Author: Lazar Pop Ivanov, Regional Project Manager, Balkan Climate Adaptation Futures
Ask a civil society organization in Bitola about drought-resistant agriculture, a cooperative in Trebinje about flood-resilient housing, a women-led enterprise in Podgorica about early warning systems or a green infrastructure enterprise in Novi Sad about cooling an overheating city, and you’ll get answers shaped by years of living with the problem: what has been tried, what failed, and what actually works in that place.
The people in these organizations have lived through the impacts of climate change for years, tested and adjusted adaptation solutions in real time, building local knowledge that external assessments can rarely match in speed or cost-efficiency. Across Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia, these patterns of grassroots ingenuity are strikingly consistent, yet innovators often work in isolation.
The 2014 floods along the Sava and Bosna rivers forced thousands in the region to leave their homes. Increasingly, wildfires and heatwaves arrive earlier and hit harder each year. Those first impacted are rural and agricultural communities, women, and marginalized groups, often developing solutions with little additional support.
Development policies have, at times, treated local actors primarily as recipients of knowledge and advice overlooking their role as co-creators. But proximity to a problem is a vital source of expertise. A local organization that has spent three years distributing water during a drought understands the failure points of a regional water system better than a top-down analysis can capture alone. For climate solutions to advance at the pace of the crisis, policy decisions must draw on the knowledge and lived experiences of those facing its impacts firsthand.
That is one of the premises behind the Balkan Climate Adaptation Futures initiative, and it is also where the regional design of the initiative becomes the centre rather than a footnote. A single country can support and fund impactful local pilots. What is more challenging to achieve individually, however, is turning those pilots into something more than isolated wins.
Four countries facing structurally similar climate risks, connected rather than siloed, can build a dynamic ecosystem: a shared pipeline of tested solutions, a shared investor base and a shared body of evidence that travels across borders to maximize regional impact. It recognizes that adaptation innovation in the Western Balkans has frequently remained localized and fragmented because the collaboration infrastructure hasn’t been in place to sustain a good idea and put it into practice.
The other premise is about what happens after a pilot works. Grant programmes are reasonably good at seeding ideas: a call for proposals, distribution of grants, a pilot that either succeeds or doesn’t. Programmes are rarely built to carry out a promising solution through the slower, less visible work of becoming scalable or investable, which means refining a business model, testing a market, and finding other sources of funding. Drawing directly on lessons from the first phase of the Adaptation Fund Climate Innovation Accelerator (AFCIA), which demonstrated that catalytic grants only deliver lasting impact when paired with structured business coaching and operational readiness, the Balkan Climate Adaptation Futures initiative is now designed to do both.
This initiative, financed by the Adaptation Fund and implemented by UNDP, will identify and fund locally led adaptation solutions, with deliberate attention to those led by the communities most exposed to climate risks. To help promising solutions grow beyond the pilot stage, BOOST, UNDP’s acceleration programme, supporting impact innovators in Europe and Central Asia, will provide the technical and business support they need to reach investors, markets and the public systems that can take them to scale.
The effects of climate change know no borders. The Sava and the Drina don’t stop at country limits; neither do droughts or summer heat. An approach to protecting farmland from repeated flooding that works in one river basin is relevant to communities on the other bank. A way of cooling neighborhoods tested in Novi Sad can be adapted in Skopje or Sarajevo within months rather than years. The Balkan Climate Adaptation Futures regional knowledge and learning platform is meant to facilitate this exchange across the region, so that what works in one country can be picked up, tested and improved in the next, instead of being rediscovered from scratch.
The initiative invites civil society organizations and enterprises to show up, whether with an early idea, a promising experiment or a solution you have already tested, and to find a real pathway (technical, financial and regional) for it to reach beyond your own community. For private sector and investment partners, it offers a pipeline of local innovations built from grassroots efforts, rather than designed top-down in the hope that the market follows.
The climate crisis in the Western Balkans needs to build stronger networks of support for local climate adaptation solutions. This project is designed to help build these connections – linking local innovators with funding, technical support and opportunities to learn across borders, placing the people with the local knowledge at the centre of the process.
If you’re a civil society organization or a business in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia or Serbia, sign up here to receive updates on our upcoming call for innovative solutions and other opportunities.
