Climate catastrophe ahead unless nations ‘dramatically’ up efforts: UNEP

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 Thursday, 7 November, found that nations must dramatically increase climate adaptation efforts, starting with a commitment to act on finance at COP29.

The 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.

“The 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 the 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,” Andersen continued.

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. This reflects progress towards the Glasgow Climate Pact, which urged developed nations to at least double adaptation finance to developing countries by 2025, from the $19 billion of 2019.

However, even achieving the Glasgow Climate Pact goal would only reduce the adaptation finance gap, which is estimated at $187–359 billion per year, by approximately 5 per cent.

As developing countries experience increasing losses and damage, they are already struggling with increasing debt burdens. Effective and adequate adaptation, incorporating fairness and equity, is thus more urgent than ever.

The report calls for nations to step up their ambitions by adopting a strong new collective quantified goal on climate finance at COP29 and including stronger adaptation components in their next round of climate pledges, or nationally determined contributions, due early 2025, ahead of COP30 in Belém, Brazil.