CLIMATEFIT

Urgent accelerated action is required to adapt to unavoidable and ongoing climate change. Climate-resilient investments must be substantially scaled up. Public budgets will not be able to address the adaptation financing challenge alone, financing from the private sector will also be necessary. CLIMATEFIT contributes to bridging the resilience financing gap by providing critical insight and building the capacities of Public Authorities (PAs) to attract and orchestrate various public and private funding & financing sources, and of Financing and Investment Entities (FIEs) to discover and access resilient investment opportunities. CLIMATEFIT will experiment on a mix of 20 territories in Southern, Eastern and Northwestern Europe in their transformational pathways towards climate resilience. The journey will start by taking stock of funding & financing barriers and enablers gathered in the Financing Landscape taxonomy. CLIMATEFIT will create an ingenious Manual for leveraging finance to, 1) co-design 20 innovative investment strategies allowing to identify sources of funding 2) develop 10 credible and scalable investment plans to help better negotiate and articulate financing streams and define investment concepts, and 3) pilot 4 bankable, tailored investment cases. CLIMATEFIT will build a Pathway for FIEs to accelerate finance, test refined methods to reward climate-resilient investment and apply smart adaptation funding and financing solutions. It will establish Local Resilience Taskforces (LRTs) composed of PAs and FIEs that propose a catalytic and systemic approach to resilience financing. Led by WCF, the high-level consortium will build capacity, co-create solutions with PAs and FIEs, and inform EU adaptation and sustainable finance policies. Finally, CLIMATEFIT aims to boost resilience financing in Europe by consolidating the dynamics in LRTs, and to promote and scale its research findings through the European Network of LRTs and its user-oriented One Stop Shop.

Promotor: Tom Coppens. Co-promotor: Tine Compernolle (FBE)
Researcher(s): Varnika Srivastava, Thomas Machiels​
Funding: EU HORIZON RIA project
Period: 2023-2026