Achieving this aim would mean tens of billions more dollars flowing into adaptation projects. This huge – but achievable – feat would be immensely beneficial for communities around the world suffering from regular extreme weather events.

Alongside his call for greater adaptation finance, Guterres outlined five priorities for the sector, one of which was making it easier to access funding, especially for the vulnerable.

If billions are going to be spent on helping countries adapt to climate change, we need to make sure the money is reaching the people who need it the most. This is where the concept of locally led adaptation (LLA) comes in. The term refers to the central importance of providing frontline communities with the power and resources to respond to the climate crisis.

The Adaptation Fund was among the first group of international organisations to endorse a set of principles on locally led adaptation during COP25 in 2019. These principles cover everything from devolving decision-making to addressing inequalities, from providing predictable funding to ensuring the whole process is open and transparent. The principles have since been endorsed by over 100 organisations, including government ministries, global charities and development agencies.

This new model sets the scene for how current and future climate adaptation should be implemented. The focus is on an inclusive approach which puts communities most affected by climate change at the heart of how decisions are made.

Putting words into practice

The Adaptation Fund has been applying the principles of locally led adaptation for over a decade. The fund’s direct access scheme allows national organisations based in the countries they serve to manage all elements of a project, from design to monitoring.

The fund pioneered its first enhanced direct access (EDA) projects in 2014, taking direct access a step further in empowering national institutions to identify and fund local adaptation projects. This led the fund to establish an EDA funding window in 2021, and in April 2024, it went one step further by creating dedicated finance streams to support locally led adaptation.

The fund believes this new approach makes it “the first multilateral climate fund that has fully operationalised the global LLA principles,” it said in a press statement.

“The Adaptation Fund has a rich history of innovating and evolving to respond to countries’ urgent adaptation needs. Over several years, the fund has continued to offer more opportunities to vulnerable countries through diverse funding windows beyond its regular projects,” Mikko Ollikainen, who heads up the organisation, told Climate Home.

“Creating these dedicated funding windows to support locally led adaptation will open even more opportunities for vulnerable countries to enhance capacity building by offering local governments, NGOs, community organisations, indigenous groups, young entrepreneurs and a broad range of local actors the opportunity to develop and implement sustainable adaptation actions directly,” he added.

Tailored solutions

One of the pioneering locally led adaptation projects the fund supported took place in South Africa from 2015 to 2020. On opposite ends of the country, two districts – Namakwa in the Northern Cape and Mopani in Limpopo – are subject to the same extreme weather: hotter temperatures with more intense dry and wet spells. These more uncertain, dangerous conditions put ever greater pressure on fragile local communities.

The pilot project was implemented by the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI). It was intended to strengthen local institutions to adapt to these new climate realities, and provided funding to 12 ‘small grant recipients’ – groups based in the region and with an intimate understanding of how the communities work.

Investments were made after vulnerability studies were conducted and tailored solutions created to meet local needs. The ambition of these groups was simple – to ensure resources went to people most vulnerable to climate change. A raft of innovative solutions were then implemented, from rainwater harvesting and solar pumps, to cooling sheds and bio-gas digesters.

‘Considerable impact’

“The reach and positive impact on people’s livelihoods and adaptive capacity through assets, learning and networks was considerable,” the project’s evaluation report concludes, adding that the focus on careful, appropriate investment “has significantly improved the lives of those directly, and indirectly connected with the projects.”

Mandy Barnett, SANBI’s chief director for adaptation policy, told Climate Home that one lesson from the project was a need to develop trust and effective relationships with people on the ground.

“We learned what we should do and what we shouldn’t do in terms of getting climate finance to the right people,” she added, noting that communicating expectations, from the funder downward, was key.

“A wider challenge is the need to translate climate science into local concerns. We want to empower people to make informed decisions, and to do this requires you to invest time and resources into capacity building,” she added.

New opportunities

The South African project helped pave the way for the many LLA schemes the fund is now supporting around the world. Fast forward to 2024 and a range of new proposals have just been approved which puts decision-making powers into the hands of local institutions.

They include a Peruvian project to support water, agriculture and food security; a Rwandan project to build climate resilience in rural areas; and in Belize, a plan to restore ecosystems and livelihoods battered by climate-related disasters. What these projects have in common is not only a plan to fight climate change, but one where the tools and resources are under local control.

“These new LLA windows take a significant step forward in providing an opportunity to directly lead and develop adaptation projects on the ground and accelerate effective, scalable actions worldwide in the process,” said Ollikainen.

The way forward

On World Environment Day this June, the UN Secretary-General took the opportunity to speak up about adaptation finance again. He highlighted how the last 12 months have been the hottest on record. “For every dollar needed to adapt to extreme weather, only about 5 cents is available,” he said.

The most recent data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development shows that, in 2022, $115.9 billion was raised for climate finance, the first time this target has been achieved. Adaptation finance made up $32.4 billion of the total, a way off the 50% goal endorsed by the UN head, but still three times higher than what it was in 2016.

Where this money is spent will determine how vulnerable regions can survive the impacts of climate change in the coming years. But as more locally led adaptation projects are rolled out, affected communities will finally have a direct say in how that happens.

Sponsored by the Adaptation Fund. See our supporters page for what this means.

Adam Wentworth is a freelance writer based in Brighton, UK.

The post Finance flowing for locally led climate adaptation appeared first on Climate Home News.

In a panic, she ran home to gather her children and the few belongings they could salvage and fled to higher ground.

The family is now among the more than 26,000 displaced by the floods. They are sheltering at a local school, unsure when or how they will be able to return to their land and rebuild.

“I have three children and I’m the only one who takes care of them”, Ofeforpa told Climate Home outside the school shelter. “One of them is Delali who I was helping prepare to go to university. All those preparations were taken away.”

Janet Ofeforpa outside the school she and her family are sheltering in in Mepe (Photo: Elikem Akpalu)

Ofeforpa lives in Mepe, one of the towns that was hardest hit. Entire homes were flattened, crops were wiped out, schooling was put on hold and the flooding of toilets, cemeteries and rubbish dumps has led to a surge in typhoid and cholera cases.

The flooding happened because heavy rains had increased the volume of water in the Akosombo dam dangerously close to its limit.

In September, the government-owned electricity company which manages the dam – the Volta River Authority (VRA) – began what it calls a “controlled spillage” of water from the reservoir.

This is a standard practice after heavy rainfall that typically doesn’t have a significant impact on downstream communities. But this time it caused the worst destruction since the dam was built in the 1960s.

Climate change’s role

The kind of unpredictable and heavy rainfall which filled up the reservoir has become the new norm in West Africa, which scientists link to climate change.

But many locals allege the disaster was the result of government negligence too, with the VRA failing to properly warn people their homes may flood.

