About us

The International Climate Initiative

Central America and the Caribbean include several of the world's most megadiverse countries, which at the same time are the most vulnerable to climate change. The German government, through the International Climate Initiative (IKI) of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK), the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection (BMUV), and the Federal Foreign Office (AA), has recognized the importance of supporting this region and, as a result, has financed cooperation projects in the region since 2008.

IKI support focuses on four funding areas:

c Mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions

c Adaptation to climate change

c Conservation and restoration of natural carbon skins

c Conservation of biodiversity

Knowledge management at IKI

IKI works particularly closely with 14 priority countries. In these countries, cooperation usually involves broader project portfolios, particularly bilateral ones.

Most of these countries have interface projects. In addition to implementing their own cooperation initiatives, these projects are also tasked with maintaining close contact with the national environment and climate ministries, as well as establishing connections with other relevant ministries in the field of climate and biodiversity policy.

In 2020, IKI designated its first regional interface project: the ACCION Clima project, which is located in Costa Rica and covers all countries in Central America and the Caribbean (except Mexico).

Our project

ACCION Clima (full name: "ACCION Clima - Implementation of Costa Rica's NDC and Regional Knowledge Transfer") is implemented by the Costa Rican Ministry of Environment and Energy (MINAE) together with the German Development Cooperation GIZ.

Our mandate

As an interface project we:

Promote networking and identification of synergies among IKI projects.
Facilitate the exchange and dissemination of experiences and lessons learned from IKI projects.
Contribute to positioning and visualizing the impacts of the IKI portfolio in the region.
Provide information about the portfolio to the donor in Germany.