In 2023, the figure reached 26.4 million worldwide as a result of floods, storms, wildfires and other disasters, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).

Climate change is not solely responsible, but the frequency and intensity of extreme weather is increasing as global temperatures continue to rise. As a result we can expect that more and more people will face losing their homes and their livelihoods.

It is commonplace to see people boarding up their homes and literally battening down the hatches before a major hurricane is predicted to make landfall. For those facing extreme weather, this mentality is no longer confined to one-off events, but a regular mindset as the climate crisis continues to bite. Many communities around the world know that building resilience against intense storms, floods and heat waves is now essential to daily life.

“No country is immune to disaster displacement,” Alexandra Bilak, IDMC’s director, said in a recent press statement. “But we can see a difference in how displacement affects people in countries that prepare and plan for its impacts and those that don’t. Those that look at the data and make prevention, response and long-term development plans that consider displacement fare far better.”

This kind of planning is happening in countries on the front line of the climate crisis. Some small island nations, for example – many of them low-lying – are seeing their homes permanently washed into the Pacific Ocean.

Paradise lost

According to Fiji’s government, disaster events in the Pacific island state over the past 40 years have led to annual economic damages of around US$16 million, with 40,000 people impacted each year. This is due to increase to an average of US$85 million per year in losses, as a result of cyclones and earthquakes. These figures are high for a country with a population of under 1 million people.

Many of the people most impacted by climate disasters live in informal urban settlements. Their homes are extremely vulnerable to the regular cyclones that hit the island nation, especially as they are often located near riverbanks or around the coast.

The subtle art of scaling up climate adaptation

A recent Adaptation Fund project in Fiji was designed to build resilience against regular extreme weather events and “climate proof” housing for the foreseeable future. The project, implemented by UN-Habitat, looked at ways to protect thousands of homes when storm surges overwhelm local water and sanitation infrastructure. The settlements were located across four main urban areas on the island: Lautoka, Sigatoka, Nadi and Lami.

Low-cost, high-impact

Constructing cyclone-resilient buildings was an essential component of the work.

Moving new homes away from vulnerable hot spots, such as foreshores, floodplains and riverbanks, was a first step. As many settlements are self-built, training local people in new construction methods ensures future homes can be built with extreme weather in mind. An innovative element from the project was so-called ‘stilted safe rooms’ – low-cost and simple raised structures intended to provide refuge during periods of intense flooding.

Flood control is a key component of climate-proofing infrastructure. In Fiji, priorities included building upgraded site drainage to reduce runoff; upgrading water sources and storage; and improving access ways, to ensure people can respond when cyclones put pressure on local infrastructure.

School’s out

In Haiti, a very poor and conflict-torn country beset with repeated natural disasters, climate-proofing infrastructure is still at an early stage. The country’s education sector, for example, has been repeatedly hit by extreme weather, including in 2016 when Hurricane Matthew damaged a quarter of its schools. Rebuilding after such frequent turmoil now requires new ways of thinking.

With the help of around US$10 million of funding from the Adaptation Fund, UNESCO is currently supporting the restoration of 620 schools across the country. Their work has included raising awareness of disaster risk reduction, improving knowledge of safety levels, and retrofitting existing buildings.

As climate disasters grow, early warning systems become essential

Panaroty Ferdinand Prophete, UNESCO’s national coordinator, told Climate Home that “nearly 200 technicians, students and experts received training on new construction techniques, an early warning system and the management of temporary shelters.” This training included working directly with the Ministry of Education to develop new construction standards for schools.

Over 150,000 students have so far benefited from the project, a success Prophete attributes to “very good synergy” between the different stakeholders. “This makes it easy to put in place a community emergency plan as well as the execution of the national action plan for resilient school infrastructure,” he added.

Best defence

Experts agree that we need to change the way we live in response to climate disasters. Moving settlements away from major water sources is, if possible, a simple solution. More projects supported by the Adaptation Fund – from Indonesia to Antigua and Barbuda – are focusing on blocking, redirecting or draining excess water as it comes in, to keep homes intact and habitable. These responses will remain some of our best defence against more unpredictable and extreme weather.

“A key sector for the Adaptation Fund is averting and reducing loss and damage through disaster risk reduction and early warning systems, which account for about 16% of the Fund’s current portfolio. Many additional multi-sector projects also include elements that are building resilience to disasters,” said Mikko Ollikainen, head of the Adaptation Fund.

