What is the Forum Secretariat doing and who are we working with?

The Forum Secretariat’s role in climate change and disaster risk management is specifically related to coordination, high level political advocacy and provision of policy support to Forum Island Countries to improve their access to, and management of, climate change and disaster risk finance. As a result, the Forum Secretariat has undertaken a multi-tiered and multi-stakeholder approach in progressing this work, together with CROP agencies including Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), the University of the South Pacific (USP) and the Pacific Community (SPC), and partners including United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), European Union (EU), Australia, Germany (GIZ), USAID, World Bank and Asian Development Bank. This collective effort has been focused on identifying and coordinating regional and international funding to support national responses to climate change.

The Forum Secretariat sees the Framework for Resilient Development in the Pacific as the overarching framework that will enable and support better coordination, collaboration and advocacy on key regional climate change and disaster management issues including on climate finance. The vehicle for this will be the Pacific Resilience Partnership.

At present the Forum Secretariat is pursuing two specific outcomes:

• Improved risk resilience as a result of greater coordination of partners.
• Forum Island Countries have access to appropriate climate change finance for related damage and loss.

These are the current work priorities that will help achieve these outcomes.

• Through analysis provide Forum Island Countries with better information about the various mechanisms and modalities available to access to climate change and disaster risk financing.
• Improve CROP and development partner coordination, collaboration and cooperation in climate change and disaster risk management resulting in a reduction of overlap and increased efficiencies and effectiveness.
• Inform and identify the challenges of PICs in assessing climate and disaster finance by using the Pacific Climate Change Finance Assessment Framework and following up on relevant recommendations being implemented with the support of CROP, donors and partners.
• Assist SIS members in the development of a specific climate change finance proposal.