Pacific Resilience Facility

The climate change crisis is an existential threat to our people, our homes and our livelihoods.

The Pacific Resilience Facility will help vulnerable Pacific people exposed to climate change and disaster risks, particularly women and girls, children, the elderly and people with disabilities.

We want to respond proactively to build our communities’ preparedness, and to offer a transformative solution. We don't want to wait for the next disaster.

 

Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF)

Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF)

A Pacific-owned, Pacific-led solution

  • The PRF will help vulnerable Pacific people exposed to climate change and disaster risks, particularly women and girls, children, the elderly and people with disabilities;
  • It will build the resilience, preparedness and adaptive capacity of poor communities before disasters strike;
  • It will allow the Pacific to invest in small grant based but high-impact projects to make communities disaster-ready;
  • It is a self-sustaining financial model - it will not result in debt for participating countries;
  • It will deliver grants quickly and efficiently, distributing money through national government systems;
  • PRF financial management will be based on global best practice, including external audits and independent monitoring;
  • It will provide predictable and ongoing support so the Pacific can prepare ourselves for disasters and long-term climate change risks, rather than waiting for the next catastrophe.

The Resilience Challenge in the Pacific

The intensity and frequency of cyclones and disasters continues to hold back development gains in the region and the fiscal and debt pressures from climate adaptation and disaster rehabilitation is challenging Pacific policy and decision makers to be more innovative in finding sustainable financing solutions.

We want to respond proactively to build our communities’ preparedness, and to offer a transformative solution. We don't want to wait for the next disaster or climate event.

We want to help our communities to be more prepared and to become more resilient, and in doing so also save on the cost of post-disaster recovery and rehabilitation.

We want to build our community-centered resilience financing mechanism without incurring debt. We want to innovate to create a sustainable source of financing community resilience that will be easy for communities to access, will strengthen and close the resilience loop, and offers a predictable source of financing to minimize disruptions to resilience building.

Providing investors with a higher social return on climate investments in the Pacific

The PRF Re-designed 

The reframed and re-designed PRF was endorsed by Forum Economic Ministers Meeting (FEMM) in August 2023 using a consultative and modular co-design approach to re-establish donor capital assurance in the PRF review process and outcome.

  1. There is still a real and urgent need for the PRF as the first Pacific-led, member-owned regional resilience financing facility, to demonstrate Pacific ownership and proactive action to tackle our climate emergency, innovatively and sustainably.
  2. There is still an unmet niche for member-owned regional resilience facilities in the plethora of global funds that are still challenging for Pacific countries to access, and which do not fund small community projects. Despite Pacific climate advocacy over the last few decades, the Pacific continues to receive a very small amount of global climate financing compared to the existential nature of these risks and the resilience financing gaps identified whilst competing globally for climate financing as the climate phenomenon becomes more pervasive and threatening to planetary sustainability.
  3. The PRF needs to be fit for purpose to meet members expanded climate and disaster resilience needs, over and above the slower than expected economic recovery and escalating social vulnerability of our people, further exacerbating fiscal challenges.
  4. The community-centered resilience focus of the PRF needs a responsive, practical, integrated and strategic view of nature as an eco-system, as the reality at community level is that in the microcosm of an island eco-system, there are multiple isolated development interventions for climate adaptation and disaster rehabilitation, which are actually part of the same spectrum of nature and resilience building and needs a more holistic view.
  5. This is a unique opportunity to reposition the reframed PRF in a post-covid geo-political landscape to attract PRF funding as a compelling climate and disaster investment proposition for investors looking to make an investment into the Pacific.

An investment in the PRF is an investment into future-proofing community resilience in the Pacific

Delivering on the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent

The PRF is a credible and efficient alternative climate and disaster community financing vehicle for investors’ regional climate investments into the Pacific and is an endorsed regional collective action as a resourcing mechanism under the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent Implementation Plan.

The PRF is a credible and efficient alternative climate and disaster community financing vehicle for investors’ regional climate investments into the Pacific and is an endorsed regional collective action as a resourcing mechanism under the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent Implementation Plan.

The PRF has also been endorsed as a sustainable financing mechanism for the Framework for Resilient Development in the Pacific (FRDP) Goals 1 and 3 for climate adaptation and disaster response and preparedness, which are directly aligned to the core of the PRF.

The PRF also recognizes the importance of systemic resilience to strengthen community climate and disaster resilience sustainably and the importance of financing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to strengthen sustainable resilience in the region. An investment into the PRF, will also be an investment into strengthening SDG resilience.

 

The PRF can finance two categories of community resilience projects:

The PRF can finance two categories of community resilience projects:

Pillar 1: Climate and Disaster Resilience

This can fund projects for climate adaptation, disaster preparedness and can support early disaster response consistent with the original PRF design. In addition, nature-based solutions, including related projects in the FRDP have also been added to demonstrate how the PRF can finance existing medium-term resilience frameworks. The PRF has also been approved to receive loss and damage funding for the Pacific region subject to ongoing regional and global dialogue.

Pillar 2: Social and Community Resilience

This pillar integrates resilience aspects of SDGs projects and community resilience projects to address systemic risks to strengthen regional SDG performance. This includes SDG projects that are either SDG goals directly relating to climate and disaster resilience, or that have resilience as a cross-cutting theme across all other SDGs. This may also include non-infrastructure community resilience projects, relating to any of the above themes and that can support community capacity building, education and awareness, data analytics, governance mechanism strengthening, public financial management, etc.