UNDP readiness for climate finance presents a framework for understanding what it means to be ‘ready’ to plan for, access, deliver, and monitor climate finance in a transformative way at the national level. The aim is to provide policy makers with an overall lens through which readiness and preparatory activities offered by a range of international, regional, and national partners can be organized.

The paper is part of a series of publications that draws upon the experience generated by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP)’s climate change adaptation and mitigation activities in some 140 countries over the past two decades.

This paper itself is not intended as a guidebook per se, but rather as an introduction to both the national challenges arising from increasing flows of climate finance and some examples of the routes available for overcoming these challenges. The intended audience for the paper is policy-makers at both the international level and national level in developing countries.

For an international audience the paper illustrates the critical importance, but also the breadth and complexity, of what is needed to be ‘ready’ at the national and local level. For a national audience, the paper aims to provide a framework to organize the plethora of tools, mechanisms, and modalities available from different development partners—ultimately improving the capacity of policy makers to put in place nationally appropriate systems to manage climate finance.

To help national policy makers move forward, this paper also highlights a number of tools and examples available to overcome barriers identified in the paper and build ready systems at the national level. For example, UNDP has developed a suite of technical guidebooks that are referred to throughout the text and for which this paper serves as a chapeau, including:

• Preparing Green, Low-emission, Climate-Resilient Development Strategies: Executive Summary
• Catalyzing Climate Finance
• Sector-Wide Approaches to Climate Finance
• National Climate Funds
• MRV Systems for Climate Finance and Actions

Read UNDP readiness for climate finance.