“From climate-proofing homes and community centres to making informal settlements resilient to floods, it’s a vital aspect of the Fund’s work. Many of the projects are replicable and scalable so we hope they will also serve as models to create a larger positive impact on additional vulnerable communities beyond those served by the projects,” he added.

There is only so much adaptation can achieve if the flood waters get too high, or if cyclones increase in intensity and destructive force. But there are many cost-effective solutions to offer people a better chance of keeping their homes intact when extreme weather hits.

These investments can’t come soon enough for communities living in climate hot-spots and can serve to tackle long standing poverty issues at the same time. Fast-tracking these solutions will become ever more important if we want to reduce the millions of newly displaced people each year.

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 Climate disasters challenge right to safe and adequate housing appeared first on Climate Home News.

Calling for global action to limit the devastating consequences, the head of the United Nations said “billions of people are facing an extreme heat epidemic – wilting under increasingly deadly heatwaves”.

Extreme-heat events have been getting more frequent, intense and longer-lasting in recent decades as a result of human-made climate change.

Guterres’ appeal comes as the record for the world’s hottest day was broken twice on consecutive days this week, according to Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. Monday beat Sunday, with the global average surface air temperature reaching 17.16 Celsius, as parts of the world sweltered through fierce heatwaves from the Mediterranean to Russia and Canada.

Guterres said the UN had just received preliminary data indicating that Tuesday “was in the same range”, which would make a third hottest straight day on record, if confirmed.

In a speech, he noted that heat – driven by “fossil fuel-charged, human-induced climate change” – is estimated to kill almost half a million people a year, about 30 times more than tropical cyclones.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks during the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) in Dubai, December 1, 2023. COP28/Christophe Viseux/Handout via REUTERS

This year alone, extreme heat struck highly vulnerable communities across the Sahel region, killed at least 1,300 pilgrims in Mecca during Hajj and shut down schools across Asia and Africa affecting more than 80 million children.

“And we know it’s going to get worse. Extreme heat is the new abnormal,” Guterres added in his speech to journalists at UN headquarters in New York.

The Secretary-General’s “call for action” brings together ten specialised UN agencies for the first time in an urgent and concerted push to strengthen international cooperation in addressing extreme heat.

Focus on most vulnerable

Guterres listed four areas where greater efforts could be made to keep people, societies and economies safer from the negative consequences of rising global temperatures.

He emphasised the importance of “caring for the most vulnerable” – with those at greatest risk including poor people in urban areas, pregnant women, people with disabilities, the elderly, children, those who are sick and people who are displaced from their homes.

Households living in poverty often live in substandard homes without access to cooling, he added, appealing for a boost in access to low-carbon cooling and expanded use of natural measures – which include planting trees for shade – and better urban design, alongside a ramp-up of heat warning systems.

Graphic from Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change

Workers also need more protection, he said, as a new report from the International Labour Organization warned that over 70 percent of the global workforce – 2.4 billion people – are now at high risk of extreme heat, especially in Asia-Pacific, Africa and the Arab States.

The UN is calling on governments to urgently review laws and regulations on occupational safety and health to integrate provisions for extreme heat, including the right to refuse working in extreme hot weather.

Energy transition and adaptation

A third area targeted by the UN for action is making economies and societies better able to withstand heat, through stronger infrastructure, more resilient crops, and efforts to ease the pressure on health systems and water supplies.

“Countries, cities, and sectors need comprehensive, tailored Heat Action Plans, based on the best science and data,” Guterres said.

Lastly, the UN chief urged stepped-up action to “fight the disease”, by phasing out fossil fuels “fast and fairly” including no new coal projects, with the aim of limiting global warming to 1.5C – a goal nearly 200 governments signed up to in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

“I must call out the flood of fossil fuel expansion we are seeing in some of the world’s wealthiest countries,” he emphasised. “In signing such a surge of new oil and gas licenses, they are signing away our future.”

The United States, Canada, Australia, Norway and the UK have issued two-thirds of the global number of oil and gas licences since 2020, according to research published by the International Institute for Sustainable Development this week.

‘Still time to act’

Commenting on the UN’s call to action, Alan Dangour, director of climate and health at Wellcome, a UK-based science foundation, noted that people working outside in physical jobs and those who cannot afford to adapt to rising heat are particularly exposed – but the effects are far broader.

“The levels of heat we now routinely see around the world put every part of society under extreme pressure, directly harming our health while also affecting food and water security and much of our vital infrastructures,” he said in a statement.

