Page 26 - Respond 2016 Magazine

section nameopment finance
devel

our global

commons:

safeguarding the Global Environment Facility

By Naoko Ishii, Chair
the planet www.thegef.org

Big birthdays are occasions for celebration, and reflection – and
reaching 25 years is a particularly important milestone. For a
person, it marks the onset of full maturity, a moment at which
soberly to confirm the course to an effective and satisfying
adult life, while still retaining much of youth’s enthusiasm
and willingness to innovate. And it can be much the same for
organizations.

Now the Global Environment Facility has reached this landmark moment. Set up in 1991 as a
pilot programme in the run-up to the Earth Summit the following year, it has developed from
being the financial mechanism for implementing international conventions agreed in Rio to Naoki Ishii, Naoko Ishii, Chief Executive
the foremost champion of the global commons on which civilization depends. But, as with a Officer and Chairperson of the Global
person reaching his or her quarter century, its greatest challenges - and opportunities to make Environment Facility (GEF).
a difference - lie ahead.

Over those 25 years its original $1 billion programme has led to the investment of more than
$15 billion, and the leverage of over $80 billion in additional resources, for more than 4,000
projects in 167 countries. Its original three partners – the World Bank, the United Nations
Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme – have grown to
a network of 18 first-class implementing and executing agencies. But the task ahead is greater
than ever, and requires that the GEF continues to innovate itself.

For the global commons – on which the world’s societies and economies depend - are
threatened more than ever before. Species are becoming extinct 10 to over 100 times faster
than at historic rates, a great dying comparable to the mass extinctions in the geological
record. Thirty per cent of global forest cover has been cleared, with another 20% degraded.
One quarter of the world’s land area – on which 1.5 billion people depend – is being degraded,
while 85% of global fish stocks are now fully exploited or have been depleted.

Climate change is no longer a future threat, but a present reality - especially for many of the
poorest and most vulnerable people on earth – the result of higher levels of greenhouse gases
in the atmosphere than at any time in at least the last 800,000 years.

So overwhelming are these impacts of human activities that the very biophysical processes
that determine the stability and resilience of Earth are being pushed to the limit. Several,
planetary boundaries within which human society has become established and thrives, have
already been transgressed as the global commons that we have so long taken for granted Photo Credit:
come under irresistible pressure. UN Photo/Zach Krahmer

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