DAVOS: Egypt and the UAE are among over 45 partners supporting the World Economic Forum’s initiative to unlock the $3 trillion of financing needed each year to reach net zero, reverse nature loss and restore biodiversity by 2050.
The Giving to Amplify Earth Action initiative, launched Tuesday at the WEF Annual Meeting, harnesses global cooperation to fund and grow new and existing public, private and philanthropic partnerships.
“This call to action is extremely timely, as it builds on the directions set during COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, ‘the COP of implementation’ under the Egyptian presidency,” said Egypt’s Minister for International Cooperation Rania Al-Mashat.
“We need more philanthropies to join us at the table and help scale up multilateral development bank finance to unlock private investments to accelerate the green transition,” she added.
“Egypt will work closely with the WEF to build effective and impactful philanthropic public (and) private partnerships and promote the role of the prominent ‘P’ — philanthropy.”
Badr Jafar, CEO of Crescent Enterprises, said GAEA provides “a historic opportunity to harness the full potential of philanthropic organizations, family offices and other innovative capital players, in unity with government and business to address our climate and nature goals.”
The UN COP28 climate talks, which will launch on Nov. 30 in the UAE, “will raise the bar in terms of ambition and the creation of a global architecture for all capital actors to act together at speed and at scale,” he added, highlighting that “the WEF and GAEA is a powerful platform and amplifier to enhance these efforts.”
As the energy and cost of living crises bite at world populations, the ambition of steering the planet away from a 1.5-degree Celsius warming pathway hangs in the balance, according to a WEF news release on Tuesday.
The recent agreement at the UN Biodiversity Conference, or CBD COP15, in Montreal to conserve 30 percent of the world’s land, coastal areas and oceans, “looks bold but fragile in the face of a rising biodiversity crisis.”
The WEF pointed out that current funding is slow and inadequate, and a new approach is needed to get capital flowing, which can be addressed through philanthropic giving as it is “nimble, more tolerant of risks and is driven by values and long-term outcomes rather than quarterly returns.”
WEF founder and Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab said: “We are at a tipping point in our efforts to put the planet back on track to meet our climate ambitions.
“To reach the speed and scale required to heal the Earth’s systems, we need to unlock not only private capital and government funds but also the philanthropy sector as a truly catalytic force to achieve the necessary acceleration,” he added.
Notwithstanding that philanthropic financing for climate mitigation has risen in recent years, it still accounts for under 2 percent of total philanthropic giving, estimated at $810 billion in 2021.
GAEA, supported by knowledge partner McKinsey Sustainability, will work over the next 12 months with founding members to build momentum around three clear objectives, the first of which is to convene leaders from the public, private and philanthropic sectors to identify and target climate and nature solutions where they are best positioned to play a catalytic role.
The second objective is to pilot and refine funding models that can support PPPP interventions, while the third involves scaling up and replicating successful approaches to new sectors, regions and actors.
GAEA endeavors to build on existing examples of success, such as the Clean Cooling Collaborative, which was founded with the help of an initial $10 million of philanthropic funding in 2016 and successfully mobilized over $600 million in public and private finance to improve equitable access to low-carbon cooling and support 4.2 gigatons of avoided CO2 emissions by 2050.
Another example is the Government of Seychelles, which raised $15 million through a blue bond and converted $22 million of government debt into conservation funding to protect 13 marine areas, covering an area larger than Germany, all by leveraging philanthropic funding, public loan guarantees and private investment
Lim Seok Hui, CEO of Philanthropy Asia Alliance (by Temasek Trust), highlighted that “GAEA’s first Asia-focused key deliverable that will be launched later this year by PAA in partnership with the WEF is a climate philanthropy report on multi-stakeholder partnerships as a force to combat complex climate challenges.”
GAEA’s growing body of philanthropic partners includes the Arab Foundations Forum, Pearl Initiative, the African Climate Foundation, André Hoffmann Family Office, Bezos Earth Fund, Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, the Clean Air Fund, Climate Leadership Initiative, Growald Climate Fund, Noa’s Ark Foundation, PAA, Philea, and the UN Foundation among several others.
Among the individuals, academic institutions, companies and public sector organizations supporting the initiative are the Government of Egypt, Strategic Philanthropy Initiative at NYU Abu Dhabi, HCLTech through their Chairperson Roshni Nadar Malhotra, Crescent Enterprises, Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, and McKinsey Sustainability, to name a few.