Speaking to journalists on Thursday, scientists convened by Wellcome said there are positive measures that can be taken to combat the problem of extreme heat, which can also bring wider social benefits.

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For example, they explained that using community facilities as cooling centres can offer older people a place to chat or play cards, tackling social isolation and heat stress at the same time. Or adding shades with solar panels to market stalls can help women traders keep working on hot days while also providing free electricity for their businesses.

“There is still time for concerted action to save lives from the impacts of climate change, but we can no longer afford to delay,” Dangour said.

A construction worker drinks water while working on a building during hot weather in Pristina, Kosovo, June 19, 2024. (Photo: REUTERS/Valdrin Xhemaj)

The UN’s call for action points out that existing tools to reduce the devastating consequences of extreme heat could be deployed with large and far-reaching effects. Guterres said the good news is that “there are solutions… that we can save lives and limit its impact”.

For example, a global scale-up of heat health warning systems could save more than 98,000 lives every year, according to the World Health Organization. And the rollout of occupational safety and health measures could avoid $361 billion a year in medical and other costs, the ILO has estimated.

The UN chief urged a “huge acceleration of all the dimensions of climate action” as global warming is currently outpacing efforts to fight it. That could start to change, he added, as heatwaves, impacts on public health and disasters such as Canada’s wildfires are now hitting the richest countries as well as poorer ones.

“The heat is being felt by those that have decision-making capacity – and that is my hope,” he said.

(Reporting and editing by Matteo Civillini and Megan Rowling)

The post UN chief appeals for global action to tackle deadly extreme heat appeared first on Climate Home News.

For the first time this year, Saudi authorities required all pilgrims to wear identification on a “Nusuk Card” around their neck, allowing security forces to check they had the Hajj visa. Banners and phone messages warned against attending Hajj without this visa and many breaching these rules were deported.

A government-controlled Youtube channel said before the Hajj that the Nusuk Card “enables access to urgent medical care” and one survivor told Climate Home that, despite feeling tired and dizzy, he felt unable to ask for medical help for fear of punishment and deportation because he only had a tourist visa.

Temperatures in Mecca reached 51.8C this year, an unusually high figure which Climatemeter scientists have said was “mostly exacerbated by human-driven climate change”.

Over 1,300 people died during the heatwave and more than four-fifths of them were without official permits, according to Saudi Health Minister Fahad Al-Jalajel. Foreign governments have largely blamed travel agents for facilitating these irregular pilgrimages, while the Saudi authorities and climate change have mostly escaped blame.

One of those without a permit was Ibrahim, a retired Egyptian head teacher. To dodge visa checks, he walked 19 km in the baking heat to Arafat, a sacred hill near Mecca. He told Climate Home that he had asked buses carrying pilgrims with permits to stop and take him “but no one stopped, no one helped us”.

#No_Hajj_without_a_permit because services are directly linked to it, and accessing the Holy Sites without a permit is a violation that merits legal consequences.#Makkah_and_Madinah_Eagerly_Await_You#No_Hajj_without_a_permit#Hajj_1445H pic.twitter.com/aapODeC018

— Ministry of Hajj and Umrah (@MoHU_En) May 22, 2024

Fahad Saeed, a Pakistani climate scientist with Climate Analytics, told Climate Home: “The Hajj pilgrimage is a profound reminder to every Muslim of equality in the eyes of God. Yet, the disparity in the safety of pilgrims based on their financial means starkly contradicts this spirit of equality.”

Two-tier system

The city of Mecca is where the founder of Islam, the Prophet Muhammad, was born and lived most of his life. One of the religion’s five central pillars is that all believers should, if they’re healthy and can afford it, visit the city at least once on a pilgrimage known as Hajj and carry out a series of rituals.

Since Muhammad’s time, Islam has expanded across the globe and is now the religion of about a quarter of the world’s people. As the Hajj takes place for a single five-day period each year, there are far more people wanting to take part than the city can handle. Over 1.5 million pilgrims arrived in Mecca for the event last June. 

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Official visas to enter Mecca during the Hajj are rationed through a lottery system, working with specialist travel agencies. But some travel agents also advise pilgrims on how to enter Mecca without an official visa.

That was how Ibrahim, who had been saving up for the Hajj for thirty years, got to Mecca. He did not want to reveal his second name out of fear of the Saudi government’s punishment.

