Blog | GEF-9: What does it entail? What changes are there? What is the impact on environmental finance?

By Luisa Freitas and Abiodun Salako

“A healthy planet makes lasting development possible.’’ – GEF Interim CEO Claude Gascon 

The Global Environment Facility (GEF) has been the backbone of multilateral environmental finance and over three decades, it has disbursed more than USD 27 billion in grants and concessional finance, catalysed USD 155 billion in co-financing, and supported environmental action across more than 180 countries through six multilateral conventions. Just last week in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, the 71st GEF Council, alongside the Councils of the Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF), the Special Climate Change Fund (SCCF), and the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF), approved USD 232.5 million for 24 projects in 22 countries, enhancing climate resilience and biodiversity conservation.

Every four years, the GEF is replenished. Each cycle sets the strategic direction, funding levels and programming priorities that shape how environmental finance flows to developing countries. From July 2026, the GEF enters its ninth replenishment cycle, a four-year, multi-billion-dollar commitment to tackling some of the world’s most pressing environmental challenges. For those designing and implementing environmental projects, understanding the trajectory and process of GEF-9 is now essential. Let’s look at what GEF-9 entails: its vision, how funding will be structured, and what each focal area will prioritise over the coming four years.

What is the GEF?

The GEF was established in 1992, on the eve of the landmark Rio Earth Summit and serves as the financial mechanism underpinning six major international environmental conventions: Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), Minamata Convention on Mercury, and the Agreement on Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ Agreement). 

Its work is channelled through 18 implementing agencies spanning UN agencies, multilateral and regional development banks, international NGOs, and national institutions, which design and manage projects on the ground. The GEF operates through a family of six dedicated funds, each serving a distinct purpose. The GEF Trust Fund is the core instrument, financing projects across the five focal areas in recipient countries. The Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF) supports the world’s most vulnerable nations in adapting to the impacts of climate change. The Special Climate Change Fund (SCCF) finances adaptation and technology transfer activities in developing countries. The Nagoya Protocol Implementation Fund (NPIF) supports the implementation of the Nagoya Protocol on access and benefit-sharing under the Convention on Biological Diversity. The Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF), launched at the GEF Assembly in 2023, channels resources towards the implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework while the Capacity-building Initiative for Transparency Trust Fund (CBIT) supports developing countries in strengthening their capacity to meet the transparency requirements of the Paris Agreement.

What GEF-9 is trying to achieve: the vision

A replenishment is never just a pure funding decision. It is a statement about what the international community believes environmental finance is for, who it should reach, and how it should work. GEF-9 runs from July 2026 to June 2030 and establishes a programming level of USD 3.9 billion. It is anchored in a single unifying vision: Healthy Planet, Healthy People. The intentional framing is a shift from viewing environmental protection as a purely ecological objective towards recognising the direct links between functioning natural systems and human well-being, whether through food security, clean water, disease risk or economic stability.

GEF-9 builds directly on GEF-8, which exceeded several of its own targets, reducing 2.3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions against a 1.9 billion tonne goal, and bringing 1.9 billion hectares of ocean under protection against an original target of 100 million hectares. Funding will flow through the GEF Trust Fund via two mechanisms.

• STAR allocations: The System for Transparent Allocation of Resources provides recipient countries with predictable, country-level funding envelopes for core focal areas.
• Non-STAR allocations: This supports integrated programmes, strategic initiatives and activities that operate across country boundaries or require a more flexible funding structure.

How GEF-9 will be programmed

Building on lessons from GEF IEO’s Eighth Comprehensive Evaluation, which found that integrated programming delivered real benefits but needed greater efficiency and sharper targeting, the new period introduces a more deliberately integrated approach to programming, consolidating overlapping GEF-8 initiatives and mainstreaming others across the portfolio rather than running them as separate streams. GEF-8 ran eleven integrated programmes. GEF-9 consolidates these to eight, which reveals a sharper focus on areas where integrated programming has demonstrated the clearest results, and a deliberate move away from running parallel streams that risked duplicating effort.  Investments will be channelled through three complementary mechanisms:

• Focal areas: Core investments targeting the foundational environmental challenges: biodiversity, climate change, land degradation, international waters, and chemicals and waste.
• Integrated programmes: System-wide interventions that address the root causes of environmental degradation across food, forest, urban, health and economic systems, and along critical supply chains.
• Strategic initiatives: Cross-cutting support mechanisms, including blended finance instruments, country engagement capacity and the Small Grants Programme (SGP), which remains one of the GEF’s most powerful tools for channelling resources directly to civil society and community-level actors.

