Climate Adaptation Finance and Implementation Gap Report 2024

This year’s UNEP’s annual Adaptation Gap Report 2024, now in its ninth edition and titled “Come hell and high water,” shows that the climate adaptation finance gap remains extremely large. This means that countries are falling short of adapting to climate change impacts.

The report reveals that although international public adaptation finance flows to developing countries increased from US$22 billion in 2021 to US$28 billion in 2022, marking the most significant absolute and relative year-on-year increase since the adoption of the Paris Agreement on climate change, the figure remains woefully insufficient to address the climate adaptation gap, which is now estimated to be between US$187 billion and US$359 billion annually.

It notes that the global average temperature rise is approaching 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and that the latest predictions from the Emissions Gap Report 2024 put the world on course for an increase of 2.6-3.1°C this century, without immediate and major cuts to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, the November report from Copernicus shows that 2024 will be the first year the world’s temperature rise surpasses 1.5°C.

As climate impacts intensify with continuous and unabated GHG emissions and the planet continues to warm, the world’s most vulnerable will be the most brutal hit. The report highlights the need to urgently scale up climate adaptation, starting with finance, which COP 29 from 11 to 22 November 2024 in Baku, Azerbaijan, offers a significant opportunity to do so.

The AGR 2024 calls on COP29 to adopt a decisive new collective quantified goal for climate finance (NCQG), which will be established during this year’s climate summit in Baku, and to include stronger adaptation components in the next round of nationally determined contributions (NDCs), due in 2025. 

The Adaptation Gap Report 2024 provides an annual assessment of adaptation planning, implementation, and finance progress. It discussed in length four key topics:

1) Progress in adaptation planning, implementation, and finance. The increased attention to and investment in adaptation planning in the last 20 years has resulted in 171 countries (87%) now having at least one national adaptation planning instrument (policy, strategy, or plan) in place. Of these, 51% have a second, and 20% have a third instrument. However, although 16 of the 26 countries without a national planning instrument are in the process of developing one, 10 remain that currently show no indication of developing such an instrument. 

2) Bridging the adaptation finance gap. The AGR  2024 is further reporting on the current finance gap and the types of adaptation that need financing, not just the total level of finance. It shows that it is generally easier to finance no-regret, reactive, and incremental adaptation but more challenging to finance anticipatory and transformational adaptation. This applies to all types of financing – domestic public, international public, and private funding. However, to meet the scale of the climate change challenge, adaptation financing must shift from reactive, incremental, and project-based financing towards more anticipatory, strategic, and transformational adaptation.

3) Enhancing capacity-building and technology transfer to improve the effectiveness of adaptation actions. Capacity-building and technology transfer are central to enhancing climate adaptation action in developing countries, but there is uncertainty regarding their effectiveness. The report notes that despite references to capacity and technology needs being nearly ubiquitous in UNFCCC documents, such as NAPs and technology needs assessments, ongoing efforts are often uncoordinated, expensive, and short-term, and there is insufficient data to assess their effectiveness.

It is crucial to close knowledge gaps to strengthen the implementation and deployment of capacity building and technology transfer in a coordinated manner. For instance, identifying which capacity building and technology transfer are relevant to what countries, and how can they be developed and transferred? Better integration, targeted support, and greater cooperation between developing and developed countries could go a long way to closing these knowledge gaps. It could be articulated in their revised NDCs and NAPs.

4)  Insights into aspects of the UAE FGCR. This year’s report also reflects on what can already be said about progress toward several of the targets laid out in the United Arab Emirates Framework for Global Climate  Resilience (UAE  FGCR) agreed upon at COP 28 in Dubai.

You can download a copy of the “Adaptation Gap Report 2024” by visiting the link in the “Source” section at the bottom of this post.

Watch the video from UNEP highlighting the urgent need for countries to increase climate adaptation efforts, primarily through committed climate adaptation financing.