This year’s UN climate change conference (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan, takes place amid worsening climate impacts – even countries that were not considered among the most vulnerable are waking up to the urgent need to adapt to a warming planet.
New research from the UN Environment Programme highlights the scale of the adaptation challenge and how it has grown in prominence, while finance to tackle rising needs has lagged behind.
This year’s Adaptation Gap Report highlights the “extremely large” gap between adaptation finance needs in developing countries – estimated at $215 billion-$387 billion per year this decade – and actual flows of money. In 2022, international public finance for adaptation projects reached only $28 billion, up from $22 billion in 2021, the report notes.
“The climate crisis is here. We can’t postpone protection. We must adapt – now,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Gueterres said in a video statement when the report was released, calling for “a massive increase in adaptation finance from public and private sources”.
“Immediate necessity”
Since the Adaptation Fund was established, it has invested more than $1.2 billion in over 180 different projects around the world, benefiting around 46 million vulnerable people and training around 1.6 million people in climate resilience measures.
In the more than 17 years that the fund has operated in the field, the urgency to respond in the present – and not leave it to future generations as the problem was often framed in the past – has become crystal clear.
The fund has managed to stay flexible and evolve with the world around it.
“In this rapidly changing world, adaptation is no longer a distant goal; it is an immediate necessity that requires urgent investments because delays in meeting adaptation finance needs lead to increasing costs of inaction, reaching limits of adaptation and increasing loss and damage,” said Adaptation Fund Head Mikko Ollikainen.
“The Fund’s ability to adapt to a changing landscape has been crucial. By fostering tangible and scalable actions on the ground, innovation and locally led adaptation, we empower pilot projects to demonstrate their value and pave the way for larger-scale climate action.”
Proud pioneers
This is what happened, for example, with one of the Adaptation Fund’s earliest recipients of its grant funding: the Centre de Suivi Ecologique (CSE), an environmental institution in Senegal, which tapped into the fund’s pioneering direct access programme.
Back in 2010, CSE was awarded $8.6 million to implement a complex project to stop coastal erosion in three regions – Rufisque, Saly and Joal – where sea level rise threatened thousands of livelihoods in tourism and fishing.
In Saly, a village around 50 miles (80.5 km) from the capital Dakar, the project built a new 730-metre seawall, 1.4-km long underwater berms, and a 3.3-km dyke to prevent saltwater from reaching fertile rice fields.
According to Dr. Assize Toure, then CSE’s director-general, the project “helped protect thousands of lives, infrastructure and goods while raising awareness of climate change in three cities along Senegal’s vulnerable coast”.
Senegal was “proud to be a pioneer” of that original funding, he said, adding that it directly led to new opportunities and initiatives to combat climate change in the country.
After the success of the initial project – which protected an estimated 3,000 jobs – CSE won a separate round of funding a few years later to further bolster the resilience of coastal communities to the encroaching sea.
The head of CSE’s climate finance unit, Aïssata Sall, believes that the different forms of support on offer from the Adaptation Fund – to help with everything from project preparation to learning grants – have improved results, and boosted the ability of CSE and other partners working on the ground to mobilise more resources.
“That inevitably contributes to the Paris Agreement,” she told the fund.
Adaptation grows in importance
The earliest UN climate conferences, back in the 1990s, often made only passing references to adaptation.
The first climate COP in 1995 stated that adaptation would “require short, medium and long-term strategies which are cost-effective”. But it was the Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, that first established a specific vehicle – the Adaptation Fund – to help finance these projects in developing countries through concrete projects for the most climate-vulnerable.
Dr. Toure of CSE described the Adaptation Fund’s arrival in the landscape of climate finance as “a major development for developing countries”. The fund now serves the Paris Agreement, adopted in 2015.
Almost 30 years since the fund’s inception, we are living with the impacts of extreme weather on a regular basis – and the need to adapt to this new reality is urgent. It is hard to tell whether those negotiating at the early COP summits fully anticipated how climate change would develop, and the role adaptation would need to play as the crisis intensifies.
By contrast, the outcome of the COP28 conference in Dubai last year includes almost 100 references to adaptation, starting on the very first page.
The adaptation landscape has changed considerably since the first UN climate conference was held in Berlin. More money is flowing into projects that vary in size and ambition around the world – and there are more funds dedicated to scaling up this work to ensure many more millions of people can be protected against climate disasters. However, adaptation finance needs continue to rise sharply.