Five areas, one direction: the focal areas in focus

The Focal Areas is a foundation of GEF programming as they continue to provide core investments and support to conservation, mitigation and restoration activities, delivering significant environmental outcomes. GEF-9 has updated each strategy to respond to where the science and the policy landscape now stand. Put side by side, they point in the same direction, which is fundamentally finance that works across boundaries, engages the private sector, and keeps people and nature in view.

Sources: Author’s compilation based on data from GEF (2022), GEF-8 Programming Directions: Resource Allocation Table, and GEF (2026), GEF-9 Programming Scenario and Global Environmental Benefits Targets (GEF/R.09/21)

1. Biodiversity: Based on the initial USD 4.5 billion, Biodiversity receives  the largest share of GEF-9 resources at 35 per cent, and remains the dominant focal area, reflecting the growing urgency around the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. GEF-9 will pursue conservation, sustainable use and restoration through integrated landscape and seascape approaches. GEF-9 is not content with protecting nature inside a conservation budget. It wants to shift how mainstream investment decisions account for biodiversity, drawing in private actors and redirecting capital that currently works against nature. The Cartagena and Nagoya protocols also feature prominently, with a focus on equitable benefit-sharing from genetic resources, an area that has gained renewed political attention as countries negotiate the terms of access to biological material.
2. Chemicals and waste: GEF-9 directs 15.5 per cent of its resources to chemicals and waste, a larger slice than GEF-8 gave it. Plastics treaties, pollution rules and hazardous-substance regulation have all gained ground globally in recent years. This focal area will drive the transition towards circularity and safer chemistry, strengthen regulatory frameworks, support technology deployment for cleaner production, and work to eliminate hazardous legacy chemicals across value chains. The explicit commitment to a just transition sets GEF-9 apart from earlier cycles. Phasing out hazardous chemicals and transforming supply chains carries costs that fall unevenly across workers, communities and economies. GEF-9 acknowledges this directly, making equitable transition an objective rather than an afterthought.
3. Land degradation: At 11.3 per cent of GEF-9 resources, land degradation programming is aligned with the UNCCD Strategy Framework 2018 to 2030, focusing on sustaining productive landscapes and livelihoods, supporting implementation of National Drought Plans, and promoting fair land and water governance. The people-centred framing comes at a time when drought and desertification accelerate across the Global South. The land degradation focal area is being asked to address the livelihood consequences of land health failure, not just the ecological ones. This positions GEF-9 land investments to engage more directly with rural communities and national governments managing compounding climate and land pressures.
4. International waters: Matching land degradation at 11.3 per cent of resources, international waters programming under GEF-9 will strengthen sustainable management of shared coastal, marine and freshwater systems across borders. The inclusion of the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement (BBNJ) as a strategic priority is forward-looking. The BBNJ Agreement is still in its early implementation phase and by positioning international waters investments around it, GEF-9 is placing itself at the centre of an emerging governance architecture for the high seas, an area that has historically lacked the institutional infrastructure to attract and deploy environmental finance effectively.
5. Climate change: Receiving 9 per cent of GEF-9 resources, climate change sees the sharpest reduction from GEF-8, where it accounted for 16 per cent of the portfolio. That reduction doesn’t, however, mean a retreat from climate ambition but planned rebalancing, with forest and landscape restoration now sitting more firmly within the biodiversity focal area. The climate focal area itself will support developing countries in advancing transformational mitigation pathways and strengthening the enabling conditions for decarbonisation and net-zero transitions. One of the more consequential lines in the GEF-9 framework is the explicit instruction for this focal area to seek synergies with the Green Climate Fund and the Adaptation Fund. The multilateral climate finance architecture works best when funds complement rather than duplicate each other, and GEF-9 is asking its climate investments to operate with that logic embedded from the start.

The GEF tends to fund innovative projects that deliver results across several focal areas at once, working in the same landscapes to address biodiversity loss, land degradation, climate vulnerability and water security together. This integrated approach breaks down institutional silos and aligns with multiple international environmental conventions simultaneously.

A fund under reform

GEF 9 introduces structural reforms designed to make the fund faster, simpler and more accountable. Four overarching priorities define its ambition over the coming four years.

