Project 1: The current climate finance landscape for adaptation and its effectiveness of reaching the most vulnerable.
In April 2014, at the 8th International Conference on Community Based Adaptation (CBA), representatives from a wide range of organizations issued the Kathmandu Declaration, which advocates that national and international funding bodies must allocate a minimum of 50 per cent of climate finance to adaptation, prioritize needs of the most vulnerable and disadvantages groups, and guarantee the adequacy, additionality, inclusivity, transparency of availability, deployment, and utilization of adaptation funding. The project is to follow up the Declaration and form a report on the overall current landscape of adaption finance at both international and national levels with specific focus on tracking how much of it goes to the most vulnerable group. It will evaluate the commitment of international and bilateral climate finance institutions on financing adaptation and select 10 recipient countries to assess if the needs of vulnerable groups are addressed sufficiently in their donor-funded projects. The availability of information about funding disbursement will also be assessed.
Project 2: Scale up the climate change insurance in Bangladesh and learn from the previous pilot programmes.
The proposed piece of work will build upon existing work into climate related insurance products by ICCCAD. A working paper is proposed that would: 1) outline best practices that should be incorporated to the fledgling index-based insurance industry in Bangladesh; 2) identify barriers to scaling-out/replication which has prevented previous pilot projects from expanding; 3) offer practical policy recommendations for up-scaling the index-insurance industry in Bangladesh. The main material to be used to produce this working paper is existing academic and grey literature. However, it is envisaged that primary information should also be collected to move the proposed paper beyond a mere ‘literature review’. Stakeholders to be interviewed include NGO representatives, project affected persons, industry representatives, and other stakeholders such as government actors. A list of potential interviewees will be drawn up using existing contact lists supplemented with individuals and organizations identified through a literature review. The project should be seen as the start of potential stream of research which could critically assess or contribute to future pilot schemes.
Project 3: Bangladesh Bank and its role in facilitating a green economy
Any proposed project on the Bangladesh Bank needs to build upon and complement existing work by both ICCCAD and IIED. The first task should be a clarification of previous and existing projects/reports to avoid overlap and duplication of efforts. A potential project, dependent on the outcome of the initial task, could be a working paper which assesses the role of Government policies and institutions (such as the Central Bank) in promoting climate resilient development in Bangladesh. It could also compare the scale and impact of the Bank’s activities with the activities financed through international funds to ascertain whether the international community is doing enough to support Bangladesh. The is a clear role for the Bank’s ‘Green Banking’ initiative in this potential paper, however, it could also extend beyond this to look at the role of other government policies and institutions both facilitating and inhibiting progress towards a green economy.