Camino al II Diálogo Regional de Finanzas del Clima – Comité Organizador arranca sus tareas

In the nine months since the First Regional Dialogue on Climate Finance held in Tela (Honduas), Latin American and Caribbean governments have advanced in a continous knowledge exchange and in developing national capacities. Taking a qualitative leap in this dynamic process, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, and Peru launched on 26 February 2013, in a meeting in Bogotá, the Steering Committee for the Second Regional Dialogue. This Second Regional Dialogue, to be hosted by El Salvador from 29-31 July 2013, will become an opportunity to deepen the exchange among countries in specific thematic climate finance areas, such as the diversification of financing instruments or mechanisms for inter-institutional coordination.

In close partnership with agencies such as UNDP, UNEP, and the EUROCLIMA program, the Steering Committee will not only work on the strategic and thematic preparations for the Second Regional Dialogue. Throughout 2013, it will also lead the design and implementation of a regional program for structured knowledge exchange aournd climate finance. For this purpose, the Committee will also rely on a Secretariat, anchored in its first stage at the Government of El Salvador and rotating among the participating countries afterward. With this perspective, the Second Dialogue constitutes a milestone for driving the regional process in the medium term (at least until 2015), involving primarily government officials, advisors, and experts.

Among its more immediate tasks, the Steering Committee will refine the thematic focuses, methodology, agenda, and participant profiles for the Second Dialogue, which have already begun to take shape in a proposal presented by the Secretariat. In the coming weeks, the Committee will push forward a process of gathering country experiences in key thematic areas, which will follow a format smilar to that which was utilized for the First Dialogue (see fichas país).

Moreover, this will be linked with the barriers studies, a base methodology agreed upon in the Tela Conclusions [pdf] and which have already been piloted in El Salvador, are on the verge of being launched in Peru and the Dominican Republic, and are in preparation in Colombia and Honduras. There are other proposals underway with great relevance for the region, including the Climate Finance Course under preparation at the Inter-Institutional Committee of the Government of El Salvador. All of these initiatives will be disseminated through the Community of Practice hosted here, in climatefinance.info.

Finally and thinking beyond the Second Dialogue, the Secretariat will initiate the first consultations and reflections for designing the regional knowledge exchange program. Ahead of the Dialogue, the Secretariat is looking to find agreement on themes, modalities, coordination, and governance for this country-led mechanism. Accordingly, the regional program could become the keystone for an increasingly strong alliance among the countries that are investing in their institutional and operational capacities for accessing and managing climate finance.