Togbe Korsi Nego VI, the Chief of Mepe, spoke to Climate Home from his home, where local volunteers had gathered to help distribute donated water sachets, rice and sleeping mats. His phone rang constantly.

“This is not a natural disaster. This is a man-made disaster,” he said. He added that “nobody came to warn us” and “the government has refused to take responsibility”.

Togbe Korsi Nego VI, the chief of Mepe, sits on his throne (Photo: Elikem Akpalu)

Were they warned?

The VRA says it did put out warnings and deputy minister Freda Prempeh accused victims of ignoring them.

The VRA’s website claims that on September 8, it notified “key stakeholders” of potential spillage in the coming days.

Four days later, they issued a press release “notifying the public of the consistent rise in water levels and the need to commence spilling”.

A car is destroyed by flood waters (Photo: Elikem Akpalu)

But this didn’t reach everyone. Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa is the member of parliament for North Tongu, which includes Mepe.

Despite his position, he told Climate Home he was not among the “key stakeholders” that VRA says it warned on September 8.

“They kept us in the dark,” he said. “I just saw a press statement on the twelfth of September [but] they didn’t talk about the water volumes [or] how significant this will be.”

Accusing the VRA of “recklessness and negligence”, he added “nobody came here to engage communities, to prepare us to evacuate”.

Lessons to learn

Ghana is not the only country where warnings have failed to reach those who need them.

In August 2021, 12 disabled people drowned in a care home in Germany when the River Ahr burst its banks, and the local district authority was accused of ordering an evacuation too late.

A girl learns at the school in Mepe flood victims are sheltering in (Photo: Elikem Akpalu)

Ilan Kelman is a professor of disasters and health at University College London, specialising in disaster prevention. He said that it’s not enough for authorities like the VRA to be aware of a risk – they need to make potential victims aware too.

“A successful warning has to involve the people affected from the beginning, long before any hazard appears, so that they know exactly what the issue is [and] have the choices and resources to settle elsewhere,” he said.

Nella Canales, a research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute, said that it needs to be clear whose job it is to manage a risk like flooding.

“There has to be communication,” she said. “It’s not enough to just say that the person receiving the risk is now accepting part of the risk management responsibilities. The risk owner should be the one who has the capacity to manage it.”

After pressure from MPs like Ablawka, the government announced a parliamentary inquiry to investigate what went wrong.

Awusife Kagbitor pictured at the door of the classroom she is sheltering in (Photo: Elikem Akpalu)

Until then, people like Awusife Kagbitor, a flood-hit resident sheltering in a cramped classroom with 15 members of her family, are left to fend for themselves.

“A lot of people came to take our pictures with a promise to help,” said Kagbitor. “So far, they’ve spoken in the wind.”

Government and VRA officials did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The post Ghana’s flood victims blame government for overflowing dam destruction appeared first on Climate Home News.

The claim made by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which carries out an annual assessment of the pledge, is based “on preliminary and as yet unverified data” that has not been made public.

Detailed figures have been made available for 2021, when developed nations gave $89.6 billion to developing countries – a slight increase from the amount of money provided the previous year.

“Symbolic” milestone

The figures pale in comparison with the trillions of dollars that vulnerable nations are estimated to need to cut emissions and better cope with the effects of climate change. But the “symbolic” $100 billion commitment, first made in 2009 in Copenhagen, has been a continuous source of diplomatic tensions since countries failed to hit the target by the 2020 deadline.

Germany’s climate minister Jennifer Morgan told reporters she hoped this sends “a reassuring signal to our partners”.

“It is a target that we had hoped to meet earlier”, she added. “We hope that this is a foundation to perhaps build some confidence in our commitment to work together with developing countries moving forward”.

Adaptation money falls

Despite the overall increase, specific funding for adaptation declined by $4 billion to $24.6 billion. The setback casts doubts over whether developed countries will be able to meet a pledge made at Cop26 to double their provision of adaptation finance to $40.6 billion by 2025.

Poor countries heavily rely on international public finance for things like early warning systems, flood barriers or drought-resistant agriculture that are less attractive to investors than renewables.

“We have seen a reduction in finance and a stalling of flows for adaptation initiatives,” UNEP’s chief scientist Dr. Andrea Hinwood told Climate Home earlier this month. “We really must act now. It’s only with fast, urgent, consolidated action with appropriate finance flows that we have a chance to address those issues.”

Loans fuel debt fears

Vulnerable countries have long called for a significant increase in the provision of grants over loans, which they argue push them further into debt. But loans continued to represent over two-thirds of the money provided in 2021, with grants making up 30% of the total.

Harjeet Singh, Climate Action Network’s head of global political strategy, said the prevalence of loans exacerbates financial disparities. “It is imperative that rich countries radically shift their approach, focusing on providing substantive support rather than resorting to symbolic gestures”, he added.

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Canada’s climate minister Steven Guilbeault recognised more needs to be done, saying the $100 billion goal is “an important milestone, but it does not solve all of our problems”.

“We know the conversation needs to shift from mobilizing a hundred billion dollars to mobilizing 10-15 times that. That’s what our collective challenge is”, he added.

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With significantly more money unlikely to be dished out of public purses, rich countries are increasingly looking at alternative solutions. Alongside reforms of multilateral development banks, like the World Bank, big hopes are pinned on contributions from the private sector.

But the latest OECD data risks dampening some of that enthusiasm. Private capital mobilised through public incentives, such as guarantees, has broadly stagnated since 2017, with only $14.4 billion made available to developing countries last year.

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So far, global efforts on adaptation have been reactive and incremental for two key reasons. One is a significant shortfall in finance for adaptation and the second is these issues being sidelined in multilateral climate agendas.

Climate adaptation is an immediate, intergenerational problem – one with disproportionate existing impacts on vulnerable communities in the Global South. The African continent is a revealing example, as countries battle one extreme weather event after another.

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Despite having contributed less than 4 per cent to global emissions, the continent is already facing disproportionate climate impacts. Climate models predict that the impacts in Africa will only become more severe and frequent with large parts of the continent warming at twice the global rate, leading to more extreme weather events.

Every degree of warming will have ramifications for food production and food security, livelihoods, access to water, health, poverty and inequality, conflict, and more. In 2022 alone, extreme weather events killed roughly 4,000 people and affected a further 19 million people across Africa.

Earlier this year, Cyclone Freddy left behind a wave of devastation in Malawi, Mozambique, and Madagascar, while the latest series of flash floods left hundreds of people dead and thousands displaced in Eastern Uganda, Rwanda, and Congo. These deadly weather events send a clear message – scaling up climate adaptation and resilience in Africa is urgent.

Investing in transformative community-led measures is the first step to scaling up climate adaptation. These measures are unique in that they are often context-specific solutions geared toward local realities that help protect people, communities, and ecosystems by building social and ecological resilience to extreme weather events.

