Harnessing climate finance for rural adaptation in the Lower Mekong Basin: Opportunities, constraints and future prospects

The purpose of this paper is to initiate a conversation about how to expand access to financing for adaptation efforts that strengthen the resilience of local communities and households to increasing climate threats in the Lower Mekong Basin (LMB). This analysis highlights the obstacles that national governments in the LMB face in both accessing financing to address their adaptation priorities and establishing an enabling environment that encourages and facilitates actions by local actors to strengthen local climate change resilience.

The report offers the following measures to enhance the enabling environment for rural adaptation financing (p. 2-3):

• translate Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) into specific targets to better measure effectiveness of national policies, programs and expenditures;
• strengthen National Government and Multilateral Implementing Entity (MIE) Collaboration;
• set rural adaptation funding targets;
• hold rural adaptation design labs;
• simplify the packaging of adaptation projects;
• avoid making scale an afterthought.