Climate Finance: Where is the money going and is it really ensuring water resilience?
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"Climate finance can build [water] tanks, pipes, and treatment plants, but unless it also builds transparency, accountability, and trust, the people most vulnerable to climate change may remain vulnerable even after millions of dollars have been spent."
- MD Abdul Malak, Jagannath University
Integrity Talk 17
June 24, 2026, co-hosted with GIZ
Climate finance is scaling fast, and a need for speed is exactly what our warming planet requires. But speed, combined with complex implementation chains and institutions that are often unprepared to securely handle a massive influx of new money is also exactly where corruption and poor integrity thrive.
In this Integrity Talk, co-hosted by WIN and GIZ, panellists traced what happens when that money moves faster than the safeguards meant to protect it, and what that ultimately costs the people it was meant to reach.
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The challenge of managing increased finance well
Martin Dersch (GIZ) framed the event with a problem that sits underneath everything else discussed: there is still no single, agreed definition of what counts as climate finance, or how to track and monitor it. Layered on top is the "race for adaptation finance", or large volumes of capital needed to move quickly under political and humanitarian pressure, through long, opaque procurement chains, toward institutions that often lack the accountability infrastructure to handle them.
Karen Ernst (Green Climate Fund) described a similar dynamic in relation to growth from within the fund itself: the GCF went from seven approved projects in 2015 to 296 by the end of 2025, backed by USD 16.7 billion in commitments, delivered through a network of more than 200 accredited entities. "That is a very good result for the fund," she said, "but for any integrity function, that also means there is an expanding risk." GCF is, in her words, a "second-line institution" — headquartered outside Seoul, with no direct implementation role and, until its board approved new regional offices, no physical presence anywhere near the projects it funds — meaning that oversight remains tricky.
When the chain breaks before the money reaches
Faith Ngige (Kenya Platform for Climate Governance) walked participants through what oversight challenges can look like on the ground. Kenya's Financing Locally-Led Climate Action (FLLoCA) programme channels funding through the National Treasury to 45 counties and on to community projects — nearly KES 14 billion disbursed and almost half of it to water security. "As the funds proceed to the county level, visibility starts to diminish," she said. "And as the money goes to the project level, you are not even able to follow it all the way." Procurement documents that civil society organisations request are often simply not forthcoming. Her deeper concern was the disconnect between disbursement and outcome: "The challenge is not just money moving, but money should be able to move in a manner that is able to address the very challenge it was designed for."
Ramon Alikpala (Future Water Asia) showed what that breakdown looks like at its most extreme. He opened with an old joke — two ministers compare houses, one built on 20% skimmed from a real bridge, the other on 100% skimmed from a bridge that was never built at all. "That joke describes, unfortunately, with precision what's actually happened in the Philippines." Between 2022 and 2025, roughly USD 11 billion was allocated to flood control (over USD 25 billion since 2011), much of it tied to "ghost projects" — infrastructure paid for in full but never built — across a portfolio of some 30,000 flood-control contracts. More, just 15 of more than 2,400 accredited contractors received about a fifth of the entire budget. "The failure of flood control is not just fiscal waste," he said. "It is fatal" — pointing to an estimated 900–1,000 flood-related deaths in the same period, many in communities where infrastructure had been recorded as complete but was never there.
Md. Abdul Malak (Jagannath University) brought the same failure down to a single name. In a coastal adaptation project in Bangladesh, a widow was surveyed, assessed as eligible, and placed on the beneficiary list for a free rainwater-harvesting tank. Her name later disappeared from the final list with no explanation, while other households described paying informal costs for installations that were meant to be fully funded. "The water tank that was supposed to come in my name was taken by others," she told researchers. "If my name was on the list, why was I left out?"
Audience Q&A - how can we fix some of these problems?
Asked what share of project cost should reasonably go toward accountability, Ernst gave no figure: "Everybody always wants higher standards of integrity, and everybody wants accountability. But that requires resources — financial and human. That's a real commitment funders and partners need to understand." Pressed on balancing rigorous safeguards against the growing complexity of accessing climate finance, her answer was simplification rather than fewer safeguards — bringing standard conditions "down to the core minimum" so under-resourced recipients can actually meet them. Alikpala, drawing on his own experience preparing a GCF concept note, agreed that the safeguard burden is still worthwhile: "It might have been tedious and complicated, but it really provided us some insights on the process."
On what structurally needs to change, Alikpala pointed to three things: procurement transparency, "structurally enforced, not left to administrative discretion"; routine physical verification — community monitoring, satellite checks, third-party audits — rather than reactive inspection; and separating political discretion from technical procurement decisions altogether. He noted the Philippines' e-procurement system covers goods and services but largely excludes large infrastructure, the exact gap the scandal exploited, and described work underway with the Asian Development Bank to benchmark utility costs so outlier pricing becomes harder to hide. Malak offered a smaller but telling illustration of the same weakness: a university tender, open to every registered bidder, that drew only one bid — priced almost exactly to the internal estimate.
On civil society's role, Ngige raised a structural bind: many CSOs monitoring projects financed through the same system they are meant to check, leaving them in what she called "a grey line" that limits how freely they can speak. Her answer was for smaller organisations to pool resources into alliances, since accreditation thresholds for accessing climate finance directly are out of reach for any one of them alone. Alikpala noted a more basic gap in the Philippines: no independent consumer body exists at all to scrutinise water contracts, unlike in some other countries.
What next?
Three tensions ran through the session without being resolved. One: whether funders can genuinely simplify safeguards without weakening them. Two: whether accountability functions will ever be resourced in proportion to the money they are meant to protect. Three: if only a small number of organisations can meet the accreditation thresholds needed to access climate finance directly, how can communities still be the ones driving decisions about what gets built where they live? The underlying question of who gets a seat at the table before money is committed, rather than after, remains open.
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Panellist presentations:
Martin Dersch (GIZ) set out why climate finance — adaptation finance especially — is structurally exposed to integrity risk, pointing to the lack of an agreed definition, the pressure to move funds quickly, and the concentration of financing in sectors like energy. He then connected these challenges for what this means for water security.
Karen Ernst (Green Climate Fund) outlined the mandate of GCF's Independent Integrity Unit and the challenges of running accountability for a fast-growing, arm's-length fund working through 200+ accredited entities.
Ramon Alikpala (Future Water Asia) presented the Philippines flood-control corruption scandal as a case study in systemic capture of procurement, auditing, and verification systems, with direct implications for water and sanitation.
Faith Ngige (Kenya Platform for Climate Governance) traced Kenya's FLLoCA programme from National Treasury to county and ward level, identifying where financial visibility and civil society independence break down.
Md. Abdul Malak (Jagannath University) presented field research from a coastal adaptation project in Bangladesh, using one beneficiary's experience to show how targeting and grievance failures play out at the household level.
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