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In the African continent, community led adaptive solutions like agroecology, food sovereignty, forest restoration, and more already exist, particularly at the grassroots and community level.

Agroecology is considered transformative in that it drives system change by challenging power dynamics underpinning the food system, placing power and control back in the hands of the farmer.

As a set of practices, agroecology has numerous co-benefits ranging from enabling farmers to strengthen their farm’s resilience to extreme weather events, to protecting biodiversity, bolstering food production and food sovereignty, and restoring soil fertility.

Equally, boosting finance and investments for locally led adaptation to climate change not only builds resilience, it’s also far more cost effective than reactively paying for and responding to severe crises. Studies estimate that climate adaptation action in African agriculture and food systems will likely cost less than one tenth of inaction – in other words, the cost of action is $15 billion versus $201 billion per annum if no action is taken.

A major stumbling block to African countries and communities developing adaptive capacities and becoming more resilient is the significant gap in adaptation finance.  As it stands, Africa will face a $265 billion shortfall in climate finance for adaptation by 2030.  To address and close the existing debt for climate adaptation, those most responsible for the climate crisis have a moral responsibility to drastically increase adaptation finance to African countries.

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If they fail to do so, vulnerable and frontline communities across Africa, and the Global South at large, will continue to bear the brunt of the climate crisis – a crisis they did not cause.

As the recent report spotlights, we need a political response at Cop28 that fast tracks global climate action efforts and places us back on track to meet the Paris Agreement goals.

As one of four pillars, the report calls for higher priority to be given to adaptation that is people-centred and sustains livelihoods.

For climate adaptation support to be truly transformative for the African context, access to decision making platforms, resources, investments, and finances must involve and reach local African communities most affected by the climate crisis. A people centred, rights based approach that protects communities and biodiversity must be at heart of these upcoming climate negotiations and decisions.

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In the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries agreed to set a global goal on adjusting, which is known as adaptation. But it is still very difficult to track and demonstrate progress towards this target because of a lack of rigour in how these projects are officially reported and evaluated.

Two years ago, we at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) set out to create a synthesis of evidence on the effectiveness of adaptation action and support. But the UK government cut its aid budget and our project was one of those to be scrapped as a result.

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Beyond funding, however, our analysis was hindered by a widespread and pervasive lack of rigour in adaptation project reporting and evaluation.

Evaluation of adaptation efforts has long faced difficulties. For six years, climate negotiators tried to assess progress towards the Paris Agreement’s imprecisely worded global goal on adaptation.

But, as governments recognised at Cop26 in 2021, they faced “methodological, empirical, conceptual and political challenges”.

In 2021, the two-year Glasgow–Sharm el-Sheikh work programme on the global goal on adaptation aimed to address these.

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Lots of adaptation action takes place in the form of discrete project interventions financed by public sources, including directly from governments and from funds that rich countries put money into.

By assessing these interventions in ways similar to those used in development finance, we hoped to obtain a picture of the effectiveness of adaptation action and support, and thus of progress towards the global goal on adaptation.

But we found that data on project outputs and outcomes is not easily accessible or publicly available.

If information is available, it is scattered across multiple sources and fragmented across databases. Moreover, most of this information is only entered into databases at the time the project is approved.

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Information about how the project is going is even harder to find, as it is often not made public or remains scattered across multiple locations, from project websites to academic publications.

The lack of a uniform system of adaptation indicators also leads to inconsistencies in how funders monitor, evaluate and report outputs and outcomes of adaptation interventions.

Moreover, baseline data is commonly missing and outcomes are often confused with outputs. Outputs are the tangible and measure results that can be observed in the short term while outcomes are the longer term effects that are expected to be achieved as a result.

Evaluations of adaptation interventions are rare. A recent systematic review of global adaptation research revealed that only 58 out of 1682 articles reported change in climate risk reduction outcomes after implementation.

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This suggests that, for now, the UN’s new global stocktake on adaptation must rely chiefly on fragmented and scattered project documentation.

When evaluations are conducted, they tend to emphasise implementation processes rather than outcomes.

A recent assessment of the Least Developed Countries Fund considers mainly how its projects are aligned to reducing vulnerability and increasing resilience, rather than if these objectives have actually been achieved.

Meanwhile, an evaluation of the adaptation portfolio of the Green Climate Fund counted the number of beneficiaries but was unable to assess impact.

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Here are four ways to fix this.

1. Create a global adaptation database: A free, comprehensive and easy-to-use global database of adaptation interventions must be established to analyse and synthesise the effectiveness of these interventions. It should include sources of funding, project duration, alternative project names, intervention design, adaptation outcomes and all evaluations. Such a database would complement existing efforts that include some of these elements, such as IATI’s d-portal, SEI’s AidAtlas and Unep’s Adaptation Gap Report.

2. Standardise and improve reporting of adaptation outcomes: The Sharm-El-Sheikh Adaptation Agenda proposes a set of 30 outcomes to report on adaptation progress. These should be used to develop a set of common indicators to be adopted under the new framework for the global goal on adaptation. These indicators should then be used consistently when evaluating and reporting project-level outcomes. For the global stocktake, these indicators must also allow for global aggregation of evaluation results.

3. Invest in rigorous adaptation evaluations: Funders must require and invest in rigorous monitoring and evaluation of and learning from the interventions they support. Project evaluations should be transparent about whether it is possible to attribute an outcome to a specific intervention. Evaluation guidance must include procedures to inform funders and other stakeholders of both intervention successes and failures. Initiatives in this direction include the new evaluation policy of the Adaptation Fund, which includes long-term evaluation.

4. Learn from the development community: Adaptation evaluators should take advantage of existing knowledge of and experience with impact evaluation in development when assessing progress in adaptation. The development community has put forward tried-and-tested methodologies for impact evaluation, and established organisations such as 3ie and the Campbell Collaboration already support, produce and synthesise rigorous evaluation evidence on development effectiveness.

Richard Klein and Biljana Macura are Senior Research Fellows and Nella Canales is a Research Fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Richard Klein leads the team “International Climate Risk and Adaptation”.

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“Current global financial flows for adaptation are insufficient for, and constrain implementation of, adaptation options, especially in developing countries”, the scientists report says.

Wealthy governments have failed to provide $100 billion of climate finance a year they promised to developing countries by 2020, with the US responsible for the vast majority of the shortfall.

Finance for adapting to climate change – rather than cutting emissions – has been particularly low.

At Cop26 in 2021, all countries agreed that developed nations would double their adaptation finance by 2025 on 2019 levels and a group of self-proclaimed “champions” has been set up to try to implement this.

Adaptation becomes harder

The IPCC’s scientists warned time for adaptation action is rapidly running out because measures will increasingly become ‘constrained and less effective’ as temperatures rise.

