The Global Environment Facility has selected seven projects as winners of its first Innovation Window, which will provide $12.3 million in grants to initiatives that test and pilot new solutions to stubborn challenges, from improving food systems to protecting wild cat habitats.
The Innovation Window program was launched as part of the GEF’s eighth funding cycle, to support and help road-test novel approaches, tools, and business models for complex problems related to biodiversity, climate change, pollution, and inter-related areas, engaging new and varied partners.
“The Innovation Window is a new and unique opportunity for the GEF to support highly innovative ideas together with partners from the private sector, civil society, academia, and leading research institutions,” said Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, CEO and Chairperson of the GEF. “We are looking forward to boosting technologies, policies, and business models that can enhance the impact of the GEF’s funding to deliver global environmental benefits at scale and support a systems change towards societies and economies that are nature-positive, low-carbon, and pollution-free.”
Collaboration for Complex Challenges (C3): gearing up leaders for systemic change
The winning projects were chosen from an initial pool of 128 applications and cover a wide range of issues in finance, behaviour change, systems transformation, technology, and tools. Among the winning projects is C3 – Collaboration for Complex Challenges: C3 is a multi-partner collaboration led by UNDP in partnership with FAO, UNEP and Wageningen University and Research (WUR).
The project focuses on strengthening the evidence base on how to accelerate systemic, collaborative, and adaptive approaches to address complex environmental challenges. The GEF Innovation Window funding will support two pilot Collaboration Labs in Kenya and Thailand, where cross-sector cohorts of Fellows will work together to develop more systemic approaches for tackling the food-biodiversity-climate nexus. The Labs will support greater integration of government and development sector programing across the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs), and Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) targets, and connect to national pathways for food systems transformation. The pilot will also generate practical guidance on how to bridge the gap between the theories of collaboration and systems transformation and their real-world application.
Commenting on the award of the project, Charles O’Malley, UNDP Senior Systems Change Adviser, said:
“Our greatest global challenges are deeply interconnected, yet we often address them in silos. Thanks to the support of the GEF, through C3 we will be able to develop and test a methodology for strengthening more collaborative and systemic approaches for addressing complex challenges. Our two pilot Labs, in Kenya and Thailand, focused on the food-biodiversity-climate nexus, provide an ideal space for exploring how, through deep collaboration, we can bridge across critical issues areas to find more joined-up solutions.”
Further information is available here: https://www.thegef.org/newsroom/press-releases/gef-announces-winners-first-innovation-window-funds