Bill Gates outraged much of the climate change world late last month when he called for a “strategic pivot” in climate action. The Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist has advocated for a shift in focus from global temperature targets to working to prepare for the impacts of global warming. Or, in UN parlance, the transition from climate change mitigation to adaptation.
Although Gates' call has sparked controversy among those who want to see faster global decarbonizationThere is already broad consensus that adaptation – building the infrastructure that will help, especially the poorest countries, withstand severe fires, floods and droughts – is significantly underfunded. The 2015 Paris Agreement promotes both mitigation and adaptation, but the latter has proven more difficult to finance than the former: 64 percent of international climate finance went to climate change mitigation and only 17 percent to adaptation (with 17 percent going to both pools).
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Negotiators at the 30th UN Conference of the Parties (COP) – the annual summit where world leaders come together to implement the Paris Agreement and coordinate responses to climate change – appear determined to start closing the gap, although concrete details are still hard to come by. At a news conference on Wednesday, European Union climate commissioner Wopka Hoekstra was asked three times whether the 27-nation bloc supports a nascent plan that would triple adaptation funding for vulnerable countries, from about $40 billion now to $120 billion a year by 2030. Three times the Dutch politician responded politely.
“Adaptation is at the very center of our conversation,” he said. “We think there is a huge opportunity to get more money to people in need.”
Translated: Many countries represented at COP30, as the conference is called, agree that the world's rich countries need to provide billions of dollars in additional funding so that poorer countries can protect themselves from climate-related disasters. That's because the world's richest countries bear disproportionate responsibility for climate change, emitting the lion's share of historical emissions. greenhouse gaseswhile countries that have done little to contribute to the crisis are least prepared to overcome it.
But actually promising that money is a different story – even for the EU, which is widely recognized as a world leader in the fight against climate change among developed countries. The success of COP30, in the eyes of many leaders in developing countries, depends on these gestures of goodwill being backed up by hard numbers.
“We really need more resources for adaptation,” Giovanna Valverde Stark, special adviser on climate change at Costa Rica's Foreign Ministry, said midway through the final week of discussions on Wednesday (the two-week conference, which began Nov. 10, ends Friday). “For all developing countries, increasing adaptation funds and reserves is extremely important.”
But achieving the goal of financing adaptation is a task that will become increasingly important as extreme weather events caused by climate change cause billions of dollars in damage each year — easier said than done when one of the world's richest players, the United States, is nowhere to be found.
This year, the United States did not send high-ranking officials to the Constitutional Court. Since Donald Trump took office for a second time in January, his administration has cut international climate, security and aid funding while withdrawing from the Paris Agreement for a second time. 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 famous countries cuts in aid funding and due to the wide range of political and economic issues that have arisen in the decade since the Paris Agreement, such as the ongoing war in Ukraine.
“The EU will be looking for other developed countries that could help step up, and the U.S. position really makes that difficult now,” said Matt Webb, deputy director of global clean energy diplomacy at E3G, a climate change think tank.
Against this backdrop, adaptation funding has tripled from current levels, less than $33 billion to be delivered in 2022may look unsuccessful. And finance is only part of the adaptation puzzle discussed at the COP. Delegates also need to define up to 100 “adaptation indicatorsThese are measures that track the effectiveness of the steps countries are taking to combat climate change, in terms of lives and dollars saved.
These figures are the subject of heated debate. They must be relevant to all countries implementing them, and they cannot be overly burdensome, forcing countries to undertake legal reforms or spend unreasonable amounts of money developing new tracking infrastructure. For example, measuring the amount of stress that water bodies are under can help countries understand whether they are depleting their freshwater resources. Another useful indicator could be to track the percentage of sanitation systems in a given country that are upgraded to climate-resilient standards.
“The whole discussion now is about the importance of indicators,” Stark said. “If you don't have a baseline, you can't measure the progress that's happening.”
The adaptation indicators and the goal of at least tripling funding for this type of work are just one part of a major funding push coming at COP30. At last year's conference in Azerbaijan, negotiators established new minimum of $300 billion per year to finance climate change in developing countries by 2035, with a broader goal of mobilizing US$1.3 trillion per year through various financing mechanisms. Figuring out how to accomplish this mobilization is one of many issues that countries are grappling with. For example, finance has to compete for attention with ongoing debates on formal issues. language that commits the world to divest from fossil fuels is another issue on which consensus will be difficult, if at all, to achieve.
However, at this stage of the negotiations, audiences – non-governmental organizations, diplomats and conference coordinators – are hopeful that the conversation about adaptation is moving in a positive direction. The same applies to delegates from developing countries. “I’m an optimist,” Stark said.
Pratishta Singh, manager of international diplomacy at climate activist group Climate Action Network Canada, said now is the time for developed countries to provide more aid funding. “We hear very clearly from our partners in the Global South that without financial support, this is just an empty structure,” she said.
That's why viewers are hoping for at least formal recognition that adaptation funding is an important part of the $1.3 trillion target set last year and, ideally, the specific new spending target set at COP30.
“If it's not in place, we need to keep pushing,” said Emily Beauchamp, an adaptation expert at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a think tank that is involved in negotiations on adaptation. “We need to continue to call for this – and start tracking the flow of funds.”
