Scaling Up Locally Led Climate Action to Enable Community Resilience and Equitable Climate Transitions

***Join us for the COP29 event, "The Role of Climate Finance for Building Community Resilience: How to Scale Up Locally Led Climate Action," on Nov. 20, at 5 p.m. Baku time.***

Synopsis

Local actors, including local governments, communities, and Indigenous Peoples, play crucial roles in achieving global climate goals. However, they receive limited climate finance, exacerbating exclusion and inequality. The World Bank's Locally Led Climate Action (LLCA) approach aims to strengthen the capacity of local actors; deliver inclusive climate investments through participatory and local decision-making with an emphasis on women, youth and other socially disadvantaged groups; and bolster national and local institutional capacity for effective climate action.

Fatou Kiridi Bangoura, Social Specialist, Agence Nationale de Financement des Collectivités (ANAFIC):

“With the World Bank and the [Agence Française de Développement (AFD)], we helped create a new way to think about local development, where local communities make their own diagnoses of their climate situation. As a result, projects will be scientific and participatory, incorporate ‘climate memory’ — e.g., to tell us about changes in forest resources over time. All of this goes to concrete financing: it’s not just on paper, it is taken directly into the communities."

Challenge

Achieving global climate goals—and ensuring a livable future—relies on the actions of local actors, including local governments, communities, and Indigenous Peoples. Despite being on the frontline of climate impacts and their potential to bring leadership and expertise to mitigation and adaptation processes, local actors continue to receive limited resources for climate action. As of 2023, less than 17 percent of global climate finance is allocated for building local resilience. Indigenous Peoples receive only around 5 percent of funding for environmental protection.

This exacerbates dynamics of exclusion and inequality and perpetuates the risk of maladaptive options that increase communities’ exposure to hazards (e.g., through increased flood risk or water scarcity), or create new risks or harms for vulnerable groups (e.g., new forms of pollution, displacement, or economic loss).

Recent years have seen a growing emphasis on locally led efforts for climate action, which has become a key priority for many governments and donors, as well as for communities living on the frontline of climate change. At the highest level, the interest in adaptation and local leadership on climate culminated in the locally led adaptation (LLA) principles established by the Global Commission on Adaptation in 2021. Though these principles have gathered momentum, implementation has been challenged by the lack of a simple framework to guide practitioners and assess progress.

Approach

Over the last few years, the World Bank has been stepping up efforts to integrate the LLA principles into its operations. The Financing Locally led Climate Action (FLLoCA) project, launched in 2021, was the first World Bank national-scale model of Devolved Climate Finance to support the government of Kenya to translate its ambitious climate agenda into scaled-up action on the ground. To scale up similar efforts, the World Bank developed Locally Led Climate Action (LLCA), an operational approach for designing locally led efforts for climate adaptation and mitigation at a national scale and to address the local needs of the most vulnerable.  

LLCA emphasizes country partnerships and national-scale programs that increase the share of finance managed by local actors; devolve responsibility for climate planning to the lowest appropriate level; strengthen inclusive and participatory decision-making; integrate local knowledge with climate data; and build the capacity, accountability, and transparency of institutions for climate action. Through targeted interventions countries will address the fundamental challenges of bottom-up approaches (insufficient capacities, coordination, and resources across all sectors and scales) while also leveraging their advantages (promoting local and gender leadership, greater sustainability of investments, increased local ownership) for more effective interventions and equitable climate transitions. LLCA offers the innovative climate change programming that the World Bank needs to achieve its agenda on adaptation, mitigation, and resilience and to implement its ambitious evolution roadmap.

Each project measures LLCA results in different ways. These will include changes in the proportion of government budgets allocated to climate change and locally led investments that benefit vulnerable groups; completion of trainings and capacity building programs for local actors, including governments and communities; increases in climate-responsive decision making about local investments; inclusive participation in climate risk assessments; community perceptions of climate preparedness and resilience; integration of local knowledge and climate science to inform local planning; and numbers of subnational governments with climate information capabilities (including early warning and knowledge management systems).