Resource mobilisation target
The Adaptation Fund Board has set a resource mobilisation target of $300 million for this year amid a growing project pipeline approaching $500 million. Leaving Baku without meeting this target would send a dire signal to climate-vulnerable people around the world.
The importance of the UN COP process as a central place for galvanising adaptation policy and finance should not be underestimated. It remains one of the few forums that gathers so many stakeholders for two weeks – and where new commitments are made each year. This COP in particular is of critical importance as it should agree on a new global climate finance goal.
Those same governments and partners coming together in Baku for the latest negotiations are aware that sea levels are rising and extreme weather is directly threatening our way of life. Adaptation is the solution that can keep the waters at bay. It’s time to ensure that it’s properly funded.
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 COP29: We need to adapt to climate chaos now appeared first on Climate Home News.
SYDNEY, Thursday 30 October 2026 — In response to reports that the Albanese government is set to introduce draft legislation this year that would seek to ban data centres in Australia’s suburbs, Joe Rafalowicz, Head of Climate and Energy at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said:
“These reports are a testament to the growing community opposition to these completely inappropriate AI factories that have sprung up across our suburbs, and Big Tech corporations should take heed — the data centre build-out must not happen without the endorsement of the Australian people.
“But the government can’t simply ship this problem out to regional Australia without addressing the fundamental issues with this extractive new industry.
“We’re already seeing a trend of AI data centre proposals moving to the regions, in areas that are more water-scarce, more environmentally sensitive, and next to sources of fracked and coal seam gas to support their massive BYO gas-fired power plans — a pattern we’ve seen play out in the United States.
“From the Beetaloo Basin in the NT to the Western Downs in Qld, we’re seeing a wave of AI data centre proposals that would see new gas fast-tracked to support their massive energy demand, and threaten to completely derail Australia’s energy transition.
“Just as suburban Australians are asking, “what for?”, regional communities like Berry Springs and Dalby do not want dirty data centres setting up shop with absolutely no benefit to their communities. Greenpeace is calling for a moratorium on AI data centre developments until strict and enforceable safeguards are in place to protect our climate and our communities.”
-ENDS-
Media contact
Kate O’Callaghan on +61 406 231 892 or kate.ocallaghan@greenpeace.org
AI data centre ban in suburbs would not address fundamental issues: Greenpeace
In the thick of the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan in 2024, the UN climate talks were rattled by what can only be described as a major PR disaster. The BBC, Reuters and The Guardian all carried headlines, attributed to leading climate policy experts, that the COPs were “no longer fit for purpose”.
The articles outlined a series of reforms called for in an open letter signed by 22 eminent scientists and politicians, including a former UN secretary-general and previous UN climate chief, with a further 150 lending their support. The headlines shook confidence in the COP process, just as governments were wrestling over a new climate finance goal.
The Club of Rome – which handled the media relations for the letter – hurried to say that its “constructive, supportive ideas” had been “misinterpreted”. Negotiators kept calm(ish) and carried on, in the end landing the finance goal after some high-stakes drama on the final day.
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Early speakers’ list suggests few powerful leaders will attend COP31
Just 77 heads of state or government are scheduled to address the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, a third less than the COP28 peak -
Africa wants adaptation finance on COP31 agenda, raising risk of a fight
The African Group wants dedicated space on tripling adaptation finance, the Green Climate Fund and trade, setting up a possible clash
To my surprise, when I went back this week to read the letter again, I could not find the offending line about the COPs not being fit for purpose. The Club of Rome has yet to respond to my query about its disappearance.
Whatever happened to the wording, that sentiment has been widely shared. COPs have ballooned in size while the importance of their outcomes seems to have diminished since the 2015 Paris Agreement (with the exception of the 2023 COP in Dubai where countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems).
The same on the surface
Two years on from those painful headlines in Baku, has anything changed for the better? You might be forgiven for thinking not. Official decisions are still made by consensus rather than the majority voting some have called for to stop blockers.
Tens of thousands of officials, activists and business execs still scurry around the halls to an ever-growing list of side events, roundtables and dialogues, while deals still come down to rows, all-nighters and jargon-filled texts adopted to rounds of applause.
But it would not be true to say that COPs have completely failed to respond to the very real need to translate the words of the Paris Agreement into action in the outside world.
