More than $18 billion promised by wealthy nations to help vulnerable, often low-polluting nations adapt to climate change is absent from current plans, according to a new study.
International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) research indicates that developed countries and multilateral organizations are on track to channel $21.8bn annually in climate adaptation money by 2025, more than $18bn short of the climate pledged at the COP26 climate negotiations last year.
“Heatwaves in India and Pakistan, as well as flooding in South Africa and Bangladesh, threaten the lives of millions,” said IIED’s director of climate research, Clare Shakya. “Providing the means for poor nations to adapt to the increasingly unavoidable changes in climate is very essential.”
IIED’s analysis of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data indicates that two countries, France and Sweden, have pledged more than their fair share, while five others, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Germany, have pledged at least half of their fair share.
The USA, Italy, and Japan are among the G7 economies falling short of their fair contribution, according to IIED.
Madeleine Diouf Sarr, climate lead in Senegal’s environment ministry and chair of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) group of 46 vulnerable nations at COP negotiations, told Sky News that climate change is now a fact.
She stated that the IPCC’s most recent report demonstrates that the repercussions are “greater in the poorest countries, such as LDC countries and small island states,” underscoring the disparity between the required and available resources.
It occurs as negotiators convene in Bonn to assess the progress made since COP26, and just before the G7 leaders’ summit, when the United Kingdom, which holds the COP presidency until COP27 in November, hopes to exert pressure on other wealthy nations.
The commitment to quadruple adaptation money was heralded as a major achievement of the November COP26 climate negotiations in Glasgow.
A COP26 official stated that urgently increasing global climate action financing is needed.
“Trust and confidence in climate finance providers can only be preserved if they deliver,” they noted, noting that they continued their efforts to double the funds.
Climate financing, the mechanism through which affluent polluting countries subsidize climate measures in impoverished countries that have traditionally polluted the least, has been a sticky issue in climate diplomacy for a very long time.
In 2009, developing nations were expected to donate $100 billion annually by 2020. In addition, they failed to divide this cash equally between mitigation (steps to reduce emissions) and adaptation (measures to cope with climate impacts). Approximately 25 percent of the $80 billion in climate money provided in 2019 was designated for adaptation.
Some impoverished, climate-vulnerable nations with very low emissions stand to gain the most from adaptation efforts, notwithstanding their bureaucratic inaccessibility.
The United Kingdom’s COP26 team and the Institute for International Environmental Development (IIED) agree that enhancing the consistency and transparency of reporting will at least help to assess how much money is being spent on adaptation.
