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The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation is working to accelerate progress by preparing energy systems for even higher rates of renewables penetration. Photo: Asia Chang
The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) is a London-based foundation funding global interventions in climate change. Over the past five years, CIFF have committed close to US$300 million in grants to increase renewable energy penetration, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and improve air quality around the world.
In November 2018, the Foundation contracted NIRAS to provide a four-and-a-half-year meta-evaluation of their renewable energy portfolio, assessing climate policy and advocacy interventions in China, India, Brazil, Mexico, and Southeast Asia. Since then, our UK team and CIFF have developed a strong relationship built on close engagement and mutual trust.
Based on the quality of services provided under the meta-evaluation, CIFF recently contracted NIRAS UK for a new project: the development of a Climate Change Mitigation Indicator Compendium. This product-focused project aims to develop a best practice manual for results measurement indicators in climate mitigation projects. Sectors of interest include renewable energy, air quality, electric vehicles, energy efficiency, and deforestation, and land use. The project will be split into three core stages: 1) inception and design of the compendium framework; 2) development of the indicator compendium itself; and 3) dissemination of the final product.
During the first phase, the team will work closely with CIFF and other key stakeholders such as ClimateWorks and the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to identify the priority sectors for inclusion in the compendium. We will then design the template for the indicators and conduct a landscape analysis of existing resources to identify existing best practice.
Being a private foundation, CIFF is an exciting funder in the climate change mitigation space, able to reach frontier sectors which traditional donors are slower to support.
The development of the compendium will focus on shortlisting identified indicators and developing user information for them. For example, we hope to be able to provide practical examples of use, different approaches to measurement and limitations for all indicators included in the compendium.
Using our existing relationship with CIFF and their climate grantees, we hope to test the indicators during development with prospective users of the compendium to make sure they are accessible and fit for purpose. The end product will be a PDF manual containing all the indicators and the core guidance information with searchable tags and hyperlinks.
Once the compendium is finalised, we will look at dissemination. The target audience for the product is both the internal CIFF stakeholders including their grantees, as well as the wider external ecosystem of climate change mitigation programmes and actors. Our dissemination plan is currently under development, but we hope to coordinate a number of outputs including online training and webinars to accompany the compendium.
Being a private foundation, CIFF are an exciting funder in the climate change mitigation space, able to reach frontier sectors which traditional donors are slower to support. The NIC UK and CIFF partnership is still relatively young but we are already acting as a critical friend to CIFF, our collaboration is steadily growing and we are excited about the emerging opportunities to strengthen this collaboration in the future.