He told Climate Home that he couldn’t afford an official visa 500,000EGP ($10,000). He entered Saudi Arabia with a normal tourist one and, with the help of a tourism company, he was able to bribe his way through checkpoints into Mecca.

He found accommodation in the suburb of Al-Aziziyah but authorities quickly raided the area before the start of Hajj. Many pilgrims without official visas were fingerprinted and deported but Ibrahim was just driven out of the city towards Jeddah.

For 1,000 Riyals ($267), he found a taxi to take him back to Al-Aziziya where he hid until the first day of Hajj. This is the pilgrimage’s most important day when pilgrims spend a day next to Mount Arafat, where Prophet Muhammad delivered his Farewell Sermon. There, they pray and ask for forgiveness.

Most pilgrims get buses from Mecca to Arafat but, worried about soldiers searching these buses, Ibrahim and his companions made the 19 km journey on foot. When he got there, the area was crowded and the temperature reached nearly 50C (122F).

The 62-year old said he began to feel exhausted and dizzy even though he was not fasting that day. “My foot, which had undergone three surgeries before, felt like a piece of fire. I could not walk”, he said.

Standing up in the heat lessens the blood flow to the brain, which can cause fainting but also heart or kidney failures, explained Mike Tipton, a British professor who advises athletes and soldiers on heat.

Muslim worshippers make their way to cast stones as part of a symbolic stoning of the devil ritual on June 18, 2023. (Photo: Medhat Hajjaj/apaimages)

Ibrahim said that getting water for him was difficult and that he did not want to ask the clinics along the road to Arafat for medical help because of his lack of visa. “We saw the bodies of pilgrims on the road in need of help,” he said, “some of them were dead, some were suffering from heat exhaustion and no one was helping them”.

The claim that irregular pilgrims were denied help has been made by many, including the official spokesperson for pilgrims from Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region Karwan Stoni, who told Agence France Presse they could not access air-conditioned spaces that the authorities had made available.

Ibrahim survived, completed his Hajj and returned to Egypt. But Jordanian cousins Tariq, 48, and Hossam Al-Bustanji, 52, were not so lucky. Their cousin Ahmed told Climate Home that their companions told him they died after walking about for seven or eight hours without any services.

“They fell and pleaded for water but no one helped them”, he said. “Their bodies were buried in Mecca and were not sent to Jordan despite our requests”.

Pilgrims receive a spray of water from volunteers in Mecca on June 17, 2024 (Photo: Arab World Press)

While irregular pilgrims had it worse, even those with official visas suffered and some died in the heat. Jordanian Rania Bassam told Climate Home her brother and his family went to Mecca, where he volunteered as a doctor. 

She said they complained to her about the services provided and the extreme heat. Bassam’s brother later died in Arafat. “His body was identified by his fingerprint but we were prevented from seeing him and saying goodbye”, she said.

Tipton said that, while many of the dead were likely to be over 65-years old with existing heart problems, the heat can kill healthy young people too from heat stroke. 

Without getting bodies into cold water, heat stroke can be a “runaway route to hypothermia with death occurring at [a core temperature of] 40-44C”.

Safer Hajj

Campaigners are appealing to Saudi authorities to take measures that would reduce the risk of mass deaths, especially as the situation is expected to get worse as the world warms.

A 2021 study published in Environmental Research Letters found that if the world warms by 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels, heat stroke risk for pilgrims on the Hajj will be five times greater.

Heat expert Mike Tipton said that they should encourage people to sit down when they can, reduce any stress, fan people and cool their hands, feet and bodies down with cold water. But, he said, it’s difficult to look after so many people.

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Limiting numbers would help, he said, and that’s the route the authorities have been going down. Government reactions in Saudi Arabia and across the Muslim world have been to prosecute and crack down on travel agents who encourage pilgrims to evade visa laws.

But that has not been enough to dissuade Ibrahim’s wife. Despite her husband’s ordeals, she is keen to follow in his footsteps next year, performing Hajj unofficially.

But speaking in their Giza home, Ibrahim warned her against the idea. “You will not be alive again if you go unofficially – either you go on an official Hajj or not at all”, he said.

(Reporting by Eman Muhammed and Joe Lo, editing by Joe Lo and Matteo Civillini)

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Pakistan’s southern province of Sindh has been sweltering under 52°C heat in recent days. Not in the news however is that wet-bulb temperatures in the region – a more accurate indicator of risk to human health that accounts for heat and humidity – passed a key danger threshold of 30°C.  

