Coping With Climate Change: India Gets $43 Million From GCF To Make Coastal Communities Resilient

Green Climate Fund (GCF), a fund backed by the United Nations, has approved a grant of $43.4 million to India, as reported by Business Standard. This will improve the resilience of coastal communities against climate change-related loss and damage.

The grant will also help India achieve its goals under Paris Agreement as well as 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

This grant is part of the $1 billion that GCF has set aside to help developing economies mitigate the risks of climate change and improve adaptability to changing global climatic conditions. The new projects that will be undertaken as part of the grant, will receive the backing of United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Developing countries like India, are most vulnerable to climate change-related issues. In the Germanwatch Climate Risk Index, which ranks the countries according to their extreme weather risks, all the top ten spots are occupied by developing economies.

It should also be noted that 95% of fatalities from natural disasters in the last 25 years, occurred in developing countries. This proportion will only increase if the developed countries keep up with their refusal to not transfer clean technologies to emerging economies.

Coastal communities which live in proximity to the seashore will face dangers like rise in sea levels, ocean acidification and changes in precipitation and storm intensity.

Satellite imagery from 1984 to 2016 shows that ten islands in the Atlantic have shrunk by 27 per cent. This reduction in land size will lead to population displacement and create a new set of refugees seeking asylum called ‘climate refugees.’