CRB researches the climate science for your project context, identifies evidence gaps, and produces a fully cited, GCF-aligned climate rationale — condensed to a polished Concept Note Section C.1.
In minutes, establish whether the evidence for a project exists, where the gaps are, and what would close them. Do this before months of preparation effort are spent.
No account required
It takes a project concept and answers three questions: what climate evidence exists for this geography, sector, and hazard; whether that evidence meets the evidentiary standard the GCF has applied in proposals it has already approved; and where the evidence falls short, what specifically would be needed to close the gap.
It then produces a fully cited climate rationale narrative drawn from that evidence, with every claim traceable to its source document and passage.
Because the most expensive mistake in project preparation is committing months of technical and staff resources to a concept whose evidentiary foundation was never there. CRB surfaces that in minutes rather than after the first review.
For a team deciding where to direct limited preparation capacity, knowing which of three candidate concepts has a defensible evidence base — and which would require new data collection — is a resource allocation decision, not a drafting task.
A general model will find the science — any capable model with web access returns national communications, IPCC chapters, and regional assessments. What it cannot tell you is whether that evidence has ever satisfied a GCF reviewer.
The CRB is grounded in the indexed corpus of approved GCF proposals and the climate science sources cited within them. It answers a different question: not "does evidence exist" but "does this evidence resemble what has actually survived review?"
The principles the Board adopted in Decision B.33/12 (August 2022), set out in Annex VI. For adaptation these are Identification, Response, Alignment, and Monitoring and Evaluation.
For mitigation they cover NDC alignment, methodology selection, project boundaries, baseline and additionality, consistency with national GHG reporting, and MRV design. Outputs are structured against those principles rather than against a generic notion of what a good rationale looks like.
Less than most teams assume. The Board addressed this directly in Decision B.33/12:
"Decides that the use of best available information and data, including from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and from traditional, local and indigenous knowledge and practices is sufficient to form the basis for the demonstration of impact potential for GCF-supported activities, while taking into account the context of the proposal, the different capabilities of accredited entities, and country and regional circumstances."
The same decision explicitly recognizes "the significant variation in information and data availability across countries and contexts." Sufficiency is contextual. CRB assesses your evidence against that standard, not an idealised one.
A gap closable from a national communication is a different decision from one requiring primary data collection. CRB distinguishes between them. The gap analysis outputs:
Why are some sources tagged with a different country?
For LDCs, CRB searches the full regional corpus, not just the target country, so relevant regional data isn't missed. When a source is primarily about a neighbouring country, it's flagged with a Covers [Country] badge for transparency — country-specific claims in the draft are always drawn from country-specific sources only.
No. It produces an evidence-grounded climate rationale narrative and flags what is unsupported. Design decisions, project logic, stakeholder positioning, and the submission itself remain with your team.
Unsupported claims are removed rather than smoothed over — the output reflects what the evidence actually supports, not what a reviewer might want to see.
Try the Climate Rationale Builder on a sample project — no upload required.