Communities First Pilot Fund: Loss and Damage Grants
CJRF’s special initiative on climate-related loss and damage launched in late 2021 with funding from the Scottish Government. The early grants in this special initiative have built up to CJRF’s Communities First Pilot Fund, which supports a growing portfolio of grants that address loss and damage through the lens of equity and inclusion.
Through grants from the Pilot Fund, people experiencing the worst impacts of climate change can access immediate support. This early action allows CJRF to test and showcase how community-driven approaches to addressing L&D work. In less than two years, these lessons have already informed the work of government and philanthropic L&D funders, as well as the new UNFCCC Loss and Damage Fund.
Moving Forward
In 2024 and 2025, our loss and damage grantmaking will have a strong focus on addressing non-economic loss and damage (NELD) in participatory and locally driven ways. With a second round of £5 million in funding from the Scottish Government, we have planned a program of work that aims to:
Support communities to develop and implement cohesive visions and plans for addressing their NELD, while accounting for different perspectives and priorities.
Deploy NELD funding to reach a diversity of geographies and to test out multiple participatory grantmaking methodologies.
Ensure funded work contributes to co-creation of a clearer, more nuanced narrative around NELD that is grounded in communities’ priorities and strategies.
Document and synthesize lessons into advocacy to inform future L&D funding, including the new Loss and Damage Fund.
The grants will:
Address NELD in both gender-sensitive and intersectional ways.
Address NELD in community-driven and locally led ways.
Include NELD across different time horizons, including slow-onset, rapid-onset, and cases where slow and rapid-onset events occur concurrently.
Encompass a full range of NELD impacts, including, for instance, mental health and trauma, impacts of climate-forced displacement and migration, and gender-based violence.
In 2024, we aim to have three streams of regional funding: in the Pacific through our partner UUSC, in the Bay of Bengal, and in East Africa. The Bay of Bengal and East Africa grantmaking processes will take place in the second half of the year. We are also supporting and engaging with small grants for L&D through the Loss and Damage Youth Grantmaking Council and the Global Greengrants Fund. In early 2025, we will have a global open call for proposals.
As work progresses under this program, we will offer partners additional funding to access specialized resources and capacity-bridging. To ensure we systematically gather lessons and stories, we are working with ICCCAD as our global learning partner and our Bay of Bengal regional learning partner. We will also have regional learning partners in the Pacific and East Africa. The lessons learned from this portfolio will feed into advocacy channels, including through our advocacy partner the Loss and Damage Collaboration.
Read more about the grants in our Communities First Pilot Fund:
2024
2023
2017-2022