Climate change is increasing the risk of deadly humid heat in developing countries like Pakistan, Mexico and India, and without international support to adapt, vulnerable communities could face catastrophe.  

What is wet-bulb temperature? 

Wet-bulb temperature is an important scientific heat stress metric that accounts for both heat and humidity. When it’s both hot and humid, sweating – the body’s main way of cooling – becomes less effective as there’s too much moisture in the air. This can limit our ability to maintain a core temperature of 37°C – something we all must do to survive. 

A recent study suggests that wet-bulb temperatures beyond 30°C pose severe risks to human health, but the hard physiological limit comes at prolonged exposure (about 6-8 hours) to wet-bulb temperatures of 35°C. At this point, people can experience heat strokes, organ failure, and in extreme cases, even death. 

Climate change and deadly heat 

Globally, around 30% of people are exposed to lethal humid heat. This could reach as much as 50% by 2100 due to global warming. To date, the climate has warmed around 1.3°C as a result of human activity, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels. And along with the extra heat, with every 1°C rise the air can hold up to 7% more moisture. 

A comprehensive evaluation of global weather station data reveals that the frequency of extreme humid heat has more than doubled since 1979, with several wet-bulb exceedances of 31-33°C. Another recent study predicts a surge in the frequency and geographic spread of extreme heat events, even at 1.5°C warming.   

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What this shows is that the humid tropics including monsoon belts are all careening towards the 35°C threshold, which is very worrying for countries like Pakistan. The city of Jacobabad has already breached 35°C wet bulb temperatures many times. More areas of the country are likely to be exposed to such life-threatening conditions more often due to climate change.   

At 1.5°C of warming, much of South Asia, large parts Sahelian Africa, inland Latin America and northern Australia could be subject to at least one day per year of lethal heat. If the world gets to 3°C, this exposure explodes, covering most of South Asia, large parts of Eastern China and Southeast Asia, much of central and west Africa, most of Latin America and Australia and significant parts of the southeastern USA and the Gulf of Mexico.  

Areas of the world that will experience at least one day of deadly heat per year at different levels of warming   

Source: ScienceAdvances 

 Even at 1.5°C of warming, there will be high exposure to lethal heat in large regions where billions presently live. This terrible threat to human life calls for urgent action to limit warming and help at risk communities adapt.  

Adapting to hard limits 

 While 35°C can prove deadly, one study suggests a 32°C wet-bulb threshold as the hard limit for labour. More realistic, human-centred models found this overly optimistic, as direct exposure and other vulnerability factors were ignored. Vulnerable groups including unskilled labourers would be most at risk of losing their income.  

In densely populated urban centres, lethal humid heat is not just a future projection but a current reality. This calls for urgent adaptation measures which integrate the risk of deadly heat into urban planning, public health, early-warning systems and emergency response.  

Investments in green spaces, heat-resilient buildings and urban cooling are vital adaptation strategies. Community initiatives like awareness campaigns, indigenous cooling strategies and local heat action plans are also essential. Households could consider investing in cooling technologies or migrating – options mostly available to the wealthy.  

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As climate change makes lethal humid heat a growing threat in some of the world’s most populous areas, more attention must be paid to understanding its risks – especially in vulnerable regions with huge data gaps. This demands a multidimensional response that combines scientific research, policymaking and community engagement.  

The potential scale and level of risk to human life also reinforces the importance of ensuring that the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C global warming limit is met. To do this, we need to halve emissions by 2030. Countries should therefore strengthen their 2030 emissions targets in line with the warming limit as they prepare equally ambitious 2035 targets in updated NDCs. 

The Pakistan heatwave is a terrible reminder of this often-underestimated threat. We must act now to limit warming while we adapt to the growing danger of deadly heat if we are to avoid potentially wide-reaching tragedies in the future.  

The post Developing countries need support adapting to deadly heat appeared first on Climate Home News.

This global goal is a playbook for how the world is going to adapt to a climate that is changing rapidly and will continue to change, even if we ended fossil fuel use today. Across the world millions of people, most of whom are least responsible for carbon emissions, are attempting to adapt their lives and livelihoods to a distorted climate.

This adaptation playbook is about more than money. It covers adaptation plans for a host of sectors, including farming, nature, health, water and transport among others. To be useful, this playbook needs a series of targets to plan actions, track investments and assess the effectiveness of adaptation measures and spending. These metrics need to specify what changes are needed to be in line with the science, by when and how to measure progress.

