Felix Chaudhary 
Deputy Prime Minister Professor Biman Prasad
Inefficient, insufficient unfair and broken is how Deputy Prime Minister Professor Biman Prasad described the challenges Pacific states faced in trying to access climate finance.
Speaking at COP 29 this week, he said the practical realities of navigating the evolving landscape of international funds, bilateral initiatives, grant opportunities, and the overlapping mandates of climate finance arrangements is a major challenge for capacity constrained governments.
“This challenge is further exacerbated by a severe lack of transparency and accountability across the financing landscape, high transaction costs, reliance on intermediaries, and a diversity of bureaucratic hurdles which rely on an army of specialist consultants to overcome,” he said.
The Deputy PM said the climate finance paradigm “continues to promote unhelpful trends – a focus on projects – the use of preferred partners – the avoidance of national systems – a predilection for the financing of workshops and studies over on the ground investments.”
“We need to shift away from the pilot project to the transformation plan – we need to lock in consistent financing that allows robust long-term national programs to be delivered.
“For Fiji and SIDS, we cannot address the burden of climate change through the mishmash of donor driven initiatives and third party projects that breed fragmentation and undermine our ability to coordinate and combine efforts to deliver outcomes.
“For finance to be fit for purpose it needs to be flexible and responsive not locked in place by a contract and schedule of deliverables written in a vacuum years ago.”
