“Nations must dramatically increase climate adaptation efforts, starting with a commitment to act on finance at COP29,” says the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Adaptation Gap Report 2024: Come hell and high water released on November 7, 2024.
The report has been released just days before the start of the 29th Conference of Parties (COP29) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on November 11, 2024.
The report also comes in a year when many developing countries have suffered from catastrophic impacts of weather-related disasters charged by global warming such as the Nepal Floods in late September which killed 224 people and the summer floods in Sudan, Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Chad that killed hundreds of people and displaced millions.
All these flooding events have been attributed to global warming and consequent climate change by the World Weather Attribution collaboration.
The warming that has occurred mainly due to the greenhouse gases (GHG) already in the atmosphere and emitted mostly by developed countries like the United States. On the other hand, the countries where the floods have occurred have historically emitted the least GHGs.
The flooding events also led to a tremendous loss and damage in these countries, leading to an increase in their debt burden, further increasing their adaptation needs and making their fulfilment urgent.
The report says that 2022 showed the greatest year-on-year absolute and relative increase in adaptation finance flows to developing countries which increased from $22 billion in 2021 to $28 billion in 2022. The actual adaptation financing needs for developing countries is a whopping $387 billion per year till 2030.
This shows some progress towards achieving the Glasgow Climate Pact goal of doubling annual adaptation finance flowing from developed to developing countries from 2019 levels of $19 billion to $38 billion. But this is not even close to what is actually required.
“Even achieving the Glasgow Climate Pact goal of doubling adaptation finance to at least US$38 billion by 2025 would only cut the adaptation finance gap of US$187-359 billion by about 5 per cent,” says the report.
The needs of many developing countries are only set to rise further as the world hurtles towards crossing the 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, which is the ambitious goal that countries agreed to achieve under the Paris Agreement in 2015.
The recently released UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report actually puts the planet on a pathway towards a rise in global average temperature rise of 2.6°C to 3.1°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100.
The Adaptation Gap Report also finds that the progress on planning and implementation of national adaptation plans has been slow. On planning, 171 countries have at least one national adaptation planning instrument such as a policy or a strategy document. Of the 26 countries which do not have such an instrument, 10 have not shown the inclination to develop one.
“Seven of these countries are conflict-affected or fragile states and will require significant tailored support if the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience target on planning is to be achieved by 2030,” says the report. The UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience (UAE-FGCR) Target was established as the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) at the UNFCCC COP28 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Under the UAE-FGCR, many thematic and dimensional targets and enabling factors were established to be achieved by countries through their national adaptation plans. The dimensional targets are Impact, vulnerability and risk assessment; Planning; Implementation and Monitoring, evaluation and learning and the thematic targets are Agriculture and food; Ecosystems and biodiversity; Water; Infrastructure and human settlements; Health; Poverty and livelihoods and Cultural heritage.
Further, the report warns that the “evaluations of projects implemented with support from the financing entities under the UNFCCC show that approximately half are either not satisfactory or unlikely to be sustainable without project funds in the longer term”.
The progress in implementation of national adaptation plans of countries also leave much to more to be done in terms of scale and speed of work as what is happening “is inadequate in light of mounting climatic risks”.
The required fulfilment of adaptation needs would come from bridging the adaptation finance gap of $187-359 billion with finances that are non-debt increasing such as grants and concessional loans. Most of the current financing is in the form of high interest loans which increase the debt burden of developing countries further.
The report suggests other innovative financing instruments such as “risk finance, insurance-linked instruments, performance-based grants, resilience credits and bonds, debt for adaptation swaps, and payments for ecosystem services”.
“The increase needed in finance flows for adaptation could be supported by reforms being proposed for international finance institutions and multilateral development banks,” says the report.
In addition to finances, the required transfer of technologies and building capacity in developing countries by developed countries is also not on track according to the Adaptation Gap Report.
Another interesting point made by the report to meet the adaptation financing needs is the shift from “a focus on short-term, project-based and reactive action to more anticipatory, strategic and transformational adaptation”.
The report states that this transformational adaptation would require more action in sectors that are harder to finance. Treating adaptation like mitigation with focus on only technical options and concentrating on easier to finance areas only will not work, as per the report.
The term ‘transformational adaptation’ was a bone of contention and debate for many developing countries at COP28 last year, but a paragraph on it was retained in the final text on GGA.
The paragraph recognised the challenges for implementing transformational adaptation for countries that have significant capacity constraints.
Transformational adaptation was something concerning for some developing country groups throughout the eight Glasgow Sharm El-Sheikh (GlaSS) work programme workshops on the GGA framework in 2022 and 2023. This was mainly because of a lack of definition about what transformational adaptation exactly entails.
The report also pointed out that to understand the true progress of the national adaptation plans under the UAE-FGCR would be difficult without the required metrics and indicators to measure progress which have still not been established.