The Forum Economic Ministers Meeting has approved the implementation of the redesigned Pacific Resilience Facility.

Pacific Islands Forum Chair and Prime Minister of the Cook Islands, Mark Brown, says this initiative was one of the key outcomes of the two-day meeting.

The proposal will now go to the 52nd Pacific Islands Leaders Meeting in November in the Cook Islands for formal approval and adoption.

Brown says the countries in the Pacific have over the years faced challenges when attempting to access a number of avenues for financing climate initiatives, such as the Green Climate Fund and other sources of financing.

“Pacific countries have for a number of years voiced their concerns at the difficulty in accessing climate financing so what we have done over the last few years and in particular, the last year and 18 months is redesign this proposal for a Pacific Resilience Facility that will be targeted to development partners to put their funds into and used for Pacific adaptation measures specifically for Pacific countries.”

Brown says this is a solution to ensure that Pacific island countries can finance their various climate adaptation initiatives.

“And we see this as one way to enable funds to be freed up quicker to our members in the Pacific countries to address climate funding and resilience building initiatives which in many cases can be quite small scale and thereby make it difficult to fund when we do those through the formal channels with the likes of the Green Climate Fund.”

Brown says the Pacific Resilient Facility was first proposed more than six years ago as a means to attract donor funding or development member funding into a specific Pacific-designed vehicle so that financing can hit the climate priorities of our Pacific countries.

PIF’s member Australia initially invested $2–3 million, while dialogue partner the United States of America donated $2 million to start up the facility.