When countries can no longer adapt to climate change, they will suffer devastating loss and damage as a consequence of escalating climate-related hazards like heatwaves, droughts and storms.

The United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) estimates $340 billion will be needed every year for adaptation, but only about 7% of climate finance flows are currently spent in that direction.

‘A huge injustice’

Aditi Mukherji, one of the authors of the report, told Climate Home that the lack of funding forces low-income countries into further debt.

Seventy-one percent of public climate finance was provided through loans in 2020, with grants having much smaller role, according to the latest assessment by the OECD.

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“It is a huge injustice”, Mukherji said. “Least developed countries and coastal communities who have not caused the problem are now having to take loans to solve the problem. It makes hardly any sense.”

The IPCC report summarises the state of knowledge of climate change science, its impacts and risks and the progress made on mitigation and adaptation. The text was approved by all member governments after a week-long session in Switzerland.

Insufficient climate action

Scientists say the pace and scale of what has been done so far, and current plans, are insufficient to tackle climate change.

While highlighting the lack of money for adaptation, the report also says climate finance also needs to increase ‘many-fold’ for emissions-cutting measures in order to achieve climate goals.

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Despite absorbing the overwhelming majority of the money pot, funding for measures to cut emissions still falls short of the levels needed to limit warming to 1.5°C across all sectors and regions.

“Adaptation and mitigation are closely interlinked,” Mukherji said. “Unless we reduce our emissions now we are locked in a cycle of irreversible impacts”.

“We cannot think we can continue to emit, make the planet warmer and those who are affected will continue to adapt. That is not going to happen. Adaptation will always have some limits.”

Adaptation limits reached

The report says some tropical, coastal, polar and mountain ecosystems have already reached hard adaptation limits. That means any action becomes unfeasible to avoid risks. An example is when a small island becomes uninhabitable due to sea level rises and lack of freshwater.

The IPCC has also found ‘increased evidence’ of maladaption, which occurs when measures backfire and increase vulnerabilities.

Mukherji says there is a need for a less technocratic approach. “The most appropriate actions need to be decided by those who are most affected. You cannot go from outside and impose views on the communities,” she said.

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Flooding returned stronger every year since, upending the city in both 2021 and 2022. “We never know what kind of damage to expect when it rains,” said Razia Sunny, who lives by one of Karachi’s nullahs – narrow channels that drain wastewater from the city to the sea.

“Residents here have gotten sick because of the waste flooding into our homes during urban flooding, we’ve even had people slip and fall [into the nullahs],” Imran Gill, another resident of the informal settlement, told Climate Home News.

Since 2017, the World Bank has poured millions of dollars into Karachi. The city, population 16 million, is the backbone of Pakistan’s economy. But come monsoon season much of the city is submerged – not least during the extreme flooding of 2022.

A major problem is trash clogging the nullahs, so stormwater overflows. Sweep was supposed to help by improving solid waste management, but two years into the five-year project, there is no sign of progress. Less than 3% of its $100 million budget has been spent, and none of it on new infrastructure.

Slum clearance

Project officials took the promise of funding as a cue to clear slums alongside the waterways. The provincial authority demolished thousands of homes without, residents say, any consultation or plan to find them somewhere else to live.

Climate Home reviewed dozens of official documents, interviewed officials inside the projects and visited the sites affected by flooding. In the sites near Karachi’s sewage infrastructure, Climate Home found several cases where residents of informal housing got injured or even died during extreme floods in 2020 and 2022.

When human rights organisations raised concerns about the demolitions, the World Bank distanced itself from the project.

The Sweep project should have executed millions of US dollars (green line) by 2022, but the actual disbursed amount (in blue) was much lower (Photo: World Bank Implementation Status & Results Report Dec. 2022)

Government officials insist things are not going too badly. “We’re only delayed by three or fourth months,” Sweep director Zubair Channa said.

The World Bank seemingly agrees: its project reports in March 2021 and November 2021 declared progress “satisfactory”, even though no work had been completed on the ground. This rating changed to “moderately satisfactory” for both the June 2022 and December 2022 reports, after further inaction.

In response to Climate Home’s request for comment, the World Bank defended the project and said the consultancy was “fairly advanced and expected to deliver their outputs soon”.

“Based on the current schedule, we expect the construction of the waste disposal facility and transfer stations to commence in early 2023,” said the bank’s press office.

Karachi’s nullahs carry waste from the city to the sea, and are often surrounded by informal settlements. (Photo: Shakeel Afridi)

This is a climate adaptation issue. Global heating “likely increased” the intensity of monsoon rains in 2022, when flooding hit 33 million people across the country, an international group of scientists found. More extreme events are expected under a 2C warming scenario.

The money trail

So what has happened to the promised funding? The money comes in the form of loans to the provincial government of Sindh.

Among a few feasibility studies and some operational costs, documents show the authorities have so far spent $91,891 (which at the time was converted to almost PKR 16 million) on furniture. An official source associated with Sweep, who asked not to be named, said the number was too high and seemed out of place.

A report of operational costs by the Sweep project shows more than $91,000 spent on furniture. (Photo: Solid Waste Emergency and Efficiency Project – Procurement Plan by Zubair Ahmed Channa)

“We’re a poor country; we can’t afford to spend like this on operational costs, not when that money will be paid back by citizens who already can’t afford it,” said architect and urban planner Dr Noman Ahmed, chairperson of Department of Architecture and Planning at the NED University Karachi.

The Sindh Government’s procurement plan earmarks $8 million for equipment ranging from bins to waste collection vehicles. Another $30 million is destined for implementation “works”. This money has yet to be disbursed.

On all aspects of these expenses, bank oversight is meant to come once the project is concluded. Yet related projects raise red flags.

In November, the Sindh High Court barred the provincial government from awarding any more contracts under the World Bank’s Competitive and Liveable City of Karachi (Click) project, citing a lack of transparency over where the money was going.

Fahad Saeed, South Asia and Middle East lead at the policy NGO Climate Analytics, said: “Pakistan needs to do some introspection as to why they were unable to tap into the funds that were available. Was their own house in order to access these funds?”

In 2021, the world’s governments agreed at COP26 to double the amount of international adaptation finance by 2025, which stands at around $20 billion per year.

Why does Karachi flood?

Decades of neglect in Karachi’s sewage and waste disposal systems created the perfect recipe for flooding in the city. Every year, come monsoon season, the city’s debilitated drainage system clogs and water overflows.

More than 6 million people in Karachi live in informal settlements, many of which have encroached the city’s nullahs – the riverbeds that carry waste from one end of the city all the way to the sea.

These populations are the first victims of urban flooding, and also major contributors to the problem.

