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The Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI) has provided FAO with USD 2.5 million to develop a funding proposal for a new programme in Central America’s Dry Corridor and the Dominican Republic, to be submitted to the Green Climate Fund.

The programme is designed to strengthen the resilience of the region’s poorest and most vulnerable households to climate change.

It is a joint effort by the Central American Integration System (SICA), CABEI, FAO and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

The Dry Corridor, which stretches from southern Mexico to Panama, is home to roughly half of Central America’s 1.9 million family farmers who grow basic grain crops, such as corn.   Poverty is rife, and access to infrastructure and services is limited. Farming families generally lack the means to cope with frequent and increasingly extreme weather events, such as droughts and severe flooding, putting themselves at greater risk of hunger and malnutrition.

Building long-term resilience

FAO, along with CABEI and UNEP, engaged in dialogue with the countries’ Ministers of Agriculture and the Environment in order to build consensus around the new resilience programme. The programme will promote investments in agroforestry and climate-smart agriculture to restore forests and degraded lands, and ensure an adequate territorial approach to ecosystem and biodiversity management.

Innovative financial mechanisms will be designed to help thousands of farming families adapt to a changing climate, and to strengthen agroclimatic and early warning information systems. The programme will also support countries to meet their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement – that is, the actions they intend to take to reduce their carbon footprint and build climate resilience – and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Working as one FAO

Hans Thiel, an FAO senior forestry officer with FAO's Investment Centre, who is leading the funding proposal work, said the team will begin visiting and engaging in intensive dialogue with each country’s authorities and stakeholders over the coming months to identify where the households most affected by climate change are and which measures need to be taken to reduce their environmental and socioeconomic vulnerability.

Once the team has been able to cost the interventions and discuss co-financing options with each country, they will have a better idea of the funding volume of the proposal, which will be submitted in early 2018.   “The Green Climate Fund is a new funding source for us, and this is a beautiful opportunity to work closely with the subregional office in Panama and the country representations to design a funding proposal at scale,” Thiel said.

The Green Climate Fund, established in 2010 at the 16^th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, supports the efforts of countries to reduce greenhouse emissions from deforestation and land use, and to build livelihood resilience.  “The first proposal FAO Investment Centre developed for this Fund was for Paraguay and now this second one is for the Dry Corridor,” Thiel said “and both are flagship projects for the region.”

Click here to learn more about the chronology of the Dry Corridor and the various organizations working to support the region’s resilience-building strategy.