SAMARKAND — The number that matters is not $3.9 billion. It is 400 million — the estimated number of people in least-developed countries and small island states whose land, water, and food systems the Global Environment Facility is now explicitly committed to protecting with a minimum guaranteed share of its new funding cycle.
Representatives of the GEF’s 186 member countries formally endorsed the ninth replenishment programme, known as GEF-9, at the organisation’s 71st Council meeting in the Uzbek city of Samarkand on Wednesday, ratifying a four-year financing commitment that runs from July 2026 through June 2030. The package sustains the institution’s role as the world’s largest multilateral environment fund — and, for the first time, codifies hard allocation floors for the countries and communities climate diplomacy has historically left at the margins.
At least 35 percent of all GEF-9 resources will flow to least developed countries and small island developing states, with a further 20 percent dedicated to projects supporting indigenous peoples and local communities. Together, those two commitments will consume more than half the total envelope if met in full — a structural shift that signals something about where donors now believe environmental money does the most measurable work.
The decision came as the GEF also closed out its eighth replenishment cycle with a final disbursement of $144.3 million, capping a $5.3-billion programme that, by the organisation’s own accounting, overshot its emissions target by a considerable margin. Greenhouse gas reductions reached 2.3 billion tonnes against an original target of 1.9 billion, while restored land and ecosystems exceeded 10 million hectares. Approximately 97 percent of the GEF-8 envelope will ultimately be allocated across its 144 recipient countries, the GEF said Tuesday.
What the numbers do not capture is the degree to which the GEF’s credibility now rests on a premise that has become harder to sustain: that voluntary donor pledges, filtered through multilateral bureaucracies and implemented by the UN Development Programme, the UN Environment Programme, and the World Bank, can keep pace with the speed and scale of ecological breakdown. The Samarkand meeting took place as global assessments documented accelerating biodiversity loss, rising ocean temperatures, and what scientists have described as the approach of critical tipping points in multiple interconnected systems.
Richard Bontjer, co-chair of the GEF Council, called GEF-9 a vote of confidence in an institution that has consistently delivered results at scale, according to the GEF’s own press materials. Aziz Abdukhakimov, an adviser to the President of Uzbekistan, welcomed the gathering by highlighting years of GEF support to protect biodiversity in Central Asia — including the snow leopard — and to restore water management across a region where transboundary environmental pressures are already a source of geopolitical tension.
The new cycle’s programming logic is built around integration. Rather than funding discrete, sector-specific projects, GEF-9’s integrated programmes will target five interconnected systems — nature, food, urban, energy, and health — treating them as a single problem rather than a series of parallel files. A blended finance programme will pursue an aspirational target of directing 25 percent of all resources toward mobilising private capital, with the architecture for doing so still under development at the time of the Samarkand meeting.
Whether private capital can actually be mobilised at that scale — and on terms that serve recipient communities rather than financial intermediaries — is a question the GEF has not yet answered. The blended finance aspiration has been a feature of multilateral development thinking for years; the gap between the theory and the disbursement record on the ground remains, by most independent assessments, substantial.
The June 2026 work programme approved alongside GEF-9 includes 16 projects across 19 countries, with GEF financing of $141.4 million and expected co-financing exceeding $828 million. Uzbekistan’s own Risk Mitigation Facility project was cited during Council discussions as a demonstration of how blended finance arrangements can draw in additional investment at the country level.
The Eighth GEF Assembly — a broader gathering of roughly 2,000 representatives from governments, international organisations, businesses, and civil society from more than 180 countries — opened in Samarkand on the heels of the Council meeting. Individual country pledges to GEF-9 are to be publicly announced at the Assembly, meaning the $3.9 billion figure currently represents initial commitments rather than a final, audited total. Additional pledges remain possible before the World Bank formally approves the package.
The GEF was founded in 1991 as a World Bank pilot programme and has since provided more than $27 billion in direct financing, while mobilising another $155 billion in co-financing from governments and private partners over three decades of operation. Russia has participated since 1994. Whether a fund established in the era of the Rio Earth Summit retains the institutional agility the current rate of ecological loss actually demands — that question hangs over the Assembly in Samarkand without a clean answer.
—Inputs from RIA Novosti, Sputnik.