Funding gap

Although it isn’t just about money, funding is important and severely lacking. The goal for 2023 was to raise $300m for the Adaptation Fund, but at Cop28 we’ve only seen $169m in pledges, a mere 56% of the intended amount.

This is particularly galling considering that only last month, the UN’s Environment Programme published its Adaptation Gap report which calculates the difference between the world’s adaptation need and the amount of finance that has been committed. It found that this gap stands at around $387 billion. This is 10-18 times the actual finance flows to the countries and 50% more than the previous estimate.

Considering emissions are still going up, it’s a travesty that adaptation spending is falling. We are on course for a humanitarian crisis if this adaptation funding doesn’t match the rise in emissions.  And adaptation finance is great value for money.  As Barbados prime minister Mia Mottley pointed out at Cop28, every $1 invested in adaptation saves $7 in loss and damage.

For example, small-scale family farms are especially vulnerable and need urgent scaling up of adaptation finance; 2.5 billion people rely on them for a livelihood. They produce a third of the world’s food and as much as half of the calories consumed globally but receive just 0.3% of climate finance.

US blocking

The problem is that here in Dubai, rich countries, especially the US, are blocking progress on the adaptation playbook. To some degree that’s understandable. It is rich, high emitting countries like the US that need to contribute most to adaptation funding and take responsibility for the climate harm they have caused and continue to cause.

But by dragging their feet, these countries are playing games with people’s lives. The adaptation talks at Cop28 are crucial as we’re not going to reduce emissions fast enough and therefore do actually need to tackle the impacts of climate change. We can’t just settle for vague and aspirational objectives, we need a concrete plan that spells out how adaptation will be implemented for the people that need it most.

African countries are the biggest cheerleaders for adaptation. It is Africans who are facing some of the most damaging impacts from the climate crisis. It’s no wonder that Africa’s chief negotiator in Dubai said agreement in Dubai on adaptation was a matter of life and death.

The Cop28 host nation’s close ties with the fossil fuel industry understandably makes for an easy story, but when it comes to whether this Cop did enough to help the world’s climate vulnerable, it will be on whether it delivers strong language on a robust global response to the adaptation crisis that will be the real test.

Mohamed Adow is the founder and director of Power Shift Africa

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The claim made by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which carries out an annual assessment of the pledge, is based “on preliminary and as yet unverified data” that has not been made public.

Detailed figures have been made available for 2021, when developed nations gave $89.6 billion to developing countries – a slight increase from the amount of money provided the previous year.

“Symbolic” milestone

The figures pale in comparison with the trillions of dollars that vulnerable nations are estimated to need to cut emissions and better cope with the effects of climate change. But the “symbolic” $100 billion commitment, first made in 2009 in Copenhagen, has been a continuous source of diplomatic tensions since countries failed to hit the target by the 2020 deadline.

Germany’s climate minister Jennifer Morgan told reporters she hoped this sends “a reassuring signal to our partners”.

“It is a target that we had hoped to meet earlier”, she added. “We hope that this is a foundation to perhaps build some confidence in our commitment to work together with developing countries moving forward”.

Adaptation money falls

Despite the overall increase, specific funding for adaptation declined by $4 billion to $24.6 billion. The setback casts doubts over whether developed countries will be able to meet a pledge made at Cop26 to double their provision of adaptation finance to $40.6 billion by 2025.

Poor countries heavily rely on international public finance for things like early warning systems, flood barriers or drought-resistant agriculture that are less attractive to investors than renewables.

“We have seen a reduction in finance and a stalling of flows for adaptation initiatives,” UNEP’s chief scientist Dr. Andrea Hinwood told Climate Home earlier this month. “We really must act now. It’s only with fast, urgent, consolidated action with appropriate finance flows that we have a chance to address those issues.”

Loans fuel debt fears

Vulnerable countries have long called for a significant increase in the provision of grants over loans, which they argue push them further into debt. But loans continued to represent over two-thirds of the money provided in 2021, with grants making up 30% of the total.

Harjeet Singh, Climate Action Network’s head of global political strategy, said the prevalence of loans exacerbates financial disparities. “It is imperative that rich countries radically shift their approach, focusing on providing substantive support rather than resorting to symbolic gestures”, he added.

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Canada’s climate minister Steven Guilbeault recognised more needs to be done, saying the $100 billion goal is “an important milestone, but it does not solve all of our problems”.

“We know the conversation needs to shift from mobilizing a hundred billion dollars to mobilizing 10-15 times that. That’s what our collective challenge is”, he added.

