Angela Churie Kallhauge is executive vice president for impact at the Environmental Defense Fund.
“There is no infrastructure in the region that can withstand a Category 5.” This warning from Prime Minister Andrew Holness to Jamaicans about oncoming Hurricane Melissa last week should be a wake-up call to the world. We are not prepared for the realities of our changing climate. The latest UN Adaptation Gap Report confirms this, showing how far we still must go to build resilience.
This year’s UN climate summit – COP30 in Brazil – offers a critical opportunity to take stock of adaptation progress and change course. Countries will discuss how to respond to rising and unavoidable climate risks, but negotiations only get us so far.
To turn pledges into protection, adaptation must become practical, profitable, and scalable. In short: we need to move the market. That means sending clear policy signals, setting enforceable standards, and deploying financial tools that build investor confidence, reward risk reduction, attract private capital, and drive demand for adaptation solutions.
Physical climate risks are already costing families, businesses, and communities – both directly and indirectly. People are spending more dollar-for-dollar to weather-proof homes and buildings, while supply chain disruptions are driving up prices – with costs ultimately passed on to consumers.
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In the United States, half of Americans believe climate change is increasing the cost of home ownership. In India, extreme heat and droughts are causing farmers to lose income from crop failures and livestock losses. Bangkok, Thailand is sinking due to sea level rise, where flooding has cost billions of dollars and forced the Thai government to consider constructing massive seawalls or moving its capital city entirely.
Fortunately, the supply of adaptation technologies, products, and services is growing. We have fortified roofs that protect our homes, flexible flood-proof walls that defend hospitals from rising waters and storm surge, cooling infrastructure that shields dairy cattle from heat stress. But these solutions are not reaching the people who need them most. A lack of awareness, access, and affordability is preventing progress.
Lessons from the clean energy playbook
The clean energy transition offers a useful playbook for building a market for climate resilience. Thanks to smart market design, renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels in most cases, with over 90% of new renewable capacity costing less than new fossil fuel plants. Governments and businesses created predictable demand, reduced risk, and aligned incentives – making it possible for clean energy to scale and turn a profit.
We can apply the same approach to adaptation. Just as renewable energy tax credits and electric vehicle mandates boosted renewable energy technology innovation and investor confidence, adaptation needs incentives for climate-resilient infrastructure and procurement requirements that prioritize adaptation. Financial tools like tax credits, resilience bonds, and blended finance can lower upfront costs, while insurance-linked incentives can reward risk reduction.
Demand aggregation is another proven strategy. Utility-scale solar procurement and fleet EV purchases drove economies of scale. Corporations led to the voluntary procurement of over 40% of the total capacity of US solar and wind projects from 2014 to 2024.
Comment: Hurricane Melissa’s destruction shows need for climate resilience push
For adaptation, buyers’ alliances that support collective and forward purchase agreements for climate-resilient building materials and municipal resilience bonds for infrastructure projects can bring down costs, guarantee market size and send strong signals to suppliers and investors.
Standards and certifications build consumer trust. Energy Star and vehicle efficiency benchmarks helped consumers make informed purchases around new product lines. Adaptation needs climate resilience certifications for infrastructure and supply chains. These should be aligned with national and international frameworks to ensure credibility and consistency across markets.
Awareness drives adoption. Clean energy campaigns helped consumers understand the benefits and return on investment of purchasing clean energy products. Adaptation needs the same messaging.
A recent analysis from the World Resources Institute found that every $1 invested in adaptation solutions created more than $10 in benefits over ten years. We need to localize this insight – providing municipalities, households, and businesses with geographic- and industry-specific risk data and cost-benefit analyses that make resilience tangible and financially compelling.
Designing an adaptation market that works
Ultimately, we need a mindset shift. Adaptation is not charity. It is a strategic economic imperative. Of course, a key component of a market is its consumers. Communities are important end-users of adaptation technologies, products, and services – and they must be engaged early and often in designing and implementing them to ensure they fit local contexts and needs.
At COP30, there will be no shortage of headlines about worsening climate impacts and slow adaptation progress. That narrative might move negotiations, but it won’t move markets.
To build real resilience, we must shift our focus from what’s impossible to what’s already possible. We have solutions. Now we need to scale them and create incentives for the ones we still need. We must shift attention to the potential, not the impossible.
The post The missing piece in COP climate talks: Market signals for adaptation appeared first on Climate Home News.
The missing piece in COP climate talks: Market signals for adaptation
Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD.
This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway point between the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the deadline for achieving its targets.
The CBD has found that countries are currently not on track to meet 22 out of the framework’s 23 targets.
