Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: As climate impacts intensify and hit the world’s most vulnerable hardest, the Adaptation Gap Report 2024: Come Hell and High Water, from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), on November 7 found that nations must dramatically increase climate adaptation efforts, starting with a commitment to act on finance at COP29.
Global average temperature rise is approaching 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and the latest estimates from UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report put the world on course for a catastrophic rise of 2.6-3.1 degrees this century without immediate and major cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
Released just ahead of the COP29 climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, the report finds that there is an urgent need to significantly scale-up adaptation this decade to address rising impacts.
But this is being hampered by the huge gap that exists between adaptation finance needs and current international public adaptation finance flows.
“Climate catastrophe is hammering health, widening inequalities, harming sustainable development, and rocking the foundations of peace,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a video message. “The vulnerable are hardest hit. And taxpayers are footing the bill. While the purveyors of all this destruction, particularly the fossil fuel industry, reap massive profits and subsidies.”
“Climate change is already devastating communities across the world, particularly the most poor and vulnerable. Raging storms are flattening homes, wildfires are wiping out forests, and land degradation and drought are degrading landscapes,” said Inger Andersen, Executive Director of UNEP.
“People, their livelihoods and the nature upon which they depend are in real danger from the consequences of climate change. Without action, this is a preview of what our future holds and why there simply is no excuse for the world not to get serious about adaptation, now.”
International public adaptation finance flows to developing countries increased from $22 billion in 2021 to $28 billion in 2022: the largest absolute and relative year-on-year increase since the Paris Agreement.
