Press release
The Climate Justice Resilience Fund will support communities on the frontlines of climate change around the world to identify, prioritize, and address the non-economic loss and damage they suffer.
The Scottish Government is partnering with the Climate Justice Resilience Fund (CJRF) to program £5 million in grants, technical assistance, and advocacy. Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousaf announced the funding in a keynote speech on Monday 18 September during an event at the New York Climate Hub.
The grants will address non-economic loss and damage, which refers to less visible or quantifiable losses as a result of climate breakdown. This can include the loss of family, community, physical and mental health and well-being, sacred sites, and culture.
Launched in 2016, CJRF puts people, their rights, and their lived experience directly at the center of climate action. CJRF makes grants that support women, youth, and Indigenous Peoples to create and share their own solutions for climate resilience.
The new funding from the Scottish Government comes in addition to their £2 million pledge at COP26 in Glasgow in 2021 to address climate-induced loss and damage, which is already funding community-driven work in Bangladesh, Malawi, the Pacific, and elsewhere.
With the additional £5 million from the Scottish Government, CJRF will take a participatory approach and partner with organizations that have close connections to the communities they support. Partners’ interventions will be community-led to ensure that the communities and individuals themselves are assessing their loss and damage and are empowered to identify how they want to address it. Other principles that will underpin the grants include an intentional and rigorous focus on gender, an intersectional approach, and a commitment to addressing non-economic loss and damage resulting from both rapid- and slow-onset events.
Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousaf said: “Not a single community on Earth will be left untouched by the effects of climate change, but that suffering is not and will not be divided equally. We must ensure the communities facing the worst hardship, with the least resources, are not left behind.
“At COP26, Scotland became the first country in the global north to pledge financial support to address that Loss and Damage. At COP27 we again led the way, committing another £5 million for the neglected area of non-economic loss and damage. We have made good on those promises but the need for urgent responses to climate shocks is only increasing.
“… Scotland might be a small country but I hope these actions will inspire others to join us in not only making pledges, but in urgently mobilising the finances that are needed on the ground today.”
Heather McGray, Director of the Climate Justice Resilience Fund, said “People around the world are facing the harshest consequences of incessant climate change impacts. For every image of physical, tangible loss depicted in the media – the loss of life, loved ones, homes, entire towns – there are losses that are less visible or quantifiable, but no less real.
It is critical that loss and damage funding reaches the local level and responds to community needs, especially the needs of marginalized community members. This initiative will set a precedent for how funding for non-economic loss and damage can be delivered to secure climate justice for communities. We will focus on communities that bear the brunt of climate impacts that are layered upon many other, historical injustices.”
The new funding from the Scottish Government complements $700,000 in additional funding from the Open Society Foundations to CJRF that focuses on youth-led projects that address loss and damage.
This upcoming set of grants builds upon CJRF’s existing portfolio on loss and damage. Through these new grants, communities and partners will co-create a clearer narrative around non-economic loss and damage. The portfolio will have a very strong emphasis on learning, both about what addressing non-economic loss and damage can look like and about how it can be done in locally led, equitable ways. The lessons gathered will inform funding and policymaking at the global level, enabling global processes to be grounded in local realities.