UK aid cuts leave Malawi vulnerable to droughts and cyclones

With significantly more money unlikely to be dished out of public purses, rich countries are increasingly looking at alternative solutions. Alongside reforms of multilateral development banks, like the World Bank, big hopes are pinned on contributions from the private sector.

But the latest OECD data risks dampening some of that enthusiasm. Private capital mobilised through public incentives, such as guarantees, has broadly stagnated since 2017, with only $14.4 billion made available to developing countries last year.

The post OECD: Rich countries ‘likely’ to hit $100bn climate finance goal in 2022 appeared first on Climate Home News.

Flood water had destroyed all her corn crops, an essential lifeline to feed her family and earn a modest income. The spiralling costs of seeds and fertilisers put replanting beyond her reach.

“The cyclone left me completely with nothing”, she told Climate Home News.

As Sandram searched for help, she said no relief was available aside from the limited support she could obtain from family members.

Elube Sandram was among the beneficiaries of the UK-funded programme in Malawi’s Chikwawa district. Photo: Raphael Mweninguwe

Her problems could have been prevented. In 2018, she registered for a £52 million ($63m) UK aid programme which helped vulnerable Malawians better cope with climate-driven floods and droughts.

But during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the UK government cut back its aid spending, ending support for Sandram and many others in Malawi and around the world.

Let down

The programme that Sandram was involved with was run by UN agencies and NGOs and helped farmers by providing them with tools, training on things like pig farming and financial assistance like weather-related insurance or cash transfers.

The idea was that it’s not quite so disastrous if a flood or a drought destroys a farmers’ crops if they have livestock or an insurance payout to keep putting food on the table.

But following the UK’s cutbacks, several parts of the scheme have been reduced or axed altogether.

The activities run by a group of NGOs were wound down in 2021, two and a half years before their scheduled end. Concern Worldwide and Goal Malawi, the main implementing partners, closed their local offices. Only a series of projects with a more limited scope operated by UN agencies are still running.

Aubrey Kabudula, a farmer from Kwataine Village in Chikwawa, told Climate Home: “We were told that one of the objectives is to help people to be climate-resilient.”

“With its abrupt closure we do not think that has been achieved,” he said.

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It is an assessment shared by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI), the UK body tasked with scrutinising how foreign aid is spent.

In June, they said that the project had been “highly effective and coherent” but had been “undermined” by cutbacks to aid and the downsizing or removal of components.

A rice field in Malawi’s Karonga region affected by drought in early 2023. Credit: Eldson Chagara

Issues are only likely to get worse. Malawi is increasingly struggling with more frequent and intense cycles of flooding and droughts. The passage of Cyclone Freddy in March killed more than 600 people and displaced at least 650,000 more, while also dismantling infrastructures and livelihoods.

Climate shocks have exacerbated poverty levels, especially for rural farmers. The World Bank estimates that over half of the country’s 19.1 million people live in poverty with women being the most affected. Low agriculture production because of droughts and floods is cited as one of the main causes.

Rishi Sunak’s rollbacks

Countries like Malawi cannot afford to address these problems alone.

Unsustainable levels of existing public debt rule out borrowing at expensive rates as an option. Most of Malawi’s climate plans are funded through grant-based international public finance provided by rich countries like the United Kingdom.

At the United National General Assembly in 2019 the then-prime minister Boris Johnson made a big, and unexpected, announcement.

He promised the UK would double its international climate finance to reach a target of £11.6 billion ($14.2bn) in 2026.

Only a few months later the global Covid-19 pandemic upended daily lives and economic orders, prompting an abrupt rethink of spending priorities.

International aid was one of the casualties. Then finance minister Rishi Sunak cut its foreign aid target from 0.7% of gross national income to 0.5%.

With Sunak now prime minister, this “temporary measure” has yet to be reversed.

Since then, the competition for a shrinking pool of money has intensified as aid funding has been diverted to support Afghan and Ukrainian refugees hosted in the UK.

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An internal government document reported on by the Guardian suggested the £11.6bn goal could be dropped as general aid cut-backs make it a “huge challenge”.

Not just Malawi

The cuts have hit climate projects around the world. UK-funded climate resilience projects have been cut or delayed in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Kenya and small-island states.

Government figures show that the number of people whose climate resilience was improved by UK aid flatlined for the first time since records began in the last financial year.

In India, a foreign office report found that budget cuts meant that activities to help rural communities cope with climate impacts had been “reduced, slowed down and stopped in some instances”.

