First Global Capacity-building Dialogues Building the capacities for accessing and scaling up climate finance

About this event

By invite only, but participants can reach out to pccb@unfccc.int if interested to attend. Background information: Capacity-building is a critical enabler of effective implementation of the Convention and the Paris Agreement. Recognizing the evolving and increasingly complex needs of Parties, particularly developing countries, the Paris Committee on Capacity-building (PCCB) has been mandated to identify capacity gaps and needs and ways to address them, as well as to enhance the coherence and coordination of capacity-building efforts related to climate change. Under its 2025–2029 workplan, the PCCB will facilitate annual capacity-building dialogues to identify solutions and successful approaches for strengthening the responsiveness, effectiveness, and impact of capacity-building support at the international and regional level. The workplan foresees this as the first in a series of regular dialogues, in which the first dialogue establishes a model that subsequent editions, including virtual roundtables, can follow. This first dialogue, held in collaboration with United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), is deliberately framed as an expert conversation among capacity-building providers, implementation partners and recipients. The intention is to foster coherence in a fragmented landscape, giving these actors a shared space to learn from one another and reduce duplication of effort. Its purpose is to surface, from their perspective, what is and is not working in the delivery of capacity-building support, and to translate that directly into two concrete outputs: the first State of Capacity-building report, and the PCCB's input into the second global stocktake (GST II). Concept and design: The dialogue is structured as a sequence of three curated panels, in order to give as many organizations as possible a genuine speaking role while keeping each intervention focused, with the aim of generating actionable insights on learning from each other, how best to align available support for building and retaining capacities in developing countries. The first panel focuses on how implementing partners design and deliver direct on-the-ground capacity-building support to developing countries, to pave the way for accessing climate finance. Panelists will be drawn from these organizations, and may also include recipients of their support, reflecting together on lessons learned in translating national priorities into actionable capacity support the challenges of ensuring impact and of retaining institutional capacity and knowledge in the long term. The second panel shifts focus on the scaling up of climate finance access through capacity-building provided by multilateral development banks and the operating entities of the financial mechanism of the UNFCCC. This panel will examine how capacity-building is integrated into financing instruments at scale, drawing out lessons learned on what changes could improve alignment between funding modalities and the long-term capacity needs of recipient countries. The third panel turns to the role of learning and knowledge exchange in sustaining capacity over time, featuring knowledge platforms and knowledge brokers. This panel will explore lessons learned on how knowledge sharing, peer learning, and technical brokering can help capacities take root and endure beyond the lifespan of individual projects or funding cycles.