Gujjar nullah residents use a community-funded makeshift bridge to get around. The bridge can be torn down at any time by authorities. (Photo: Shakeel Afridi)

“In 2019, when the Sindh Government took the issue to the World Bank, we realised that there was a serious requirement to clean the nullahs once or twice a year,” Sweep director Channa told Climate Home News.

After bad urban flooding in 2020, the Sindh Government reached out to the World Bank to speed up the cleaning of nullahs. “We asked to be allowed to work and they agreed, so despite Sweep not having been signed yet work began, and we were to get the money back through retroactive funding,” Channa said.

The World Bank announced the decision to finance these efforts in December 2020, saying they would “improve solid waste management services in Karachi” and “upgrade critical solid waste infrastructure”. This would help to reduce floods “especially in vulnerable communities around drainage and waste collection sites.”

The reality on the ground was different.

Destroyed homes

Instead of protecting the vulnerable, the provincial authorities started by bulldozing homes that had been built without planning permission.

The World Bank denied responsibility. “There were meetings between civilians and WB officials, who claimed to us that they had never sanctioned any encroachment removal,” Zahid Farooq, senior manager at Karachi’s Urban Resource Centre, told Climate Home.

KBT PRESS RELEASE
In their recent correspondence with KBT, World Bank has confirmed that they will neither retroactively nor prospectively finance any nullah cleaning activities because affectees have still not been involved in the rehabilitation process pic.twitter.com/sk2dqLsl1U

— Karachi Bachao Tehreek (@StopEvictionKHI) July 9, 2021

The World Bank’s press office told Climate Home their projects “will be prohibited from financing any future investments on the affected nullahs. Sweep will not retroactively or prospectively finance any nullah cleaning works, or any studies related to the nullahs.”

Then, in 2022, extreme flooding hit informal settlements the hardest, turning the water filled area around the nullahs into quicksand, according to resident Imran Gill. “No one has ever died because of the nullahs before all this construction took place. And yet, the area has now seen several people lose their lives.”

Bhutta Masih died in flooding this year when the ground beneath his feet went out. He leaves behind five children and his widow, Parveen. His youngest son helped pull his father’s body out with ropes and has found it difficult to recover from the trauma.

“He used to have a job but lost it. He hasn’t been okay mentally since that day. We can’t afford this,” Parveen said.

Bhutta Masih’s widow Parveen stands next to the barricades that were added after his
death (Photo: Shakeel Afridi)

Owners of the broken homes are not permitted to rebuild what remains of their homes – even by hanging curtains.

But some have nowhere else to go. Ruksana and Sadayat, a couple in their 80s who have lived most of their lives on the nullahs, used broken bricks they found to do some repair work.

“We know they can break this down, but we have no other choice but to rebuild it. We can’t afford the rent [elsewhere], and when they come to tear it down, they will tear it down. What can we do?” Ruksana asked.

Sweep’s future

Despite all its troubles, Sweep director Channa told Climate Home that Karachi’s flooding wasn’t as bad as previous years.

Urban planning expert Ahmed said this was “completely untrue” and infrastructure under the WB’s Competitive and Livable City of Karachi (Click) project had caused flooding to worsen.

“They’ve done improvement projects, for example, the green belts, which themselves created bottlenecks,” he said. “It seems that this was nothing more than an emergency cleaning effort with no long-term thought process for solutions. When the WB is intervening with such a large portfolio, why aren’t they providing a plan to help the people who are being displaced?

Ruksana and Sadayat sit in what used to be their living room (Photo: Shakeel Afridi)

Lawyer and activist Abira Ashfaq has worked with the affected communities. She said the World Bank failed to use its influence on the Sindh government to help people living on the nullahs.

“We filed a complaint with the WB, and they deemed our case eligible. We held five meetings with WB officials and with the stakeholders,” she recalled. “Nevertheless, they distanced themselves and said their project was only meant to address waste disposal, and they eventually dismissed our complaints, claiming no responsibility,” she said.

The result of this interaction was that the nullah cleaning work was once again thrown back to the Sindh government, which has now handed it over to the Frontier Works Organization (FWO), the engineering wing of the Pakistan Army.

For now, residents can expect little more in the way of flood aid than tarpaulins from local NGOs to cover their damaged homes. They rely on each other and wait for the next flood.

The post World Bank adaptation funds slept through Pakistan’s record flooding appeared first on Climate Home News.

While three African presidents flew to the Netherlands for the Africa Adaptation Summit on Monday, only Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte was there to meet with them.

Rich countries have unmet promises to financially support poorer countries in boosting climate resilience.

Senegal’s president Macky Sall said: “I cannot help but note, with some bitterness, the absence of leaders from the industrial world. I think if we made the effort to leave Africa to come to Rotterdam, it would be easier for the Europeans and others to be here.”

Ghana’s president Nana Akufo-Addo associated himself “wholly with the sentiments of president Macky Sall about the failure of certain vested interests to be present with us at this meeting” and the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) Felix Tshisekedi said “it is my turn to also deplore the absence of leaders of industrialised nations”.

Ethiopia’s president Sahle-Work Zewde, speaking by video link, echoed their criticisms. She added: “Sometimes, we should not appear to be talking to each other while those who should be with us are not present.”

United Nations deputy secretary-general Amina Mohammed said the meeting was “lop-sided” and “a bird only flies on two wings”. She praised African leaders for showing up, adding “it’s not because [they] don’t have anything important do back at home”.

Unmet promises

In 2009, wealthy countries promised to deliver $100 billion a year to developing countries in climate finance by 2020. They fell $17bn short of this target in 2020 and have still yet to meet it, with the US responsible for the vast majority of the shortfall.

The shortfall between a country’s climate finance in 2017-18 and its fair share. (Photo: ODI)

At the meeting in Rotterdam, Macky Sall linked this failure on finance to the viability and fairness of African emissions reduction measures. Senegal is promoting offshore oil and gas exploration while the DRC is auctioning off oil concessions in rainforests and peatlands.

Sall said: “When countries of Africa are asked to renounce polluting developments to deal with the current state of emergency on the planet, it is only fair that, as a counterpart, the cost of adaptation to this should be shared equitably also… notably the financial commitment of $100bn a year.”

African nations eye debt-for-climate swaps as IMF takes an interest

Analysis of six African national plans by PowerShift Africa finds on average they are investing the equivalent of 2.8% of GDP on adapting to climate change. The UN Environment Programme estimates that developing countries will collectively have to spend up to $300bn a year on adapting by 2030.

Rich countries pledged at last year’s Cop26 summit to double their adaptation finance contributions from 2019 levels by 2025. This would increase it from $20bn a year to $40bn. A group of self-proclaimed “adaptation champions”, which does not include the US, has formed to try and meet this goal.

Africa is responsible for just 3% of total historic emissions.

Worries closer to home

In Rotterdam, the European Commission’s climate lead Frans Timmermans said that many European citizens would not be persuaded by the “moral point that those suffering the most consequences are not responsible for creating the crisis”.

