The thematic track under the 7th cohort of the Global EbA Fund (cut-off date: 21 April 2024) is dedicated to overcoming the barriers and creating enabling environment for the uptake of green and green-gray approaches to infrastructure planning, investment, implementation and monitoring to enhance resilience and adaptive capacity of communities exposed to climate risks.
Green Infrastructure, which is also referred to as Natural infrastructure, such as wetlands and mangroves forests can provide nature-based adaptation solutions for flood control, coastal protection, and water security, alongside a host of co-benefits to biodiversity, livelihoods, health and more. However, for communities exposed to extreme climate and disaster risks, green infrastructure alone may not provide adequate protection (Green-Gray community of practice, 2020). According to the latest IPCC report, increase in global warming, limits to adaptation strongly concentrated among vulnerable populations, will become increasingly difficult to avoid. Above 1.5°C, limited freshwater resources pose potential hard adaptation limits for small islands and for regions dependent on glacier and snow melt. Above that level, ecosystems such as some warm-water coral reefs, coastal wetlands, rainforests, and polar and mountain ecosystems will have reached or surpassed hard adaptation limits and consequently, some Ecosystem-based Adaptation measures will also lose their effectiveness.
Conventional gray infrastructure, in the form of seawalls and dams, can provide immediate protection but is often prohibitively expensive to build, maintain, and replace, and can create unintended negative impacts. By blending “green” conservation, restoration, and sustainable management with “gray” engineering techniques, a hybrid ecosystem-based adaptation approach is created, where benefits of both solutions could be incorporated, while minimising the limitations of using either green or gray infrastructure individually.
Green-gray infrastructure combines conservation, restoration, and/or sustainable management of ecosystems with the selective use of conventional engineering approaches to provide people with solutions that deliver climate change resilience and adaptation benefits. This green-gray infrastructure design approach can apply in a variety of ecosystems and accomplish a variety of goals. (Green-Gray community of practice, 2020).
Combining green/natural and gray/physical infrastructure adaptation responses has potential to reduce adaptation costs and contribute to flood control, sanitation, water resources management, landslide prevention and coastal protection. (IPCC, 2023).
Yet, while these approaches are emerging globally, they are not yet in common use by conservation sectors, engineers and practitioners and their meaningful incorporation faces barriers in a lack of understanding, as well as strict regulatory and funding policies.
According to FEBA-facilitated Global Green-Gray Infrastructure Community of Practice, fundamental to the successful application of green-gray infrastructure projects is an enabling environment that includes governance systems, socio-economic factors, financing, cultural aspects, as well as behavioural change and acceptance.
The Action Pillars of the Global EbA Fund aim to guide the applicants on the focus of the expected submissions with the emphasis on the enabling environment. All proposals should focus on a maximum of two pillars to keep the activities focused and attainable, and should not focus on field implementation.
These Action Pillars are:
1. Levers for catalytic change:
- policy & policy instruments,
- Education, capacity building and skills development
- Financing
- Working through the value chain perspective
2. Functional Data & Science
3. Innovations for adaptation
The next cut-off date to submit project proposals under both the general and the thematic tracks, is 21 April 2024. Organisations implementing projects in Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are strongly encouraged to apply.
Find additional resources regarding green infrastructure here. Please also consult our What We Fund and How to Apply pages as well as the Grants Procedures Manual for more information. All other questions can be directed to contact.ebafund@iucn.org.