A recent United Nations Adaptation Report has revealed a stark reality: despite increased climate adaptation efforts worldwide, the financing provided to developing countries falls alarmingly short of the $359 billion annual requirement.
This significant shortfall persists even after the largest annual investment to date, underscoring the urgent need for accelerated progress in adaptation financing.
The report’s findings highlight the substantial gap between the financing needs of developing countries and the actual funds allocated. This disparity hinders effective adaptation planning and implementation, exacerbating the vulnerability of these nations to climate change impacts.
The report from the UN Environment Programme has revealed that funding from developed nations to support climate change adaptation in developing countries reached $28 billion in 2022. This marks a significant increase of $6 billion, the largest single-year rise since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015.
The boost in funding is a step towards meeting the goals set out in the Glasgow Climate Pact, which aims to double adaptation finance to $19 billion by 2025. However, experts warn that even achieving this target would only reduce the estimated $187-359 billion annual adaptation finance gap by about 5 percent.
Despite the progress, the report highlights the urgent need for increased investment to support vulnerable nations in addressing the impacts of climate change. The United Nations has emphasized the importance of accelerated action to adapt to climate change, particularly in this decade.
Inger Andersen, Executive Director of UNEP said: “Climate change is already devastating communities across the world, particularly the most poor and vulnerable. Raging storms are flattening homes, wildfires are wiping out forests, and land degradation and drought are degrading landscapes.”
He added, “people, their livelihoods and the nature upon which they depend are in real danger from the consequences of climate change. Without action, this is a preview of what our future holds and why there simply is no excuse for the world not to get serious about adaptation, now.”
A stark warning from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): current adaptation efforts to combat climate change are woefully insufficient, lacking the scale and urgency required to effectively address the crisis. The focus is often on planning rather than actual implementation, hindered by several barriers, such as data and knowledge gaps, lack if monitoring and evaluation tools, difficulties in accessing finance, and limited integration of adaptation priorities into broader plans and policies.
Despite progress in developing national adaptation strategies, the focus remains on planning rather than implementation, hindered by significant barriers.
However, one of the biggest obstacles to speeding up adaptation is the UNFCCC’s fragmented international negotiations, which have led to endless rounds of debates and implementation inertia. Numerous adaptation-related processes are occurring concurrently, although they are not clearly connected. Identify the link between the processes associated to adaptation and the policy.
Additionally, the report highlighted the widening gap between the funds needed for adaptation – the adjustments needed to slow the rate of global warming – and current levels of publics investment.
Against this backdrop, UNEP called for a “new collective quantified goal” for climate finance at COP29 and including stronger adaptation components in their next round of climate pledges due early next year ahead of COP30 in Belém, Brazil.
COP 29
Looking all the climate urgencies the UN Climate chief, Simon Stiell, stated on the first day of the COP29, “let’s dispense with any idea that climate finance is charity, climate change is impacting “every single individual in the world one way or another.”(UN News)
He further underscored that the UNFCCC process “is the only place where we can address the rampant climate crisis and to credibly hold each other to account to act on it. And we know this process is working. Because without it, humanity would be headed towards five degrees of global warming.”
Giving stark examples of why a new deal on climate finances is so critical, saying that every country would pay a terrible price if at least two-thirds of the entire world’s countries cannot afford to rapidly reduce their emissions.
Furthermore, the entire world economy could collapse if countries are unable to strengthen their supply chains in the face of rising costs linked to climate shocks, such as falling water levels in the Panama Canal which has a dramatic impact on shipping volumes.
As COP29 started, the weather agency of the United Nations, released its State of the Climate 2024 Update and issued a Red Alert on the rapid progression of climate change within a single generation, driven by rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.