Bill Gates outraged much of the climate advocacy world late last month when he called for a “strategic pivot” in climate action. The Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist argued for attention to be shifted away from global temperature goals and toward work to prepare for the consequences of global warming. Or, in United Nations parlance, a shift from climate change mitigation to adaptation.
While Gates’ call has sparked controversy among those who want faster globalization decarburizationThere is already broad consensus that adaptation – building infrastructure that will help poorer countries in particular cope with fires, floods and droughts – is significantly underfunded. The 2015 Paris Agreement promotes both mitigation and adaptation, but the latter has proven consistently more difficult to finance than the former: 64% of international climate-related finance has gone to mitigation, and only 17% to adaptation (of which 17% has gone to both pools).
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Negotiators at the 30th U.N. Conference of the Parties, or COP — the annual summit where world leaders meet to implement the Paris Agreement and coordinate responses to climate change — appear determined to begin to bridge that gap, even if the details are still hard to come by. At a press conference on Wednesday, EU Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra was asked three times whether the 27-nation bloc supported a nascent plan that would triple adaptation funding for vulnerable countries, from the current target of around $40 billion to $120 billion a year by 2030. On three occasions, the Dutch politician politely responded.
“Adaptation is at the very heart of the conversation we’re having,” he said. “We think there is a huge opportunity to get more money to those who need it. »
In translation: Many countries represented at COP30, as the conference is called, agree that the world’s rich nations must shell out billions of dollars in additional funding so that poorer countries can protect themselves against climate-driven disasters. Indeed, the world’s richest countries are disproportionately responsible for climate change, emitting the lion’s share of historic emissions. greenhouse gaswhile countries that have contributed little to the crisis are the least prepared to face it.
But in reality, committing that money is a different story, even for the EU, which is widely recognized as the global leader on climate action among developed countries. The success of COP30, in the eyes of many leaders of developing countries, depends on the need to concretely quantify these gestures of goodwill.
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“We really need more resources for adaptation,” Giovanna Valverde Stark, special adviser on climate change to Costa Rica’s foreign ministry, said midway through the final week of deliberations Wednesday (the two-week conference, which began Nov. 10, ends Friday). “For all developing countries, increasing the adaptation fund and provisions is extremely important.”
But achieving a goal like financing adaptation — a goal that becomes increasingly important as climate-driven extreme weather events cause billions of dollars in damage each year — is easier said than done when one of the world’s richest players, the United States, is nowhere to be found.
The United States did not send any high-level officials to the COP this year. Since Donald Trump assumed the presidency for the second time in January, his administration has cut international climate, security and aid funding while withdrawing, for the second time, from the Paris Agreement. At the same time, Trump launched a series of trade wars with countries around the world, imposing new tariffs and fueling global economic instability. Many other major countries are also reducing their aid funding, due to a wide variety of political and economic pressures that have emerged in the decade since the signing of the Paris Agreement, such as the ongoing war in Ukraine.
“The EU will seek assistance from other developed countries to help it scale up its efforts, and the U.S. position makes that more difficult now,” said Matt Webb, associate director for global clean energy diplomacy at E3G, a climate change think tank.
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In this context, tripling adaptation funding from its current level, to less than $33 billion provided in 2022, may seem like a failure. And financing is just one piece of the adaptation puzzle negotiated at the COP. Delegates are also expected to define up to 100 “adaptation indicators,” which are metrics to track the effectiveness of measures countries are taking to strengthen themselves against climate change, in terms of lives and money saved.
These indicators are the subject of heated debate. They must be relevant to all countries implementing them, and they cannot be too expensive, requiring countries to pursue legal reforms or spend unreasonable amounts of money developing new monitoring infrastructure. For example, measuring the degree of stress that water bodies are under can help countries understand whether they are overexploiting their freshwater resources. Tracking the percentage of a given country’s sanitation systems that are upgraded to meet climate resilience standards could be another useful indicator.
“The whole discussion right now is about the importance of indicators,” Stark said. “If you don’t have a baseline, you can’t measure ongoing progress.”
The adaptation indicators and the goal of at least tripling funding for this type of work are just one part of a major financing effort underway at COP30. At last year’s conference in Azerbaijan, negotiators set a new minimum floor of $300 billion per year for climate finance for developing countries by 2035, with a broader goal of mobilizing $1.3 trillion per year through a variety of financing mechanisms. Determining how to make this mobilization a reality is one of the many questions countries are trying to resolve. Finance must compete for attention, for example, with the ongoing debate over the formal language that commits the world to abandoning fossil fuels – another issue on which consensus will be hard-won, if even achievable.
Yet at this stage of the negotiations, observers – non-governmental organizations, diplomats and conference coordinators – are hopeful that the adaptation debate is moving in a positive direction. The same goes for delegates from developing countries. “I’m optimistic,” Stark said.
Pratishtha Singh, head of international diplomacy at the climate activist group Climate Action Network Canada, said it was high time for developed countries to provide additional financial aid. “Our partners in the South are telling us very clearly that without the financial support, it is just a hollow framework,” she said.
That’s why observers are hoping, at the very least, for formal recognition that adaptation finance is an important part of the $1.3 trillion target set last year and, ideally, a new specific spending target set at COP30.
“If it’s not fixed, we have to keep pushing,” said Emilie Beauchamp, an adaptation expert at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a think tank, who is involved in the adaptation talks. “We must continue to demand it – and start tracking how financial flows flow. »
