Last year was, by any account, an extraordinary year in the fight against climate change – not only at the international level with the Paris Agreement, but also for the ecbi.

First and foremost, support from the German International Climate Initiative (IKI) has revived our Training and Support Programme (T&SP). Managed by Achala Abeysinghe and her team at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), T&SP held its first pre-COP training workshop for junior LDC negotiators in Paris. We are very much looking forward to the future pre-COP and regional training workshops and support activities by the T&SP in Phase IV (2015-2020) of the ecbi.
We were also extremely proud about the fact that in the run-up to Paris, Achala was listed as one of the top 15 female climate champions by CNN, together with Christiana Figueres and Laurence Tubiana, and subsequently featured in a special edition on Vogue as a “climate warrior”.

Our Publications and Policy Analysis Unit, headed by Anju Sharma, has also delivered a number of important policy papers and analyses. Anju, who is also our lead analyst on in-country Enhanced Direct Access (EDA), presented a set of last year’s publications, Consolidation and devolution of national climate finance: The case of India and Engaging Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises in developing countries: Enhanced Direct Access and the GCF Private Sector Facility, at a Fellowship Programme Ad hoc Seminar consultation with senior Indian policy-makers in New Delhi, to encourage a national understanding of EDA.

In addition to this, and apart from the annual Bonn Seminar and Oxford Fellowship and Seminar, the Fellowship Programme also organised a couple of Ad hoc Seminars co-hosted by the Chair of the Adaptation Fund Board and the co-chairs of the Standing Committee on Finance to facilitate a discussion between the members of these two bodies on the role of the Adaptation Fund in the new climate regime.