Egypt & UAE To Raise $3tn A Year For Climate Efforts

The Giving to Amplify Earth Action initiative, launched Tuesday at the WEF Annual Meeting, harnesses global cooperation to fund and grow new and existing public, private, and philanthropic partnerships.

Egypt’s Minister for International Cooperation, Rania Al-Mashat, said, "This call to action is extremely timely, as it builds on the directions set during COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, "the COP of implementation" under the Egyptian presidency."

"We need more philanthropies to join us at the table and help scale up multilateral development bank financing to unlock private investments to speed up the green transition," she said.

She believes Egypt will work closely with the WEF to build effective and impactful philanthropic public (and) private partnerships and promote the role of the prominent "P"—philanthropy.

In the report mentioned, Badr Jafar, CEO of Crescent Enterprises, said GAEA provides "a historic opportunity to harness the full potential of philanthropic organizations, family offices, and other innovative capital players in unity with government and business to address our climate and nature goals."

The UN COP28 climate talks, which will launch on Nov. 30 in the UAE, "will raise the bar in terms of ambition and the creation of a global architecture for all capital actors to act together at speed and scale," he added, highlighting that "the WEF and GAEA are a powerful platform and amplifier to enhance these efforts."

As the energy and cost of living crises bite at world populations, the ambition of steering the planet away from a 1.5-degree Celsius warming pathway hangs in the balance, according to a WEF news release on Tuesday, stated the report.

WEF founder and Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab said, "We are at a tipping point in our efforts to put the planet back on track to meet our climate ambitions."

"To reach the speed and scale required to heal the Earth’s systems, we need to unlock not only private capital and government funds but also the philanthropic sector as a truly catalytic force to achieve the necessary acceleration," he added.

Even though philanthropic funding for fighting climate change has grown in recent years, it still makes up less than 2% of all philanthropic giving, which is expected to reach $810 billion in 2021.

According to the report, GAEA will work with founding members over the next 12 months to build momentum around three clear objectives, the first of which is to convene leaders from the public, private, and philanthropic sectors to identify and target climate and nature solutions where they are best positioned to play a catalytic role.

By Sumita Pawar