The Paris Agreement established the global goal on adaptation of enhancing adaptive capacity, strengthening resilience, and reducing vulnerability to climate change in the context of the Agreement’s temperature goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C or 2°C.

The Glasgow – Sharm el-Sheikh work programme on the global goal on adaptation, established and launched at COP26, represents a turning point in the world’s journey to both make and measure progress towards this global goal.

Among other things, this work programme will help enhance understanding of the global goal on adaptation and how to understand progress towards it.

This, in turn, will help equip communities and countries with the knowledge and tools to ensure that the adaptation actions they take are indeed moving the world towards a more climate-resilient future.  It will also help to better inform the provision of support for adaptation.

The Paris Agreement (Article 9.4) states that the provision of scaled-up financial resources should aim to achieve a balance between adaptation and mitigation. In fact, there is a political aspiration of having a 50:50 balance between mitigation and adaptation, with a greater share of the adaptation funding going to most vulnerable countries.

A lot of work needs to be done to achieve that. It is clear from the Fourth Biennial Assessment and Overview of Climate Finance Flows that support for mitigation remains greater than support for adaptation; indeed, adaptation finance has remained at between 20 and 25 per cent of committed concessional finance across all sources.

COP26 urged developed nations to at least double their collective provision of adaptation finance from 2019 levels by 2025, in order to achieve this balance between adaptation and mitigation.

At COP26, Parties welcomed new financial pledges made to the Adaptation Fund (totaling over USD 350 million) and to the Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF) (totaling over USD 600 million) that will translate into helping vulnerable people bolster resilience to the worsening impacts of climate change.

In the case of the Adaptation Fund, these pledges broke previous resource mobilization records and included first-time contributors.

The contributions will help the Fund continue to support concrete adaptation projects in developing countries, such as planting heat-tolerant wheat varieties to improve food security, or building natural retaining walls to reduce flood risk.

The money pledged to the LDCF will help accelerate adaptation in the least developed countries, who are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change.

LDCF projects have supported a wide range of adaptation measures in the past, from conserving and restoring degraded landscapes to strengthening climate change early warning systems to allow for rapid responses to extreme weather events.

Under the rules, modalities and procedures agreed for the new market-based UNFCCC mechanism established by Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement to contribute to the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions and support sustainable development, it was decided that a share of proceeds will be levied to assist developing country Parties that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change to meet the costs of adaptation.

Specifically, a 5 per cent share of proceeds will be levied, which will be delivered to the Adaptation Fund to support concrete adaptation projects in developing countries around the world.

This percentage is more than double the 2 per cent levy under the market mechanism established under the Kyoto Protocol – the clean development mechanism – which was also delivered to the Adaptation Fund and formed a key source of its income.

It is well known and deeply concerning that current provision of climate finance for adaptation remains insufficient to respond to worsening climate change impacts in developing country Parties.

To respond to the present and future climate risks we need to significantly increase the scale of adaptation finance, from all sources – i.e. public and private sources. All players must come on board – governments, financial institutions, the private sector.

Finance should also be predictable. By 2025, a new collective quantified goal on climate finance will be set, starting from a floor of USD 100 billion per year and taking into account the needs and priorities of developing countries.

While the new goal is thus yet to be determined, it is clear from the most recent UNEP Adaptation Gap Report that adaptation costs and needs are rising, and are five to ten times greater than current international public adaptation finance flows, leading to a widening adaptation finance gap.

Adaptation finance flows mobilized to meet the current and future collective goal must therefore be scaled up to ensure that vulnerable countries can meet their adaptation needs, reduce their vulnerability, and increase their resilience to cope with climate hazards such as floods and droughts.

The Santiago Network was established at the previous COP25 to catalyze technical assistance for averting, minimizing and addressing loss and damage in developing countries.

At COP26, Parties adopted the functions of the Network and set up a process to further develop the institutional and funding arrangements for the Network.

This will make it possible to identify technical assistance needs and priorities, and more effectively catalyze demand-driven technical assistance for averting, minimizing and addressing loss and damage at the local, national and regional levels.

Parties also established the Glasgow Dialogue to take place over the next three years to discuss arrangements for funding activities to avert, minimize and address loss and damage.

Multilateralism and collaboration between governments, international organizations, international financial institutions, civil society and the private sector is essential to ensure more support for adaptation.

The UNFCCC secretariat has launched a UN-wide partnership, UN4NAPs, to mobilize the whole UN system to support the most vulnerable countries in preparing and implementing their national adaptation plans (NAPs).

The initiative builds on the call from the UN Secretary-General for the whole UN system to advance adaptation plans under the slogan “more, faster, better”, with a focus on increasing support to vulnerable nations, including the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and small island developing States.