Inertia: Collins Nzovu, chairperson of the African group of negotiators on climate change, criticised the limited progress on the crucial issue of adaptation at COP28. Photo: Dominika Zarzycka/Getty Images
As the United Nations climate change summit drew to a close in Dubai this week, with most of the focus on fossil fuels, another key priority was seemingly overshadowed: how vulnerable countries will adapt to damaging climate impacts now and in the future.
In 2015, the Paris Agreement established a Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), aimed at enhancing adaptive capacity, strengthening resilience and reducing vulnerability to climate change.
The GGA is meant to serve as a unifying framework that can drive political action and finance for adaptation on the same scale as mitigation, according to the World Resources Institute. This means setting specific, measurable targets and guidelines for global adaptation action as well as enhancing adaptation finance and support for developing countries.
The GGA is a playbook for how the world is going to adapt to the climate change that is already happening and will continue to happen, “even if we stopped using fossil fuels today”, Climate Action Network International said on Monday.
“The new text on the global goal on adaptation highlights serious gaps on securing a strong outcome on adaptation from COP28. Communities on the front line deserve far better.”
Adaptation is not optional. “The most vulnerable cannot be made to choose between preventing dangerous climate change by delivering a phase-out of fossil fuels and dealing with the inevitable impact of climate change,” it said, noting how the new text falls short on what developing countries have been asking for.
The goal for 2023 was to raise $300 million for the Adaptation Fund, but at COP28, “we’ve only seen $169m in pledges, a mere 56% of the intended amount”, it stated.
Adaptation is a “matter of life and death for Africa”, said Collins Nzovu, the chair of the African group of negotiators on climate change, who called out the slow progress on adaptation, specifically on the GGA.
He told a briefing this week that a strong agreement on adaptation was the “most important outcome” for Africa at COP28.
“If we are serious about saving lives, livelihoods and protecting ecosystems, then the GGA framework must have ambitious, time-bound targets with clear means of support for implementation.”
This includes finance, capacity-building and technology transfer, which are a “cornerstone” of the GGA. African countries, he said, could not agree to an adaptation framework featuring “process-based targets” without specified outcomes.
Despite the strain on African budgets and the increasing debt burden, governments have committed significant domestic resources on adaptation. “However, only scaled-up, adequate and predictable international public finance can close the widening gap. Means of implementation is therefore the cornerstone for realising the GGA and its framework.
“Africa cannot accept a GGA framework without means of implementation from developed countries for developing countries, especially on the targets.”
Last month, the United Nations Environment Programme’s Adaptation Gap report 2023 found that the adaptation finance needs of developing countries are 10 to 18 times as great as international public finance flows — more than 50% higher than previous estimates.
Public multilateral and bilateral adaptation finance flows to developing countries declined to about $21 billion in 2021. The report said the updated costs of adaptation for developing countries are estimated to be in a plausible range of $215 billion to $387 billion a year this decade.
This yawning adaptation gap is “sadly the result of years of developed countries’ reluctance to fund adaptation”, Nzovu wrote this month.
“Over the years, we in the Global South have seen how developed countries are comfortable funding mitigation activities that reduce emissions but seem not to care much about the people already suffering the impacts of climate change. Could it be because the people who need adaptation are not their people?”
Because climate change is largely driven by fossil fuel burning by developed countries, it’s not only their moral obligation but their legally binding obligation under the climate convention to provide support to developing countries. “It’s an outrage that they haven’t done so,” noted Nzovu, who is Zambia’s minister of green economy and environment.
Citing the “grand promises” developed country partners have failed to fulfil, “in 2009, for instance, they made their now famous pledge to commit $100 billion per year in climate finance by 2020, which long remained elusive. In 2021, they promised to double their adaptation support, which they also have not delivered”.
Climate finance requires a minimum of $2.4 trillion of transformative grant-based investment and transfer of technology for climate adaptation and mitigation by 2030, said Fadhel Kaboub, an associate professor of economics and the president of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. “We are nowhere near that target at the end of COP28.”
Climate finance is a climate debt owed by the historic polluters of the Global North to Global South countries that are on the front lines of climate change. He said the Global North is refusing to pay its debt.
“If you owe me $100, you are supposed to pay me. Instead, you give me a $10 loan with conditionalities to control how I use my money. You give me another $10 in exchange for having control over my forests (aka carbon markets). You invest another $10 in green electricity that I must export to you on favourable terms. You outsource another $10 worth of low value-added manufacturing to produce cheap consumer goods for you.” None of this should count as climate finance. “It is a climate debt default greenwashed with neocolonial debt traps,” Kaboub said.
The latest text on the GGA is “utterly disappointing” and an “injustice” to people on the front line of the climate crisis, said Amy Giliam Thorp, an adaptation and resilience policy adviser at Kenyan-based think-tank Power Shift Africa.
“Shockingly, the text is even weaker, more vague in many areas, and lacking in ambition to fast-track adaptation action,” she said. “There are no improvements in targets for thematic areas or the adaptation policy cycle, while concrete targets for an overarching global goal and means of implementation (like technology transfer, capacity building, and finance) are noticeably absent.”
The resilience of African people and countries is “hanging by a thread”, yet developed nations — the United States, United Kingdom and European Union — have continued to block the inclusion of adequate support and finance for developing countries to bolster adaptation efforts.
The negotiations and the latest iteration of the text is set to corrode trust between developed and developing nations. A framework focused on action without concrete targets, especially to support developing countries, is “pointless and toothless”.
Thorp said adaptation must be a priority for Africa because it is facing so many extreme weather events. “Without an ambitious GGA framework, particularly calling for finance, we’re not going to be able to address these issues. Our countries, our governments, and our people are having to deal with the consequences and the costs of those impacts already.”
That more than half of the finance the continent is receiving for adaptation is in the form of loans “is only making the debt situation of many African countries more onerous”.
Africa’s group of climate negotiators conceptualised the GGA in 2013 and it was enshrined in the Paris Agreement in 2015.
Thorp says this is something that’s often forgotten. “It’s actually the second goal of the Paris Agreement, which means it’s equally important. But what we’ve seen with COP28 is an emphasis on mitigation and a kind of sidelining of adaptation … and moving straight to commitments and pledges on loss and damage.”
COP28 began with a historic agreement on a loss and damage fund to help developing countries cope with the effects of climate change and initial financial commitments worth millions of dollars were made.
Thorp said the failure to secure an ambitious GGA framework, which includes clear time-bound and measurable targets for the overarching global goal and clear strong language on the means of implementation, “would really mark this COP as a huge disappointment and failure for the Global South”.
While it’s “fantastic” that loss and damage was agreed to on the first day of COP28, “those commitments are still in the millions and not in the billions, which is what we need”.
“If we don’t have adaptation in place, losses and damages are only going to escalate.”