Eastern and Southern Caribbean Program for Accelerating Climate Change Adaptation in the Caribbean (PACCA)
Overview
ESC countries are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change, such as tropical storms, hurricanes, droughts, rising sea levels, eroding coastlines, recurring floods, ocean acidification, all with implications for critical economic sectors such as water resources management, food production and health.
As small island developing States, their small populations, land size, scarce natural resources, and limited human capital, mean the impact of these events on many ESC countries can be catastrophic. For climate change impacts to be sustainably addressed within the region, it requires a cohesive approach that can produce climate change data and information, incorporate this data into decision-making at various levels, and design and implement innovative adaptation sub-activities while accessing international climate finance to support scaling up of activities.
This Activity implemented by the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC) supports the acceleration of climate action programming and access to finance by strengthening regional institutional capacity. This will be done through the provision of climate data, data management and modeling tools, and technical assistance to public and private sector organizations involved in the development and execution of climate projects. This activity is expected to directly benefit 500,000 people and indirectly benefit 3,000,000 people regionally through a pipeline of over $300,000,000 in Green Climate Fund (GCF) projects.
Outputs & Deliverables
The result of USAID PACCA interventions will be the scaling up of the region’s climate change adaptation response while ensuring a system is in place that will be sustained over the long-term. To reach this goal, USAID PACCA designed several tasks and interventions under three major technical Component areas, summarized as follows:
Component 1: Enhancing the generation, management and use of climate and climate change data and information.
This activity will enhance access to data and information while strengthening the systematic capture and use of climate data and information from LIDAR or other instrumentation. This is critical to ensuring that high frequency data and country specific information is available to: (1) support the climate case, (2) inform responses to various climate and climate change hazards, (3) provide information to strengthen early warning systems, and (4) provide the evidence-based need for decision making, and to serve as the justification for leveraging funding from entities such as the GCF and AF for Readiness Support and Full funding projects/programs.
Component 2: Increasing climate finance flows to the Caribbean for climate resilient development.
This aims to strengthen institutional capacities for the development of innovative financing approaches and facilitate the development of inclusive, impactful, effective, efficient and sustainable instruments for unlocking access to climate finance. Through strategic partnership and engagement, this output intends to advance the pipeline of project and programs for ESC countries. It is expected to increase the pipeline from US$300 million and contribute to the development of at least six (6) concept notes and three (3) full funding proposals.
Component 3: Increase awareness and involvement of state and non-states actors in Climate Action
This component aims to increase awareness and involvement of state and non-state actors including the private sector and civil society organizations in climate change negotiations, advocacy, planning and programming. The aim here is to engage a wide cross section of publics including vulnerable groups, students, experts and non-experts in several disciplines including climate data, information and modeling, project development and management as well as climate financing.
