking on this important task.
Among other things, Çuçi added also the region offers many opportunities for the fight against climate change. "The region faces many challenges due to limited institutional capacity and cooperation. Moreover, the reaction of countries to the effects of climate change is sporadic, driven by sporadic projects and not based on a regional approach," she said.
ENVIRONMENTAL FUNDS
Environmental funds at the UN, but also at the EU, have received a special focus over the last 10 years. In this context, Albania has been adhering for years to organizations such as Global Environment Facilities and Green Climate Fund, as well as the Balkan countries. The possibility of absorbing these funds, mainly GRAND, but also credit opportunities, is almost never used at all, both by our country and by all Balkan countries, which are always at the bottom of the statistical tables for financing.
The Green Climate Fund (GCF) is the only multilateral financial entity whose sole mandate is to serve the Climate Change Convention and aims to provide equal amounts of funding for mitigation and adaptation. The GCF is the main operating entity under the financial mechanism of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which seeks to make an ambitious contribution to global efforts to achieve the goals set by the international community to combat climate change.”
The UN Conference of the Parties at (UNFCCC) established the GCF to make a significant shift towards sustainable emission and climate development in developing countries and to help achieve the goal of maintaining a global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius.
In recent years GCF has moved from a very rich and successful investment agenda to implement multilateral agreements, to new directions in additional areas that seek to strategically focus on investment to catalyze structural change in key areas where a great environmental loss is estimated.
According to a financial analysis of the UNDP environmental economy, today the globe invests 143 times more financial resources in activities that generate deforestation than those that all governments invest each year in forest conservation. In the same vein, the OECD states that today we are investing about $ 82 billion in nature conservation from all sources at the same time that we are globally investing $ 500 billion in "potentially harmful investments for biodiversity."
To recover all these losses, in all environmental sectors, funds such as Global Environment Facilities or Green Climate Fund have already become the backbone of environmental sustainability financing.
Following the initial step taken by Albania to present a "Guide to the Western Balkans region in accelerating access to climate finance" discussed at a high-level meeting in Tirana in April 2019, Albania is exploring opportunities for:
• Initiating a regional approach to building the regional mechanism, which constitutes the voice of the region heard in the global context of environmental funds, as well as benefiting from synergies for a more harmonized use of available donor funds;
• Promoting joint regional efforts and projects leading to a de-carbonized, efficient, and circulating economy, as a way to engage with the EU's Green Pact action "Green Agenda for the Western Balkans" but at the same time, GREEN DEAL is already a keyword in UN and EU.