Results

As of 2024, the World Bank portfolio of projects containing LLCA activities continues to grow and is expected to contribute to enhanced resilience for over 100 million beneficiaries by 2030. Results achieved in enhancing resilience are being tracked through the World Bank’s new corporate scorecard. Projects underway are already demonstrating the transformational impact of locally led approaches.  

In Guinea, the Support to Local Governance Project, drew on $40 million in financing from the International Development Association (IDA), channeled funds directly to communities for investments in local development and access to basic services. For its second phase, the project is aiming to strengthen the capacity of national and local institutions for transparent, inclusive, and climate-resilient decentralization across 356 of Guinea’s 362 communes. By 2028, it is expected to support local governments in dedicating at least 50 percent of their resources to community-led investments that contribute to climate resilience, with a greater focus on the needs of women and youth. The population of Guinea will benefit from better financing for local development and climate resilience interventions and from a greater emphasis on community engagement, accountability, and social inclusion in climate decision-making. More than 238,000 elected officials, national and local government cadres, and community representatives of civil society are expected to benefit directly from capacity-strengthening activities.

In Kenya, as mentioned previously, FLLoCA provides a national-scale model of devolved climate finance, built through policy changes at the national and local levels to channel funds and decision-making power to county governments through direct transfers. FLLoCA is financed through $150 million of IDA credit, approximately $75m from the Government of Kenya and over $62m million in parallel (from KfW) and co-financing bi-lateral donors (from Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden). The Program provides capacity building support to both national and county government entities and uses performance-based grants to incentivize counties to: have their own Climate Change Units and County Climate Change Ward Planning Committee. It also incentivizes counties to allocate funds of their own budgets for climate action while undertaking Participatory Climate Risk Assessments and Action Planning with their citizens.  The number of counties meeting these conditions increased from nine to 45 counties within two years of implementation and counties have contributed over $23m of their own resources to climate investments in the first year of project implementation.

Other programs explicitly designed to incorporate an LLCA approach are under development and expected to move into the implementation phase in countries such as Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nepal, Rwanda, and Tanzania.

Consistent with the IDA20 Policy Commitment for community-led climate investments, IDA financing for LLCA activities is increasing support for 20 low-income countries as of 2024, covering the Pacific Islands, South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.

As ground-level implementation progresses, country analytics and knowledge exchange have begun. Country-scale assessments in Indonesia, Cambodia and knowledge events in the Kyrgyz Republic are examples of how insights are being generated from projects. These will be disseminated through the World Bank’s knowledge and learning platform on LLCA, launched at COP28, where practitioners can access publications, toolkits, recordings of webinars, and other examples of how LLCA has been applied in practice.

Graphs and Data Visualization

Partnerships

To scale up LLCA across the portfolio, the Nordic Development Fund (NDF) has partnered with the World Bank to provide catalytic support in support of large-scale investments in devolved climate finance.  The World Bank has also drawn on its partnership with the Global Center on Adaptation’s locally led adaptation hub which is key to advancing knowledge and learning. Additional partnerships on knowledge and learning exist with other organizations that are pioneers for locally led approaches for climate, including the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), the World Resources Institute (WRI), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), BRAC, and the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI).

Looking Ahead 

As LLCA programs scale up across different countries and regions, the World Bank’s role in providing technical assistance, building evidence, and sharing knowledge is critical. This will include:

1. As part of the Knowledge Bank, building and enhancing knowledge flows to support client countries through technical assistance, peer-to-peer learning exchanges, and country-driven co-creation workshops;
2. Expanding partnerships in the Global South to support country level implementation, testing and replicating locally led solutions and dissemination of expertise;

Supporting global initiatives for increasing the share of climate finance allocated to local levels in coordination with other multi- and bi-lateral organizations and vertical climate funds. This will help maximize impacts and pool resources to areas where they matter.