As climate change grows more intense, adaptation finance has become the most pressing necessity at this critical point, according to the United Nations Environment Programme’s latest report, dubbed the Adaptation Gap Report 2024: Come Hell and High Water. Despite reaffirmation pledges by developed countries to supply more funds, it shows a far cry from the actual financing required for developing countries to adapt to climate change impacts. This is a gap amounting to between $187-359 billion annually, which would pose a formidable challenge to international adaptation efforts.
Increasing Demand for Climate Adaptation Finance
Developed countries were, at the 2021 UN Climate Conference in Glasgow, encouraged to double adaptation financing for developing nations by 2025. This should advance from a currently modest level of about $19 billion in 2019. The Glasgow Climate Pact further reiterated the significance of adaptation finance, making the call on developed countries to report their progress toward this goal by 2024. However, the UNEP reports that despite the rising adaptation funding to $28 billion in 2022 from $22 billion in 2021, the gap remains huge between needs and finance flows for adaptation.
Funding Gap and International Climate Obligations
The UNEP report shows that filling the adaptation finance gap will only realize 5 percent with efforts for achieving the Glasgow goal. This therefore means that the urgency of this gap can be buttressed by the fact that climate change impacts become more destructive and ravage vulnerable regions.
Funding gaps pose significant risks to developing nations, because they are so often at the sharp end of climate impacts yet lack the financial muscle to adapt accordingly. In fact, developing countries have adaptation costs which include building climate-resilient infrastructure and early warning systems for extreme weather.
The UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen highlighted the need for urgent action, pointing out that current levels create a gap and leave poor and vulnerable communities insufficiently equipped to respond to existing climate change impacts. With a global rise in temperature still below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the impacts already are severe and continue to increase without taking direct action.
Adaptation Finance: Transitioning from Reactive to Strategic Approaches
It highlights the transformation of adaptation finance, from how this evolution can be progressed-from incremental measures, taken in response to emergencies, to a more comprehensive, proactive approach. According to UNEP, transformative adaptation policies and measures should be commensurate with the scale of climate change impacts.
This can be done by adopting long-term strategic thinking instead of short-term project-based thinking. Presently, adaptation projects focus on immediate needs, but the scale and kinds of adaptation required call for much broader, transformative action that could stand up against worsening climate impacts. The strategic shift would require high investment in infrastructure, community resilience, and capacity building in sectors.
Who Should Pay for Adaptation?
One of the key issues the report raises is who pays for adaptation. As UNEP points out, under existing finance arrangements, climate adaptation will largely be paid for by the developing countries concerned, which would largely violate the principles of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” as well as the “polluter pays” principle, which together form the basis of international climate agreements.
These principles recommend a greater adaptation cost burden for the developed countries, as they are the largest emitters, despite their major historical role in greenhouse gas emissions. But many developing countries still assume large shares of adaptation costs, which reduce already very thin budgets and slow the pace of climate resilience efforts.
Closing Funding Gaps at COP29
The report by UNEP is urging governments, especially in the developed world, to raise the ante in adaptation financing ahead of COP29, the next UN climate conference. According to the report, without sharper commitments from developed nations, the developing countries will continue experiencing the burden of heavy adaptation. The report also advocates for the more innovative uses of international public finance that will now address the gaps strategically.
The previous Emissions Gap Report, published by UNEP last month, concludes that in the absence of strong cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, the world is headed for a warm-up of 2.6-3.1 degrees Celsius this century. This will stand in stark contrast to the agreed limit on the 1.5 degree Celsius warming ceiling set in Paris, thus bringing in urgent focus both on emissions reduction and on adaptation financing.
Compliance with Adaptation Goals
Least Developed Countries
The world’s least developed countries, most vulnerable and directly hit by climate change, have zero adaptation finance that would fill in the gaps to seal the hole. According to the UNEP report released recently, it indicated that at least 171 countries had national adaptation policy, strategy, or plan. The progress is being made because out of these 51 percent possessed a secondary plan while 20 percent had started implementing their third adaptation plan.
This report, however, shows that adoption measures were lagging behind. Of course, enough funds were not available to implement such strategies. The fertile measures such as flood defenses, drought-resistant agriculture, and resilient infrastructure require considerable financial support in developing countries.
International Trends of Global Warming and Urgency
Fresh data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service also puts the urgency of climate action into perspective, stating that the year 2024 is almost assured to be the warmest in records and may soon have temperatures above by at least 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. That second-warmest October set a pathway toward what promises to be the hottest year on record and hammers home once again the pace of global warming and the imperative to adapt and mitigate now.
Reimagining Climate Finance for a Resilient Future
The UNEP report argues for radical redirection of adaptation finance management and its disbursement. The organization recommends that the more strategic approach to adaptation finance should be adopted to target regions and sectors where it can make a difference-elsewhere, rather than continuing piecemeal projects to scalable and resilient solutions for supporting communities in their adaptation of worsening climate impacts.
With COP29 around the corner, it is going to be increased pressure on the international community to put adaptation finance right at the heart of the climate negotiation table. Added adaptation funds along with inventive approaches will help developed nations to bridge this gap while ensuring the integrity of international climate agreements and ensuring a much more sustainable future for those communities in developing countries.
Source: UNEP