“Let us acknowledge our failure,” said UN chief António Guterres just before the start of the thirtieth climate summit this week in Brazil. The battle to stay below one and a half degrees of warming is lost, prominent figures are now also saying it out loud. Guterres still hopes that this is a temporary exceedance.
Temporary or not, many people are already feeling the consequences of climate change: heat, drought, forest fires, storms and floods are increasing. The realization is approaching that this is only the beginning. And so adaptation, adapting to the consequences of climate change, is moving up the agenda. Also at the climate summit in Belém. Negotiations about this immediately heated up this week
“The perspective on adaptation is changing,” says Marjolijn Haasnoot, professor of climate adaptation at Utrecht University. “Previously you weren’t allowed to talk about it too much, as that would distract from reducing emissions. Now you can. But it is a false contradiction to compare these two things. Even with one and a half degrees of warming, a lot of adjustment is needed.”
The perspective on adaptation is changing. Previously, you weren’t allowed to talk about it too much, as that would distract from reducing emissions. Now it is
There has been a longstanding realization that adaptation can prevent damage and victims. That is why a Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) was included in the Paris Agreement in 2015. However, for years not much was done with it. Two years ago, at the 28th climate summit in Dubai (COP28), a framework for adaptation was introduced. Goals such as clean water, health and infrastructure were identified, and policy objectives were formulated such as ‘integrating adaptation into national and local plans’ and ‘carrying out risk analyses’. It was one of the breakthroughs of COP28.
Resilience
But how can resilience to climate change be measured? How can we monitor whether countries are making progress with their adaptation? That is one of the big topics this year in Belém. The delegations negotiate, among other things, one for adaptation: matters that indicate what countries are already doing – or still need to do – to make themselves resilient to the consequences of climate change. It remains to be seen whether a decision will be made.
A group of African countries thinks it is too early and wants to postpone the decision for two years. Like everything at the UN, participation in the adaptation goals is officially voluntary, but establishing the list of indicators still creates expectations. Part of it is about how much investment is made. It will also contain new reporting obligations, including for vulnerable countries. The African group says: how do we pay for that? Let that be clear first. And formulate the indicators less ambiguously, and in such a way that vulnerable countries can also work with them.
“The African countries are not crazy, the point about the required money is crucial,” says David Abudho of Oxfam Novib, who, among other things, follows the negotiations on adaptation and financial flows in Belém. “Time and time again, much less money is released than is needed. There is deep pain there.”
The Dutch delegation will speak on behalf of Europe about the adaptation indicators. The position of the African group, which other vulnerable countries joined, came as a surprise to them. The Latin American group is irritated about the request for a postponement, they want to get ahead. The indicator negotiators do not have a mandate to negotiate about money.
The fact that this is being discussed is also part of the dynamics at a climate summit. It’s a way to put pressure on the sore point around overall climate finance, which is discussed elsewhere. In addition, adaptation finance does not have a prominent place on the main agenda of this climate summit, so vulnerable countries are doing their best to discuss the subject wherever possible. The African group wants the amount for adaptation financing to be tripled, to at least $120 billion per year from 2030.
It is clear to everyone that there must be indicators for adaptation. Targets have been agreed for greenhouse gas emissions. Whether these will be achieved – or rather: whether they will clearly not be achieved – can easily be expressed in figures. Resilience is less easy to capture in figures.
The indicators make adaptation measurable. Over the past two years, an international group of 78 experts has been working on one manageable list. Robbert Biesbroek, professor of public administration and climate adaptation at Wageningen University, was one of them. “We started with more than nine thousand indicators, with input from all kinds of angles. In several rounds we reduced it to a hundred indicators.”
What resilience to climate change looks like is highly dependent on the local context. In the Netherlands this is related to raising the dikes. In other countries it is necessary to grow crops that can withstand drought better or ensure that enough fresh water remains available.
“The indicators do not describe specific adaptation measures per country, which are up to the countries themselves,” says Biesbroek. “The point is that we have indicators that can be applied throughout the world. It was sometimes quite a challenge to find the right level of abstraction.”
Warning systems
So there are indicators that concern warning systems and whether they reach enough people. But nowhere does it stipulate, for example, that such a system must work via an SMS alert, because not everyone has a mobile phone.
How can resilience to climate change be measured? How can we monitor whether countries are making progress with their adaptation?
Several indicators concern the financing of climate adaptation. “There are indicators about money going from rich to poorer countries, but also about how many countries themselves put in,” says Biesbroek. “We talked for a long time about what would be appropriate. Money is of course sensitive, which is partly why we sometimes formulated multiple versions of an indicator so that negotiators could discuss it at the climate summit.”
Biesbroek is not surprised about the attitude of the group of vulnerable countries. “Preliminary discussions were held in Bonn in June and the ifs and buts were already heard there. At most the certainty is surprising. I understand both sides. Even the countries that want to continue: they would like to start measuring. The Global Stocktake report will be published again in three years, which is an important indicator of where we stand. We still know very little about adaptation, which is why those indicators are needed.”
Vulnerable countries mainly see that it is not self-evident that money will be made available for adaptation. “The willingness to make investments in this area is waning,” says Michael Jongeneel, CEO of development bank FMO, which helps finance adaptation projects on behalf of governments and private investors. “There is a huge shift in attention. America is clearly withdrawing, but this movement is also underway in Europe. People now prefer to put money into their own defense rather than into climate projects.”
Coffee and chocolate
That is somewhat short-sighted, says Jongeneel. “It is naive to think that climate change is not our problem. It is the reason why coffee and chocolate are expensive here. If it becomes unsafe to live in some places, or if it is no longer possible to earn an income somewhere, we can also count on migration to increase.”
Financing does not always look like an amount that is simply transferred. “One way is for countries to carry out adaptation projects themselves, and then have expensive loans that they had with rich countries forgiven,” says Jongeneel.
There is also money to be made from many adaptation projects. “For example, we gave a loan to a shrimp company in Vietnam that plants mangrove forests, so that the country floods less often. That company is doing very well. In Zambia we invest in solar parks because drought makes it more difficult to get electricity from reservoirs. There is also a revenue model behind that.”
Adaptation works, we know that, says Professor Haasnoot. “In Bangladesh, almost 150,000 people were killed by a tropical cyclone in 1991. In 2017, after the introduction of a warning system and the construction of shelters, only six.”
But she finds the idea that adaptation is possible always and everywhere dangerous. “There is a change of heart, people are starting to exchange emissions reduction for adaptation. But take the island states. You can build houses on stilts for a while, they already do that on some islands, but if your land is always under water, you eventually have to leave. It is also about the loss of indigenous knowledge, a culture. The discussion is not only about money, but also about justice.”
Discussions about the indicators have not yet come to a standstill at the negotiating table in Belém. “They now mainly talk about the less controversial indicators,” says Abudho of Oxfam. “Ultimately, the point about financing can be one deal breaker are for the African group. That will become clear next week: this weekend it will become clearer about the financing item on the rest of the COP agenda. For the time being, they do not want to take all the energy out of the negotiations.”
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