Imma Perfetto
Cosmos science journalist
Nations are not doing enough to address the rising impacts of climate change the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) latest Adaptation Gap Report 2024: Come hell and high water has found.
The report recommends a dramatic scale up of adaptation efforts this decade, starting with a commitment to act on finance at COP29.
Global average temperatures are rapidly approaching 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, and, according to the report, “mitigation action is woefully underachieving on the scale and ambition needed to keep within the long-term temperature goals of the Paris Agreement”.
Despite contributing least to the climate change crisis, developing nations are being hit hardest by increasing loss and damage due to climate change and are already struggling with increasing debt burdens as a result.
The “adaptation finance gap” reflects the need for a fair and equitable flow of money from developed countries, which are disproportionally responsible for the historic and current greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change, to developing nations to help effectively and adequately adapt.
The report found that while international public adaptation finance flows from developed countries to developing countries is increasing, it is nowhere close to making up the adaptation finance gap, which is estimated to be AU$328-591 billion (US$215-387 billion) per year.
The report calls for nations to step up to the challenge by adopting the ambitious New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) for climate finance next week at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan.
However, given the scale of finance required it says that “NCQG can only be a part of the solution” and will also require “innovative approaches and enabling factors to mobilise additional financial resources.”
It found that a more strategic approach to investment is needed, shifting from “a focus on short-term, project-based and reactive action to more anticipatory, strategic and transformational adaptation”.
Planning and implementation of adaptation within countries is also not increasing fast enough. While 171 countries now have at least 1 national adaptation planning instrument in place, 26 counties do not and 10 show no indication of developing one.
The report urges nations to include stronger adaptation components in their third set of nationally determined contributions (NDCs), due in February 2025.
Executive Director of UNEP, Inger Andersen, says 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,” says Anderson.
“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.”