He said: “Let’s be frank, many of our citizens in Europe will not buy this argument today because their worries are linked to their own existence in this energy crisis, in this food crisis, in this inflation crisis. This might seem very strange from an African perspective but it is always what is closer to your own worries is always bigger on your agenda than someone else’s worries.”

A more convincing argument for Europeans, Timmermans said, is that “without success in Africa,  there can be no success in Europe – our destinies are so intimately intertwined that if we are not collectively responsible for development in Africa, for Africa being able to use the opportunities it has… we will sink together in an ocean of despair”.

Deadly flash floods in UAE highlight need for resilience investment

Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte joined the meeting for the afternoon. He said: “I would have loved to have more of my European colleagues here.”

The Global Center on Adaptation said it had invited the leaders of its traditional funders in France, Norway, Denmark, Canada and Finland.

France’s Emmanuel Macron met instead with French regional leaders in Paris while Canada’s Justin Trudeau stayed home to deal with a mass stabbing in Saskatchewan.

The governments of Finland and Norway did not reply to requests for comment on what their leaders Sanna Marin and Jonas Gahr Store were doing instead.

Denmark’s prime minister Mette Frederiksen was occupied with a national military remembrance day but told African leaders by video message: “I know that you want Europe to engage more in your struggles and we should.”

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Abnormally heavy monsoon rains led to flash floods in July which killed at least 550 people across Pakistan, with rural communities in the impoverished southwestern province Balochistan hardest hit. At least 77 children have lost their lives and more than 500 people were injured in the floods.

More than 34,000 homes were deluged and 977km of road infrastructure and 61 bridges were destroyed.

Zia Salik, head of fundraising at Islamic Relief UK, was in Balochistan when the floods hit. 

“The flash floods destroyed and demolished entire villages. [These are] impoverished villages, built entirely out of mud bricks… they had no chance against the heavy floodwaters,” Salik said, adding that 85-year-olds he spoke to said they had never seen that much water in their lives. “Most people have lost their livestock and their land – they will not be able to grow anything until next year.”

Villagers raised the alarm which led to mass evacuations, but there were no early warning systems in place, said Salik. “Considering the size of the floods, the loss of lives has been relatively low.”

Colombia’s new president calls for debt swap to protect the Amazon

In Balochistan alone, over 150,000 people are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance, according to Islamic Relief. 

“I spoke to families who had not washed themselves for over a week because all water pipes were destroyed by the floods,” Salik said.

Aid groups are on the ground distributing tents and food packs, but a lack of media coverage and aid cuts means there is little funding available to help communities rebuild, he said.

“Ordinarily the UK would allocate significant funds to such a disaster but I haven’t seen any announcement,” said Salik, attributing the silence to the government’s decision to freeze international aid over the summer.

Pakistan was the biggest recipient of UK bilateral aid 2015-19. It dropped to seventh place after the UK government decided in 2020 to scale back the aid budget from 0.7% to 0.5% of national income.

The US, Japan and Germany have also been major aid contributors to Pakistan in recent years, along with multilateral agencies.

Three children walk among the rubble in a village in Balochistan, Pakistan, which was badly hit by flash floods (Photo: Islamic Relief Pakistan)

Pakistan is one of the world’s most vulnerable countries to climate change, according to the Climate Change Risk Index 2021 by NGO German Watch.

This past month was the wettest in three decades, according to Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority, Reuters reports. Balochistan received 305% more rain than the annual average, according to the agency.

“Authorities in Pakistan have traditionally focused more on flood management and less on disaster risk reduction,” Aisha Khan, executive director for Civil Society Coalition for Climate Change in Islamabad, told Climate Home News.

“This is largely due to lack of resources for taking necessary adaptive measures and also due to inability to anticipate the sudden onset and intensity of floods,” she said. 

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In its latest climate plan, Pakistan estimated it needs $7-14 billion annually until 2050 for adaptation investments, primarily in infrastructure.

“Without access to climate finance for adaptation this will remain a recurring challenge beyond the country’s coping capacity,” Khan said. 

“Impact-based forecasting can help but indicative modeling is not precise and there is a limit to preparing for anticipatory adaptation as the scale, scope and intensity of climate induced disasters is highly unpredictable,” she said.

The most urgent adaptation needs are resilient infrastructure, which will require hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of investment, said Salik. Houses should be rebuilt with concrete foundations and steel girders, not with mud bricks which can be washed away, and the government should invest in dams, walls and channels to divert floodwaters, he said. “The real challenge is the infrastructure cost.”

The post Pakistan struggles to rebuild after deadly flash floods appeared first on Climate Home News.

The 31 October meeting was the first time representatives of both houses met to discuss adaptation. At the conference, politicians, climate experts, farmers, activists and regular citizens expressed concern that policymakers were not doing enough to prepare for the impacts of climate change.

According to a report published by France’s Senate in June, 2C of warming above pre-industrial levels could deal a profound blow to France by 2050.

The report claims heatwaves are set to strike more often and longer, and wildfires – a phenomenon only experienced in the Mediterranean region – could unfurl across the whole country several weeks a year from 2060.

Drier soil will also make it significantly harder to grow food, while sea level rise threatens to engulf the coast, ski-stations in the Alps and Pyrenees will fall prey to disrepair and Asian tiger mosquitos carrying tropical diseases could rear their heads, it said.

The report warned some regions would have it harder than others, with touristic regions in the mountains or on the coast particularly vulnerable.

“Change is here and it will accelerate,” transport minister Elisabeth Borne said.

IEA World Energy Outlook outlines 1.5C scenario

“Only this summer our country experienced two intense heat waves. They deeply disrupted our collective and individual lives. I am thinking of the postponed national exams, of the slowed down trains, of the cancelled sports events. Electricity production was also disrupted.”

“Nowadays we speak of these events as ‘extreme’. Unfortunately, they will become less and less exceptional,” she said.

Both the report’s commissioner, senator Ronan Dantec, and Frédérique Tufnell, a deputy for the Charente-Maritime region, called on the national assembly and senate to hold a debate on the country’s strategy to adapt to the climate crisis.

Tufnell said the country should consider a framework adaptation law – “though the decision depends on the government,” the deputy from president Macron’s La Republique en Marche party told Climate Home News.

Bruno Charles, vice-president of Lyon, said France had yet to develop “a common culture around what climate change means for a 2000-year-old town like ours. We’re proud to be part of the Unesco heritage list – though in 100 years, living conditions will have been turned upside down.”

“How will five century-old buildings fare in the face of 50 days of heatwaves at 50 degrees?” he asked. “How do you create social housing in the knowledge that there’ll be summers at 50 degrees during 60 days? How do you get around in a town where the asphalt is melting?”

