Civil society leaders, government officials and multilateral partners gathered on December 12, 2025, on the margins of the Global Environment Facility’s 70th Council meeting to confront a central question shaping the next phase of global environmental finance: how to ensure communities closest to environmental breakdown are not just consulted, but funded, empowered and placed at the center of delivery as the GEF enters its 9th replenishment cycle.
The consultation, held as the final such engagement under GEF-8, comes at a moment when developing regions, particularly Africa, are facing rising climate impacts alongside tightening development finance.
The GEF has long positioned itself as a catalyst for environmental action in low- and middle-income countries, mobilizing more than $26 billion in grants since its inception and unlocking far larger sums in co-financing.
In Africa alone, GEF-supported programs underpin biodiversity conservation across the Congo Basin, land restoration in the Sahel and renewable energy access in fragile states. Yet as the scope of environmental challenges has expanded, so too has scrutiny of whether funding architectures are reaching those delivering solutions on the ground.
At the consultation, officials from the GEF Secretariat pointed to reforms already underway. The Small Grants Program, which channels finance directly to community-based organizations, has been reshaped over the past cycle to work through a broader range of implementing agencies and new mechanisms such as microfinance windows and competitive civil society challenges. These shifts have helped grassroots groups access funding for projects ranging from mangrove restoration in coastal West Africa to climate-resilient agriculture in Eastern Africa.
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Civil society representatives, however, argued that the gap between policy ambition and lived reality remains wide. While GEF-9 rhetoric emphasizes a “whole-of-society” approach, speakers noted that the share of funding flowing directly to civil society-led initiatives has declined in relative terms, even as expectations placed on communities have grown.
For Indigenous Peoples and local communities, whose territories hold an estimated 80 percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity, access barriers remain particularly acute.
The tension is familiar across Africa’s environmental landscape. Community forest groups in countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo or Liberia are often expected to deliver conservation outcomes that serve global climate and biodiversity goals, yet struggle to meet complex fiduciary and reporting requirements designed for international institutions.
Youth-led climate organizations face similar constraints, operating in contexts where national focal points control access to multilateral funds and competition for limited allocations is intense.
Council members acknowledged these constraints. Representatives highlighted evidence from recent performance reviews showing that while GEF projects mobilize significant co-financing, only about 59 percent demonstrate broad adoption beyond pilot stages.
That statistic has direct implications for Africa, where scaling solutions is essential in regions confronting accelerating land degradation, deforestation and climate stress. Oversubscription to programs such as the Inclusive Conservation Initiative, which reportedly attracted demand more than eighty times available funding, underscores the depth of unmet need.
Several governments offered examples of how the model could evolve. Egypt cited its decision to allocate a fifth of its national GEF envelope directly to the Small Grants Program, embedding civil society participation across project lifecycles.
Australia and others pointed to the underutilized potential of Indigenous knowledge systems in slowing biodiversity loss, particularly relevant for African landscapes where customary governance still shapes land and water management.
GEF leadership framed GEF-9 as a transition point. With replenishment discussions ahead of the January 2026 meeting, calls to raise the funding target from $5.4 billion to as much as $7.5 billion reflect concern that current resource levels are misaligned with the scale of the triple planetary crisis.
For Africa, where adaptation costs alone are projected by multilateral banks to exceed $50 billion annually by 2030, the design of GEF-9 will influence whether global environmental finance supports incremental projects or systemic change.
The consultation closed with a clear message: environmental outcomes depend on who controls resources and decision-making. For African countries, where community-led action often delivers results faster and at lower cost than centralized programs, the credibility of GEF-9 will be measured not by declarations, but by whether civil society, women, youth and Indigenous Peoples can access finance predictably and shape priorities.
As climate and biodiversity pressures intensify, the distance between global funding institutions and local solutions is no longer an abstract governance issue. It is a determinant of whether environmental commitments translate into resilience on the ground.
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