1. Integration and integrated programmes: GEF-9 integrated programmes will support countries in shifting five key systems, nature, food, urban, energy and health, from regimes that drive degradation to alternatives that safeguard the planet and support human well-being by embedding the value of nature into production and consumption decisions.
2. Blended finance at scale: GEF-9 will expand its blended finance global programme and mainstream blended finance across the Trust Fund, with an aspirational target of directing 25 per cent of resources towards mobilising private capital. On the opening day of the 71st GEF Council, the Rob Walton Foundation announced a partnership with the GEF to help African governments mobilise up to USD 50 million in additional funding for the management of 162 Keystone Protected Areas across the continent, areas foundational to biodiversity, water security, livelihoods and sustainable development.
3. Whole-of-government and whole-of-society engagement: GEF-9 will promote nature-positive governance, supporting a shift from policies that drive environmental harm towards frameworks that support a nature-positive world. Civil society organisations, the private sector, youth and women will be engaged as partners in the planning and execution of GEF-supported initiatives, not as stakeholders to be consulted at the margins.
4. Robust funding for LDCs, SIDS and indigenous peoples: GEF-9 sets a target of 35 per cent of resources directed to Least Developed Countries and Small Island Developing States, and 20 per cent to support Indigenous Peoples and local communities. The USD 100 million Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities Conservation Initiative, four times the investment of the previous cycle, will provide dedicated, direct funding to Indigenous-led organisations and support their participation as executing agencies and funding intermediaries, a structural shift in how the GEF conceptualises access (GEF, 2026).

E Co. and the GEF: a track record across the architecture

E Co. has worked across the GEF architecture for over a decade, supporting governments, UN agencies, and financial institutions in designing and implementing projects across multiple focal areas and recipient countries. Our portfolio includes biodiversity, climate change, land degradation and international waters, giving us a cross-sectoral perspective that few advisory firms can bring to a single engagement. 

One of the persistent challenges in GEF programming has been the tendency for projects to be designed within institutional lanes, with implementing agencies naturally gravitating towards their established government counterparts. The result, in many cases, is programming that mirrors institutional relationships rather than the integrated, systems-level ambition the GEF is now asking for under GEF-9.

Our comparative advantage as a firm  is particularly in our ability to bridge institutional divides, support cross-sectoral programme design, and bring private sector and blended finance expertise to engagements where that capability is most needed. As GEF-9 places integration and private capital mobilisation at the centre of its agenda, that combination of skills is directly relevant to what implementing agencies, governments and in-country partners will need most over the coming four years.

GEF-9 is a more integrated and more targeted fund than its predecessors. Its programming directions, reform commitments and explicit focus on vulnerable countries and communities show a fund that has taken stock of what works and is building on it. For implementing agencies, project developers and in-country partners, the priority now is understanding where the new openings are and how GEF-9 connects to the other funds operating in the same space, such as the GCF and AF. If you are developing projects under GEF-9, we would be glad to support that work. Get in touch with our GEF focal points, Anne Gander at: anne@ecoltdgroup.com  and Beverley Salmon at: beverley@ecoltdgroup.com.

References

1. Global Environment Facility (GEF). (2026). GEF at a Glance 2026. Available at: https://www.thegef.org/sites/default/files/documents/2026-01/GEF_Glance_2026_01_EN.pdf
2. Global Environment Facility (GEF). GEF Agencies. Available at: https://www.thegef.org/partners/gef-agencies
3. Global Environment Facility (GEF). (2026). GEF-9 Programming Directions (GEF/R.9.18). Available at: https://www.thegef.org/sites/default/files/documents/2026-04/GEF_R.9.18_GEF-9%20Programming%20Directions.pdf
4. Independent Evaluation Office of the Global Environment Facility (GEF IEO). Eighth Comprehensive Evaluation of the GEF (OPS8). Available at: https://www.gefieo.org/en/types/evaluations/ops8
5. Global Environment Facility (GEF) Secretariat. (2026). GEF-9 Programming Scenario and Global Environmental Benefits Targets (GEF/R.09/21). Prepared for the Fourth Meeting for the Ninth Replenishment of the GEF Trust Fund, 9 April 2026 (Virtual Meeting)
6. GEF 8 Resource Allocation Table531 GEF: https://www.thegef.org/sites/default/files/2023-01/GEF-8_PD_Annex2_Resource_Allocation.pdf