Global warming is projected to be around 1.3C lower this century than it would have been if the world had not committed to tackle the climate crisis under that accord. Developing countries have a valued space at COPs in which their voices have equal weight in decision-making, unlike in many other international fora. And most importantly, perhaps, there has been a subtle shift, tipping the balance away from negotiating towards doing.
Brazil branded last year’s summit in Belém as the “COP of Implementation”, corralling the sprawling Action Agenda into six axes. This was a bid to impose some structure on the mushrooming efforts between governments, UN agencies, cities, businesses and civil society to set targets and spur faster results on their pet issues, from methane emissions to health and adaptation in conflict zones. COP30 alone saw the launch of 120 “plans to accelerate solutions”.
COP30 roadmaps off the cuff
Meanwhile, as the formal negotiations drew to a close, it was clear that consensus decision-making was evolving into something a little more improvised.
With only around half of all countries on board with the idea of a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago announced his team would put one together over the coming year, along with another on how to meet a global goal to halt deforestation by 2030. Those roadmaps will be launched next week, presented and discussed at COP31, though it’s still unclear whether or how they’ll be incorporated into the formal negotiating agenda.
Some leading policy-makers don’t think that matters too much. Speaking to journalists before the Antalya summit, COP30 CEO Ana Toni and Dutch climate minister Stientje van Veldhoven said “coalitions of the willing” can move ahead without needing consensus from the COPs. This, they said, was evident this year at the first global conference on TAFF, co-chaired by van Veldhoven and attended by 60 countries.
“Consensus or no-consensus in the general COP doesn’t make a difference for the choices I have to make in my country to get my country to phase out fossil fuels,” said the Dutch minister. The Netherlands recently became one of the first to publish a national TAFF plan.
COP31 banks on flagship voluntary initiatives
This thinking has permeated the management and expected outcomes of this year’s COP too. Earlier this year, Türkiye, supported by international energy agencies, floated the idea of a voluntary goal to boost electrification to 35% of the world’s final energy consumption by 2035 – and this is now being touted as one of the main results to be expected from Antalya.
Türkiye is also championing a pledge on AI and climate, while co-host Australia is pushing to ease access to climate finance for least developed countries and small island states.
COP31 presidency announces AI pledge as UN climate chief says Big Tech ‘on thin ice’
None of these needs consensus. But with a political cover decision already in the works, as trailed by the COP presidents, they – and perhaps the fossil fuel roadmap – may find a home in the official text if language acceptable to most can be found, giving them them additional weight.
UNFCCC reform process in the shadows
Formal reform is underway too, if quietly. UN climate chief Simon Stiell is leading a review informed by ongoing consultations with a group of 15 well-respected climate policy experts, three of whom signed the open letter in 2024.
Among them is leading Swedish climate and sustainability scientist Johan Rockström who has strong ideas about how to make COPs function better, including a switch to majority voting. He told the same press briefing nothing stands in the way of this, because the rules of procedure for making decisions at COPs have never been formally agreed.
Still, to get away from the default setting of consensus would require agreement on a new system that may be impossible to achieve given the rise in bullying tactics by fossil fuel heavyweights.
Comment: The UN climate process was built for negotiation – now it must support implementation
The deliberations with the high-level policy gurus, as reflected in a summary of June’s session in Bonn, largely echo what’s already happening organically, calling for stronger partnerships and accountability both in and between the Action Agenda and negotiations. It doesn’t mention voting.
A general overview of the reform exercise says that “improving and optimizing the [UN climate] process over the medium to long term… will be critical to fostering trust, enhancing collaboration, and catalyzing increased ambition”.
In the short term, don’t hold your breath for anything concrete on reform at COP31 but watch for signs in what ends up dominating the headlines from Türkiye.
The post Editor’s Desk: COP reform is happening quietly, behind the headlines appeared first on Climate Home News.
Editor’s Desk: COP reform is happening quietly, behind the headlines
With the COP31 climate summit in Turkey looming, all eyes are on China to see what the country will push for in the negotiations.
At COP30 last year, China helped to secure a “dialogue” on climate-related “unilateral trade measures”, as well as a two-year “work programme” concerning climate finance.
The nation also championed south-south cooperation throughout the conference and co-led a summit on methane, alongside Brazil and the UK.
In a recent press conference, China’s environment vice-minister Li Gao noted the need to “uphold multilateralism” and send a “clear political signal” that the global community is united around climate action.