Financing for climate adaptation shrank by 15%, says UN – 11/02/2023 – Environment

Financing for climate adaptation in developing countries fell by 15% in 2021, according to the UN (United Nations), which considers that this number shows that the fight against global warming is stagnant.

Despite clear signs of an “acceleration of climate risks and their impact on the world, the financing deficit for adaptation is worsening”, concludes UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) in a report released this Thursday ( two).

The amounts needed for adaptation are in the range between US$215 billion and US$387 billion annually.

How do multilateral and bilateral public flows of financial adaptation to developing countries
development fell to around US$21 billion in 2021 —a 15% drop—, the document concludes that the financial adaptation needed for these countries is 10 to 18 times greater than flows. This gap, the document also highlights, was more than 50% larger than previously estimated.

“Actions to protect people and nature are more urgent than ever,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement. “However, as needs increase, action is stagnating”, he also stated, for whom, in addition to fulfilling the financing promises made by countries, an extraordinary tax is needed to be charged to fossil fuel companies to compensate climate losses.

Developed countries committed in 2009 to providing US$100 billion a year in climate finance to poorer nations, and mobilizing funds will be a key point of discussion in negotiations at COP28, the UN climate conference to be held in Dubai from November 30th to December 12th.

According to UNEP, the difference between the amount needed and the financing practiced has increased “despite the promises made during COP26, in Glasgow, to double adaptation financing between 2019 and 2025”, to reach US$42.5 billion annually, the which constitutes a “worrying precedent”.

The annual funding gap for adaptation alone is currently between US$194 billion and US$366 billion.

Measures aimed at reducing the exposure and vulnerability of countries and populations to the effects of climate change were an important point of the Paris Agreement, created to contain global warming “well below 2°C in relation to pre-industrial levels” , preferably a 1.5°C increase in temperature.

Many developing economies, which are the least historically responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, are among the most exposed to the dramatic and destructive effects of global warming, such as rising sea levels, fires and drought.

“This inability to adequately adapt intensifies the climate crisis and has enormous consequences for the damage it causes, especially for the most vulnerable”, say the report’s authors.

“The 55 economies most vulnerable to climate change have already suffered more than US$500 billion in damage over the last two years,” they add.

Every billion dollars spent combating coastal flooding, for example, would help prevent US$14 billion in economic damage, according to UNEP.

For Inger Andersen, executive director of UNEP, “the world must urgently reduce greenhouse gas emissions and intensify adaptation efforts to protect vulnerable populations”, as she writes in the report’s introduction.

Pieter Pauw, from the Eindhoven University of Technology, one of the report’s authors, assesses that “the numbers are not that big”. “If you compare the US$100 billion [anuais prometidos pelos países] with the money that the United States spends on its army and with what was spent on Covid or to save its banks, this is change”, he states.

“It’s time for developed countries to position themselves and provide more”, he adds.