Overcoming bottlenecks in funding access, building municipal capacity, and advancing green recovery efforts across regions: highlights from the third coordination meeting

The Third Coordination Meeting between international donor projects related to climate topics, brought together representatives of donor-funded projects with Ukrainian municipalities to align efforts on the regional climate change agenda. The meeting focused on advancing climate change mitigation, adaptation, and green recovery at the municipal and regional levels. Participants discussed activities sectoral climate actions, support towards development and implementation of regional and municipal plans for climate and energy, green recovery, and just transition as well as climate change adaptation efforts. Additionally, donor-funded projects representatives explored opportunities to support municipalities and other stakeholders in developing capacities for climate change mitigation and adaptation on the regional level.  

The need to support municipalities in preparing strategic documents, such as feasibility studies, was highlighted as critical bottleneck for access to funding and project implementation. Participants discussed the potential for providing grants for small project preparation to enable municipalities to engage external experts without involving scarce municipal resources.  

In addition to funding challenges, the meeting emphasized the need for capacity building initiatives to empower municipalities and stakeholders to address climate change more effectively. 

 Participants discussed the integration of “build back better” principles into recovery processes, identifying gaps in existing initiatives and stressing the importance of mainstreaming climate mitigation and adaptation in regional development strategies. 

One of the outcomes of the meeting was the agreement to develop blueprints based on pilot projects to facilitate scaling up successful approaches. This strategy aims to ensure that lessons learned from smaller initiatives can be applied across regions, enhancing the overall impact of climate action in Ukraine. 

The report of the meeting in English is available here Report-third donor coordination meeting.

The event was co-organized by the EU-funded project “Covenant of Mayors – East” and the Ukrainian Climate Office under the Capacities for Climate Action (C4CA) project, which is implemented by GIZ on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) co-financed by the International Climate Initiative (IKI) and the European Union.