Dramatic rise in adaptation efforts, finance needed: UN

Climate risks are growing as global warming hastens, and work on adaptation must accelerate substantially, including scaling up finance between five- and ten-fold to tackle the issue, the UN said today in its 2022 Adaptation Gap Report.

"We cannot use other global crises as excuses for inaction," UN environment programme (UNEP) executive director Inger Andersen said. She said extreme climate events, such as flooding earlier this year in Pakistan, are taking place at around 1.1°C above pre-industrial temperatures, while based on current policies global warming is set to hit 2.8°C by the end of the century.

Greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced to comply with the Paris Agreement and the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C, but adaptation is needed to minimise the effect of climate change and avoid losses wherever possible, the report said.

Efforts on adaptation "continue to make incremental progress but fail to keep pace with increasing climate risks," and planning, research, monitoring and "more and better finance" must all rapidly increase, UNEP said. It called for stronger international co-operation.

Adaptation finance for developing countries reached $29bn in 2020, up by 4pc on the year, UNEP data show. But the organisation estimates between $160bn/yr and $340bn/yr is needed by 2030. Taking inflation into account, it said between $315bn/yr and $565bn/yr will be required by 2050. Developed countries at the UN Cop 26 summit in November 2021 agreed to double support for adaptation in developing countries to $40bn/yr by 2025.

Beyond significant increases in adaptation finance, developed countries should at the upcoming Cop 27 present "a credible roadmap with clear milestones on how this will be delivered — preferably as grants, not loans," UN secretary general Antonio Guterres said. Better climate risk data are needed, he said and he reiterated his call for universal early warning systems for extreme weather events.

A business model to ensure finance reaches the right adaptation projects is required, Guterres said. The UN, with other climate funds, will present a pilot at Cop 27, he said.

But even "ambitious investment in adaptation" cannot halt some impact from climate change, so the topic of loss and damage must be addressed both by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and individually by countries, the report found. Adaptation and loss and damage are at the top of the agenda for the Egyptian presidency of Cop 27.

By Georgia Gratton