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The Global Environment Facility’s governing body has agreed to allocate $291 million from the GEF Trust Fund for a set of 30 high-impact initiatives to address illegal fishing, bolster island economies, curb pollution, and regenerate farmlands with blended finance, while helping align public policies with environmental priorities.
The new funding approved by the GEF Council during its 70th meeting will support activities spanning 56 countries, including 21 Small Island Developing States and 21 Least Developed Countries. The investment is expected to generate $1.8 billion in co-financing, or $7 for each GEF dollar.
With this decision, Council members representing the multilateral fund’s 186 participant countries have allocated 83 percent of the financing available in the current four-year funding cycle. There is one more Council meeting remaining in the GEF-8 period, due to take place in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, in May-June 2026.
Most environmental targets for the GEF-8 period have been met or surpassed, and others are on the cusp of realization, due in large part to the ambitiousness of the latest work program that was approved during the virtual Council meeting.
The approved initiatives include Unlocking Blue Pacific Prosperity, a Pacific-wide effort to protect and sustainably manage marine habitats. GEF funding will bolster the efforts of at least 12 Pacific Small Island Developing States and benefit more than 3 million people across the region as countries ramp up their collaboration. This Pacific marine project, along with a global effort to combat illegal tuna fishing, are set to prompt major advances in bringing over-exploited marine fisheries to sustainable levels.
Land restoration efforts will also get a significant boost from the GEF’s blended finance project supporting Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru as they accelerate and scale up the adoption of regenerative agriculture practices across multiple food supply chains. This initiative blends resources from the GEF with IFC concessional funding and co-financing from commercial financial institutions to de-risk investments and incentivize sustainable practices. GEF funding will be used either for sustainability-linked loans with interest rate reductions to incentivize regenerative practices, or for subordinated loans to de-risk commercial bank loans to farmers.
Other notable projects approved by the GEF Council include efforts to combat land degradation affecting Indian pastoralists and Malawi farmers; funding to strengthen joint stewardship of the Cubango-Okavango river basin, a globally significant and regionally vital water system connecting Angola, Botswana, and Namibia; and initiatives in Madagascar focused on electric mobility systems as well as sustainable wetland management.
The GEF Trust Fund work program also includes a special focus on policy coherence, with proposed projects in Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico aiming to foster alignment, integrated planning, and knowledge exchange across diverse government ministries in support of improved environmental outcomes. In Mexico, the efforts to strengthen policy coherence will focus on the country’s first deforestation-free, low-emission livestock policy to bring more than 460,000 hectares of productive landscapes under more sustainable land management and sequester 60 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.