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UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 13-- More than 39 million U.S. dollars in funding was approved on Wednesday for a project that will build resilience and mitigate the effects of climate change, benefitting nearly 1 million Nepalis, the UN-backed Green Climate Fund (GCF) said. Co-funding the initiative, Nepal's Ministry of Forests and Environment (MoFE) is adding another 8 million U.S. dollars for a total of more than 47 million U.S. dollars, which will see the project to fruition over the course of seven years, GCF said in a press release Wednesday. Communities in the Churia hills region, the southernmost range of the Himalayan foothills, running east-west through Nepal, will be targeted as it provides vital ecosystem functions to the heavily-populated plains downstream where the most fertile agricultural land is located. "This major GCF contribution... will benefit more than 200,000 households in the Churia hills," said Somsak Pipoppinyo, UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) representative to Nepal, noting that it would help rural families to "become more resilient to the changing environment in which they find themselves." Decades of unsustainable use of natural resources have resulted in forest degradation, floods and soil erosion. And the negative effects on downstream communities have been exacerbated by increased droughts and extreme weather events precipitated by the climate crisis. It is predicted those impacts will intensify in coming years, further threatening food security and livelihoods, said the press release. | 
