Ahead of COP 30, UN warns of ‘yawning gap’ in global adaptation finance

By the Climate Centre

The amount of money going to developing countries to help them cope with and recover from the impacts of climate change is only 7 per cent of the internationally assessed requirement, according to Running on Empty, this year’s report on adaptation from UNEP, released yesterday in the run-up to COP 30 in Brazil.

Amid rising global temperatures and intensifying climate impacts, the United Nations Environment Programme finds that “a yawning gap in adaptation finance for developing countries is putting lives, livelihoods and entire economies at risk”.

The report updates the cost of adaptation finance needed in developing countries – based on both modelling and extrapolated needs from Nationally Determined Contributions and National Adaptation Plans – at US$ 365 billion a year; the amount actually getting to those countries fell to US$ 26 billion in 2023 from US$ 28 billion in 2022.

UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen says that “unless trends in adaptation financing turn around, which currently seems unlikely, the [COP 26] Glasgow Climate Pact goal will not be achieved, the [New Collective Quantified Goal for climate finance] will not be achieved, and many more people will suffer needlessly.”

“There are signs of hope,“ she adds, however. “Some 172 countries have national adaptation policies, strategies or plans in place … countries reported over 1,600 adaptation actions, mostly on biodiversity, agriculture, water and infrastructure.

“Support for new projects under the Adaptation Fund, the Global Environment Facility and the Green Climate Fund also grew in 2024. With the Baku to Belem Roadmap … we have the chance to enable the raising of US$ 1.3 trillion per year by 2035.”

‘This is a huge problem,
especially for developing countries’

Overall, the UNEP says, funding for new adaptation projects rose in 2024, although emerging financial constraints make the future unclear. Both public and private finance must step up to increase adaptation, it argues, but without increasing vulnerable nations’ debt burden.

“This is a huge problem, especially for poorer developing countries, which have often contributed little to the cause of climate change,” climate finance expert Pieter Pauw, of Eindhoven University of Technology and one of the lead authors of the UNEP report, told the Dutch NOS network yesterday.

“It’s a slow-motion disaster, becoming increasingly visible during extreme weather events worldwide,” he added, estimating that up to some 20 per cent of the costs of adaptation could be covered by the private sector. “The rest requires public funding, which is currently unavailable.”

The IFRC and the Climate Centre have developed the seven-stage Climate Action Journey with locally led adaptation as a central goal, providing an innovative framework for National Societies to create climate solutions through community wisdom, lived experience and climate science.

Most recently, in its own message to COP 30, the IFRC reported that with National Societies it is scaling up locally led climate action through the Global Climate Resilience Platform, supported by the Climate Action Journey that bridges climate, humanitarian, development, private and innovative finance.

In the Philippines, Jesus Seno Cortes works in urban agricultural farming since losing his work as a motorized tricycle driver during the Covid 19 pandemic. The photo appears in this year’s UNEP report on global finance for climate adaptation in developing countries. (Photo: Mark Linel Padecio/UNEP)