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Despite two national adaptation plans in 2011 and 2018, the country has so far failed to come up with an adequate adaptation strategy, participants agreed.

Charles slammed a general lack of political willpower to address the looming problems. “We have a generation of mayors and presidents who were born before the awareness of climate change and think that technical solutions will fix things,” he lamented.

Vivian Despoues, chief strategist at the Institute for Climate Economics (I4CE), pointed to the record rush to buy fans and air conditioners in June as evidence that the country was ill-prepared for heat waves.

Other participants pointed to instances where the impacts of climate change were not being factored into decision-making.

Antoine Bonduelle, head of Climate Action Network France, criticised plans to operate an electric shuttle to Beauvais airport without questioning the logic of air travel.

“Everything is great!” he said of the shuttle. “But as soon as it comes to talking about the low-cost economic model, we find ourselves in the company of politicians who are airport lobbyists. They’re not there to say: ‘Let’s imagine how can we reduce the airport in the years to come’.”

EU plots climate deal with China

There was strong support to restore ecosystems to simultaneously cut emissions and adapt to climate change –  also called nature-based solutions – in the run-up to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s World Conservation Congress, due to take place in Marseille in June 2020.

Sylvie Feuillette, a spokesperson for the water agency in Seine Normandie, said that something as a simple as restoring hedges on agricultural land could “improve soil quality, retain water, limit streams and dependency on pesticides”.

Deputy Tufnell, the commissioner of a January report on wetlands, likewise urged the country to protect these “lands of the future” that offer many benefits, including water filtration, carbon absorption, or buffer zones for flooding.

“Two-thirds of the wetlands [in France] disappeared during the 20th century,” she pointed out.

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I was chairman of the Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis) when our group fought for the report at the Paris climate change conference back in 2015. The findings came as a shock, even for those of us who have been sounding the climate change alarm for decades.

Among the most startling revelations is that global warming may exceed 1.5C above preindustrial levels – the temperature beyond which climate change impacts could spiral out of control – in as few as 11 years. Already, with 1C of warming, climate impacts have grown more frequent and severe than previously imagined, including increasingly powerful storms and accelerating sea level rise.

In fact, along with the IPCC report, Aosis successfully advocated for setting a global temperature goal of 1.5C in Paris. As countries on the frontline of the climate crisis, we have long devoted an enormous amount of political capital to pushing for the most ambitious temperature target as possible.

Reality check: is the 1.5C warming target even possible?

Our efforts have helped remind the international community that scientific information, however difficult it may be to hear, must inform the international climate change regime.

But, in light of the report, as well my own observations as the environment minister for the one of the world’s lowest-lying countries, I fear we have entered a new phase in the climate talks, one where we must now devote at least as much energy to securing our priorities on adaptation and loss and damage as we do on mitigation ambition.  

As small island leaders, we know that the cost of adapting to climate impacts is straining our budgets.

In the Maldives, for instance, we are witnessing prolonged droughts in our outlying atolls. Such extremes have major implications for ensuring our people have enough water to drink. In emergencies, we have been forced to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to ship supplies from our desalination plant in the capital to the affected areas.

At the same time, we have been forced to build coastal protection structures around numerous islands to help manage rising seas and erosion. In the past 5 years, we have spent $85 million on such projects.

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We were fortunate to be among the first group of countries to receive support from the Green Climate Fund for an adaptation project on water security. When complete, it is projected to provide freshwater to over 100,000 people in a group of outer islands at a cost of about $28 million ($4 million of which came from our own budget).

This represents a significant return on investment by any measure, but like all small islands we face dramatically higher adaptation costs if we hope to build resilience against the kind of impacts the IPCC projects.

Globally, the cost of adapting to climate change in developing countries could rise to between $280 and $500 billion per year by 2050, according to a 2016 UN Environment report. The cost will be disproportionately borne by the world’s developing and least developed countries and is exponentially larger than the amount of international public finance available today.

A failure to keep global warming under 1.5C and the enormous shortfall in the support needed to help vulnerable communities adapt also forces us to confront loss and damage with renewed urgency.

Comment: It’s time to make polluters pay for climate damages

Loss and damage refers to the irreversible harm caused by climate change—slow onset events like the disappearance of an island to rising seas or extreme catastrophes like the near total destruction of property seen on Barbuda in the wake of Hurricane Irma in 2017.

The Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage, established in 2013, was ostensibly supposed to address the aforementioned concerns, but while progress has been made in developing the bureaucratic structure of the mechanism, there is faint hope today that real money will materialize to let it do its work.

Since Aosis formed in 1992, it has always advocated for positions that would give all our members the best chance for survival. Decades ago, the group called for a global temperature goal of 1C. As greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise, it became clear that the target was unrealistic. Later, strong scientific evidence pointed to 1.5C as the responsible global temperature goal and the slogan “1.5 to stay alive” was born.

Now that the IPCC is saying we could overshoot 1.5C of warming in about a decade, we must adjust our political demands accordingly. Make no mistake: it would be suicide for the world to continue to emit greenhouse gases at the current pace and we should all demand a rapid transition to renewable energy. But for small island nations, it would also be suicide not to use every lever of power we have to demand what is fair and just: the support we need to manage a crisis that has been thrust upon us.

Thoriq Ibrahim is the environment and energy minister of the Maldives and has been chairman of the Alliance of Small Island States since 2015

The post Islands need support to face shocking impacts of 1.5C global warming appeared first on Climate Home News.

The recent rejection of two major adaptation projects by the board of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) from Bangladesh and Ethiopia has caused the board of the GCF to re-examine how adaptation projects should be analysed and supported going forward. 

The proposals were not supported on the grounds they had not made a sufficiently clear case that they constituted an adaptation to climate change and not just standard development actions.

‘Adaptation’ to climate change – projects that build resilience to the new climate – as opposed to ‘mitigation’ – projects that reduce emissions and try to avert more warming – is an often neglected area. Under the Paris Agreement, half of all climate finance must be directed towards adaptation projects. Yet they have struggled to get access to funds, with recent problems in the GCF the latest example.

Report: Green Climate Fund urged to embrace development links

Two other adaptation-focused funds were set up some years ago under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – namely the Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF) and the Adaptation Fund (AF). They have also carried out reviews to develop their strategies for supporting adaptation activities going forward.

Now is therefore a good time to review lessons from the past in terms of both what has worked and what has not.

The two major flaws in the process so far have been the inability to distinguish between adaptation and development in the proposals and the inability of the funds that were actually allocated, with some notable exceptions, to reach the most vulnerable countries and communities. 

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The LDCF and AF having been in operation for longer than the GCF have gained some valuable lessons in how best to support adaptation of the most vulnerable and also how to blend adaptation funding with development funding at the national level. 

