The core message in the UNEP report is as simple as saying that as climate impacts intensify, adaptation action continues to fall far behind felt and actual human needs
By Salam Rajesh
The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)’s newest publication, ‘Adaptation Gap Report 2024’, has this hard-hitting message for the world community: As fires and floods hit the poor hardest, it is time for the world to step up adaptation actions.
The core message in the UNEP report is as simple as saying that as climate impacts intensify, adaptation action continues to fall far behind felt and actual human needs.
For the uninitiated, the adaptation gap refers to the ‘difference between actually implemented adaptation and a societally set goal, determined largely by preferences related to tolerated climate change impacts, and reflecting resource limitations and competing priorities’.
UNEP’s Executive Director, Inger Andersen has this to say: Global average temperature rise is still below 1.5°C, yet climate change is already hitting communities across the world hard, particularly the most poor and vulnerable. And it will get much worse, the latest estimates put the world on course for a temperature rise of 2.6 to 3.1°C this century unless there is urgent and ambitious mitigation.
The discussion in the report centers around four main topics of the AGR 2024, which are: (1) progress in adaptation planning, implementation and finance, (2) bridging the adaptation finance gap, (3) enhancing capacity building and technology transfer to improve the effectiveness of adaptation actions, and (4) insights into aspects of the United Arab Emirates Framework for Global Climate Resilience (UAE FGCR) that was agreed at COP28 in Dubai.
While acknowledging that the quality of adaptation planning globally is improving, the report says that achieving global coverage of national adaptation planning instruments is still going to be difficult.
This reflects upon the difficulty of negotiations amongst the carious nations marked by the global divide between the global north and the global south with much differing opinions on implementable actions and the myriad hurdles on the fossil fuel emission issues. The Dubai climate summit and COP29 in progress at Baku in Azerbaijan is criticized as dominated by the fossil fuel-based industrial lobby, sidelining critical dialogues on the climate issues.
The assessment is further amplified by the report which does not hesitates in saying that the progress in adaptation implementation is rather slow and marred with several problems. Countries need to ramp up their ambitions to prepare for increasing climate risks, it forewarned the slacking and indifferent nations.
Meeting the climate challenge will not only require a scaling up of adaptation finance but also a more strategic approach to investment, the AGR 2024 stressed while emphasizing that to meet the scale of the climate change challenge, adaptation financing needs to shift from the historic focus on reactive, incremental and project-based financing towards more ‘anticipatory, strategic and transformational adaptation’.
Given the barriers to adaptation, the report outlines that there is a need for enabling factors to help unlock adaptation finance, for both the public and the private sectors. Elaborating on this, the AGR 2024 report highlights that for the public sector there are a number of enabling factors that include the ‘creation of funds and financing facilities, climate fiscal planning and climate budget tagging, mainstreaming in national development planning and medium-term expenditure frameworks, and adaptation investment planning’.
Better capacity-building and technology transfer could accelerate adaptation planning and implementation, the report stressed, while hinting that interventions to support capacity-building should start by identifying and mobilizing endogenous capacities that already exist, provide a balance of emphasis on ‘hard’ (e.g. technologies) and ‘soft’ (e.g. enabling conditions) capacities, and place gender equality and social inclusion considerations at their centre. The focus on gender equality in matters of collective decisions at the grassroots and in the implementation of ground-rooted activities at adaptation is seen as pathways to success towards achieving set goals.
Critically examining that current priorities locally and globally are often too narrow, technical, and focused on responding to international commitments or immediate crises, limiting efforts towards deeper change, the AGR 2024 laid particular emphasis on enabling capacity-building and technology transfer plans that support adaptation across all sectors, scales and development priorities, and build capacity for transformational change.
The transformational change being hinted at resounds on the growing global call for planning and activation of works that are primarily ground-rooted and focused on actual implementation at the grassroots with active participation of all relevant stakeholders including elders, women and children.
Different civil society organizations and indigenous groups around the world have consistently emphasized that the traditional knowledge and wisdom of age-old practices committed to by Indigenous Peoples and local communities through generations, and supported by scientific reasoning, can address adaptation processes successfully on the ground.
This further resounds on the UNEP report’s thrust on bridging the gap between capacity and technology needs, and the levels of action on the ground that requires overcoming multifaceted challenges. One distinctive challenge that always crops up between States and the IPLCs is the gap of information and trust deficit on decisive matters that undermine the long-term impacts on land and people due to the push for ‘developmental’ agendas of the State minus people’s active participation.
Based on the assessment that most developing countries expressed the need for more capacity and technology across all aspects of adaptation planning and implementation, with a focus on water, food and agriculture, the report categorically called upon all relevant stakeholders to work on a common agenda that addresses communities across frontiers and physical barriers (political boundaries).
The world today is faced with myriad issues on the observed impacts of global warming, climate change and extreme weather events that unrelentlessly had wreak havoc in many of the countries around the world during these recent years, irrespective of political affiliations or the isolation. Thousands of families recently had been impacted by unprecedented droughts, wildfires, floods, storms, cyclones, and heat waves across the seven continents, sparing almost none.