During the fortnight, delegates will also be negotiating decisions relating to the two supplemental protocols to the CBD: the Cartagena Protocol, which covers biosafety; and the Nagoya Protocol, which covers access and benefit-sharing for the use of genetic resources.
(The Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, which are each governed by a “meeting of the parties”, or “MOP”, have fewer parties than the CBD as a whole, with 173 and 141, respectively.)
Carbon Brief is tracking the progress of countries towards consensus on dozens of negotiating texts using the interactive table below.
The tracker includes texts from the COP, as well as the MOPs for the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols. It also includes draft decisions from the most recent subsidiary body meetings, as these form the starting point for the negotiations in Yerevan.
The CBD has three subsidiary bodies: the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA), the subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) and the subsidiary body on article 8(j) and other provisions (SB8J).
SB8J focuses on issues related to the Indigenous peoples and local communities. It was established at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024.
The first two columns of the interactive tracker list the topic of each agenda item and the relevant body, with subsequent columns including dates, page counts and links to the original documents.
The table is searchable and can be sorted using the arrows in the header.
Areas of disagreement in UN draft texts are denoted by square brackets. Counting the brackets in a particular iteration of a text therefore gives a sense of how far parties are from reaching consensus.
The bracket column is colour-coded, with dark green indicating a low number of brackets and red indicating a high number of brackets remaining.
Texts can also present parties with choices using “options” or alternatives (“alt”), which are counted together in the sixth column of the table.
The key discussions in Yerevan will centre around two agenda items in particular. The first is the global review, which will assess progress towards the GBF and make recommendations for accelerating action.
The second is finance, which can be separated into two parts: resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism. On resource mobilisation, biodiverse global south countries are likely to push for an increased amount of international finance for conservation.
Disagreement over the creation of the financial mechanism led to the suspension of COP16 in Cali in October 2024, as parties failed to find agreement on the mobilisation of finance before the end of the summit.
Global south countries want the establishment of a separate financial mechanism under the control of the CBD; global north countries largely prefer to maintain the existing mechanism, which sits under the Global Environment Facility.
At the resumed session of COP16 in Rome in early 2025, countries agreed on a roadmap that would lead to the establishment of a permanent mechanism.
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The post Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit
A beacon of love
On an outer island of Fiji, two thousand nautical miles from Sydney, is a shining light of hope and resilience for our troubled world.
The island of Kioa is home to a Tuvaluan community who migrated from their atoll of Vaitupu in the late 1940s. It is a land of warm hearts, big smiles, and deep cultural roots; a place where the sound of a conch still summons the island together, where islanders paddle out to fish in carved outrigger canoes, and healthy happy children walk barefoot to school.
Here, culture is life. Kioans live sustainably through their traditional knowledge and practices. The island is alive with song, dance and the rhythms of a life tied to the tides, the winds, and the seasons.
Facing the future
Greenpeace has been lucky to have a relationship with Kioa for a number of years now, and we are continually learning from this remarkable community.
Last week, as part of our Voyaging Oceania project, we returned to the island. Our purpose was twofold —- to carry messages from the island to leaders gathering in Nadi this week for the Pacific Pre-COP, and to support the Kioa community in their efforts to improve water security for the island.
Unlike Tuvalu itself, with its eight atolls, Kioa is a mountainous, forested and richly fertile island. It will remain habitable far into the future. Kioans did not initially migrate from Vaitupu due to climate change, but the move was prophetic. They now have a lifeboat.
However, even Kioa faces challenges on our rapidly warming planet, in particular when it comes to water. Climate change is shifting once reliable rainfall patterns. On top of this, the island is already feeling the effect of this year’s intensifying El Niño event, which for Fiji means reduced rainfall and prolonged dry spells.
Right now, fresh water has to be carefully rationed, and is only available for a few hours a day. During last week’s visit aboard our campaigning ship Oceania, Greenpeace was privileged to work with the Kioa community on a new solar-powered water distribution project for the island.
Designed and led by the island, the project involves using a solar pump to move water from a reliable source to a storage tank and then using gravity to distribute the water around the village.
It was a lesson in how local knowledge and ingenuity can be the backbone of today’s climate solutions. To build a dam around the source, the local community knew the exact spot where they could gather gravel at low tide to mix with the cement. They took only what was needed, knowing that all resources must be carefully conserved. Kioa has no roads and no machinery, and it was an all-of-island effort to carry the materials up to the project site, including many heavy bags of sand and rock.
Such projects truly bring to life the vision of a resilient, locally-led, fossil fuel free Pacific.