The first lesson is to allow decision making on adaptation actions to be devolved down to the national and even sub-national levels. A good example was support for coastal erosion protection in Senegal by the AF, where local government and local communities were involved in decisions regarding the priorities for funding. 

The second lesson is to allow adaptation funds to be used in combination with national development funds rather than insisting on supporting stand alone adaptation projects only. The LDCF has been good at enabling projects to be funded based on each country’s own National Adaptation Programme of Action. The LDCF also focused on the most vulnerable developing countries. 

Thus it is important that the GCF, the AF and the LDCF share lessons with each other and perhaps find synergies in working together with each developing its own niche. 

They could also collectively join forces to ensure that all adaptation activities they fund have robust monitoring, evaluation and learning built into the process. There should be an emphasis on adaptation as a learning-by-doing process, but unless there is an explicit investment in learning, lessons will not be learned.

Finally, there needs to be a change in emphasis from supporting adaptation projects and even programmes to a more system-wide transformative adaptation of entire countries over the longer term. This would mean a greater investment in the human adaptive capacity of the younger generation in each country.

Saleemul Huq is director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Dhaka and a senior fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London.

The post Climate adaptation cash is failing to reach the poorest, here’s how to fix it appeared first on Climate Home News.

Adaptation finance is not keeping pace with the needs of countries increasingly exposed to droughts, floods and sea level rise. Work to address loss and damage faced by the world’s poorest still lags behind.

“I think that this COP was branded ‘the African summit’ just to make Africans feel good, but nothing is being done to salvage the interests of the continent,” said Nnimmo Bassey, former chair of Friends of The Earth International.

“I personally don’t think Africa will have anything to celebrate after this meeting. There might be an agenda for discussion in the future, but the real action will not happen this year.”

As delegates review the progress made in adaptation finance last week, it becomes apparent that the chasm between the needs of vulnerable nations and what developed countries are prepared to give is increasing instead of reducing as it was hoped last week.

While the G77 group, which represents developing countries, asks the parties to quadruple adaptation finance, developed countries are sticking to a 50-50 balance between adaptation and mitigation in their recently published roadmap, which sets out the practical steps to deliver US$100 billion of climate aid per year by 2020.

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But according to the latest UNEP Adaptation Gap report, the cost of adapting to climate change in developing countries could rise to between US$280 and $500 billion per year by 2050.

“The $100 billion roadmap is a step forward, we have been asking for it for a long time,” said Armelle Le Comte, advocacy officer at Oxfam. The plan projects that public climate finance will reach US$67 billion by 2020. When private finance is included, developed countries estimate they will mobilize between $77 billion and $133 billion total by 2020. “But what the roadmap projects is nowhere near enough what is needed in terms of adaptation. The G77’s request is more in line with reality,” said Le Comte.

To bridge the gap, “we need political will from the head of states who will come in this week, and governments need to take the lead on adaptation. Private finance has a role to play but at the moment 90% of it goes to mitigation,” she said.

Speaking on behalf of the least developed country (LDC) group, the chair Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu said that a lack of ambition and slow progress on climate adaptation and finance is having an impact on vulnerable nations. “Climate finance is a matter of survival and we still do not have a clear roadmap for the $100 billion. Unfortunately we see many developed countries still blocking progress.” he said.

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On loss and damage, a big sore point in the conversation between rich and poor nations, African countries are unsatisfied: “A review was planned, but we haven’t even started to conduct it,” Mpanu-Mpanu said.

The detail oriented, all-or-nothing approach taken by negotiators means that on these matters “nothing will be agreed until everything is agreed. But countries have different strengths and weaknesses, and this means that some issues are held hostage,” he said.

African countries also worry about the future of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), the flagship UN initiative to deliver aid, in the face of the new US presidency. The GCF receives 20% of its funding from the US, and so far of the US$3 billion it pledged it has only delivered $500 million. Should the incoming Donald Trump administration scrap climate aid altogether, Africa would be one of the first casualties.

Mpanu-Mpanu refused to rush to conclusions: “I can only go for an optimistic approach. When the president takes office, he will be surrounded by capable officers.” But should Trump decide to abandon the Paris agreement, he said: “I don’t think that a single party would be able to stop the unparalleled momentum, no other agreement has seen such a degree of ownership. Guess what, we’ll do it anyway.”

Lou Del Bello’s series of reports on Africa and climate change is funded by CDKN

The post Africa forgotten amid global climate battle between rich countries appeared first on Climate Home News.

Scientific evidence is the foundation of robust adaptation policies that tackle water management, energy and food security, the study says. Without it, the climate impacts that are already plunging Africa into a humanitarian crisis are poised to get much worse.

But patchy weather records, most of which lay abandoned in meteorological offices and are unlikely to ever be digitised, make the African climate system among the planet’s least understood.

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The study, produced by the Future Climate For Africa initiative, a joint program of the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) and Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), finds that while Africa is poised to get hotter and its weather more erratic, most government departments are only planning short term, therefore failing to respond to slow onset environmental changes.

“It is difficult to model through computers, which makes predictions of future rainfall under climate change challenging,” said John Marsham, one of the authors at the University of Leeds, in the UK.

Although scientists know that both dry spells and heavy rainfall are likely to increase, whether some regions will get wetter or drier remains unclear.

Marsham also said that poor funding and the fact that the data are rarely shared with the scientific community are deepening the crisis.

“Long term decisions that do not account for climate change risk serious negative impacts” Marsham said. “Water supply, irrigation and drainage infrastructure built now need to be designed for the water availability, water needs and flood occurrence of the coming decades, as well as the present.”

Countries are increasingly embracing preparedness, and initiatives for adaptation in agriculture often include climate risk in their agenda.

The Adaptation of African Agriculture, presented at the UN climate talks in Marrakech this week, is one of the programs that builds on research and scientific evidence to devise practical solutions.

It connects governments and farmers in fields such as soil management, agricultural water control, as well as risk management.

“Africa, long neglected, can no longer be ignored. Today, it is an active, respected partner in the debate on global governance,” said Moroccan King Mohammed VI at the launch of the initiative.

“Cooperation, which is already intense with many countries at the bilateral level, will be further expanded and revitalized.”

But to create a robust, long term climate response strategy, funding from developed countries needs to keep flowing.

Teresa Anderson, climate and resilience expert with ActionAid, said that every dollar invested in prevention and resilience saves seven dollars in humanitarian response. “But donor countries prefer to wait until the crisis is in the news before responding to it, by which time is too late to make a real impact.”

She said that rich nations should ramp up their financial contribution to climate response, and makes no concessions to the US President-elect who vowed to slash climate aid.

“No country lives in a bubble, in a world where this year was the hottest ever recorded and 400 million people were affected by drought there is no space for climate denialism. The American people need to be aware that they live in the rest of the world,” she said.

Lou Del Bello’s series of reports on Africa and climate change is funded by CDKN

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