Advice

The GEF has a long history of using community-based approaches (CBAs) to achieve environmental outcomes across its diverse focal areas and special programs. CBA projects have been shown to deliver positive environmental outcomes, as well as socioeconomic co-benefits, including increased food security, better access to water and sanitation, enhanced educational attainment, and income increases. However, CBAs are not meant to be a universal remedy and may not be suited in some contexts.

The GEF has been investing in transboundary water cooperation for three decades, supporting the shared management of fresh and marine water resources that are rich in biodiversity and provide essential ecosystem services, but face numerous threats. Transboundary fresh and marine water resources are intricately linked to cooperation and, as such, can generate multiple benefits for ecosystems, people, and countries. However, conflicts associated with their use and management can also be the source of considerable environmental, economic, social, and political costs.

This STAP Information Note #2 on blended finance follows the Information Note #1 published in February 2024. In this note, STAP addresses the need for the design of blended finance projects to consider the interactions between the finance logic and the logic for delivering global environmental benefits (GEBs) and not treat them separately.

The GEF Trust Fund seeks to deliver global environmental benefits (GEBs): conserving and sustainably using biodiversity, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, strengthening transboundary water management, reducing chemicals and waste, and sustainably managing and restoring land. Many GEF Trust Fund projects also provide socio-economic co-benefits, including support for adapting to the impacts of climate change. However, these climate adaptation benefits are often not adequately considered or captured.

Global demand for sustainable development finance exceeds available public funding many times over, placing increasing expectations on the GEF to attract private capital for global environmental benefits. Early GEF investments focused on climate change mitigation areas, including renewable energy and energy efficiency. More recently, the GEF has ventured into environmental and nature related sectors, such as biodiversity and land management.

The rapid pace of global change requires a “whole-of-society” approach to harness scientific understanding to anticipate, adapt, and innovate in addressing environmental degradation, which can often be achieved more effectively if done in partnership with those outside professional and scientific circles.

Many of the places facing the greatest environmental problems also confront challenges related to conflict and/or state fragility, so called fragile and conflict-affected situations (FCS), with implications for GEF project operations and outcomes. The GEF partnership has increased attention to FCS over the past decade, and the GEF Secretariat has committed to developing more tailored guidance for conflict-sensitive programming.

AL approaches have been used in GEF projects mostly to reduce environmental harms associated with livelihood practices or, to a lesser extent, to encourage shifts to livelihoods that are more resilient to climate change. However, research literature suggests that permanent shifts are often difficult to achieve and evidence supporting the effectiveness of this approach is limited.

STAP prepared this note summarizing definitions and guidelines on ecosystem-based management to support consistent understanding and implementation of the term. The note responds to a recommendation to STAP by the Independent Evaluation Office of the GEF to provide this summary. At the start, the note summarizes definitions of ecosystem-based approaches and presents brief descriptions of guidelines that could be consulted when designing GEF projects on ecosystem-based management.

The STAP paper on agrivoltaics (AV) provides background information on an emerging innovative and effective solution for addressing issues of land competition between food and energy. AV is the combining of solar PV systems with agricultural production by using the same area of land for producing solar energy and agricultural products, thereby creating synergies between renewable energy and agricultural production.

This briefing note builds on STAP’s earlier advice to the GEF on co-benefits.  To assist the GEF in developing an options paper for the Council, this paper identifies potential co-benefits that can result from GEF projects, provides a guide for incorporating co-benefits into project design, and suggests ways to track and measure co-benefits using existing indicators drawn from Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

Innovation is critical to achieving Global Environment Facility (GEF) objectives. It has been a consistent theme since the inception of the GEF, and the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) has identified multiple examples of innovation in GEF programming, with increasing emphasis in successive replenishment cycles. Under GEF-8, there is even more need for innovation, particularly innovations to solve systemic challenges and contribute to transformational change.

On 4 May 2023, a STAP/GEF virtual workshop to learn from GEF agencies’ experience with knowledge management and learning (KM&L) platforms developed for the Integrated Approach Pilots (IAPs) and Impact Programs (IPs), and to see how this experience could benefit the development of platforms for the Integrated Programs.

Policy coherence matters to the GEF to ensure that global environmental benefits (GEBs) created by its projects are not undermined or negated due to misaligned policies that allow leakage, reduce the durability of GEBs, or even invest in environmentally-damaging behaviors, recognizing that a balance needs to be struck with a country's economic and social objectives. 

The STAP brief presents STAP thinking on the use of simple future narratives to design resilient and durable projects. It highlights the importance of considering all drivers of change, such as population, conflict, climate change, and migration, when designing projects. The brief shows that not considering how drivers of change could play out in the future can make project outcomes short-lived, less resilient, or even damaging to the environment and people.