In Pakistan, a foreign office report found that a £38 million ($46m) climate resilience plan had been paused for 18 months because of “uncertainty… following significant and unanticipated costs incurred to support the people of Ukraine and Afghanistan in finding refuge in the UK.

A large-scale project aiming to help a series of African countries build resilience to climate change suffered a significant “scale back from its original ambition”, as its annual summary said.

The programme envisaged a £250 million ($306m) budget in its business case, but this has now been reduced to “up to £100 million” ($122m).

Targets have been scaled back too. One original target was to improve the resilience of four million people through an early-warning system. That’s been reduced to three million.

In Chikwawa the climate project has still left a mark in the minds of many people despite the cutbacks.

The beneficiaries now hope that the country, a former British colony, will not be entirely forgotten.

“I am still optimistic that the assistance that we were receiving from the donor [UK government], will not be gone forever,” said Sandram. “And if I were to be asked whether that funding should resume or not, I will say it should resume because climate change is here to stay.”

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At Cop28 next month, governments are expected to approve a framework to make the Paris Agreement’s global goal on adaptation (GGA) more concrete. The initiative is aimed at enhancing nations’ resilience to extreme weather events, flooding, droughts and sea level rise.

Adaptation is one of the key priorities of the Paris Agreement, alongside emission reductions. But challenges in defining, measuring and funding action on this front have held back progress at the same time as climate risks are accelerating.

Two years ago, at Cop26, countries agreed to a two-year work programme to fill this gap. Developing countries most affected by climate change hoped this would unlock finance to reduce their vulnerability.

Widening finance gap

Developing countries need an estimated $387 billion a year to carry out their current adaptation plans, but in 2021 they only received $21 billion in international adaptation finance, according to a recent report by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

“We have seen a reduction in finance and a stalling of flows for adaptation initiatives,” UNEP’s chief scientist Dr. Andrea Hinwood told Climate Home. “We really must act now. It’s only with fast, urgent, consolidated action with appropriate finance flows that we have a chance to address those issues.”

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Money is a sticking point in negotiations over the adaptation framework.

Developing countries want the agreement to tackle the question of finance directly, ideally with a dedicated target. On the other hand, developed countries, which would be called upon to foot the bill, oppose any mention of money in the text.

Money struggles

Disagreements nearly sunk talks over the framework in Bonn last June, before being rescued in the eleventh hour. Four months later, as negotiators met for one last time before Cop28, fundamental divisions remained.

The African group proposed the inclusion of a target for the funding of “at least 80% of expressed needs by developing countries” with the size of adaptation finance reaching at least $400bn annually by 2030.

A proposal by China on behalf of the “like-minded group” of developing countries says the framework should require developed countries to provide developing countries with “long-term, scaled-up, predictable, new and additional finance”.

A girl fetches water by digging a hole in a dried up waterbed during a drought in Somalia (Photo: UNDP Somalia/Flickr)

A developed country negotiator told Climate Home they “cannot live” with any references to finance in the framework.

“We want to discuss the substance and not the money. We don’t see the GGA framework as the space to talk about a new climate finance target for adaptation,” they said. “Adaptation finance will be addressed somewhere else and will enable the framework to be effective.”

The European Union suggested in its latest proposal that the role of finance in delivering the targets could be referenced in a decision text outside of the framework.

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But developing countries fear that approving a set of actions without clear indications within the text of how to fund them would lead to an “empty framework”.

Lisa Yassin, a negotiator from the group of least developed countries, told Climate Home “it is critical” the question of finance is addressed within the framework.

“It ensures a commitment to ongoing and enhanced funding that is directly responsive to the needs outlined within the framework’s targets,” she said. “It also guarantees its centrality and better accountability beyond Cop28.”

Broken promises

Fuelling divisions is a deepening distrust by developing countries over rich nations’ failure to cough up cash promised for climate action. Developed countries have still not made good on a 2009 pledge to collectively provide $100bn a year by 2020 to help developing countries cut their emissions and adapt to climate impacts.

They are also off track to meet a promise made at Cop26 to double the adaptation finance for developing countries to around $40 billion by 2025. Adaptation public finance flows to developing countries declined by 15% in 2021 to $21 billion, according to UNEP.

Richard Klein, senior research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute, expects “a very difficult conversation” about adaptation finance at Cop28. “If trust and confidence were there that there will be enough money on the table, the question of money under the GGA framework would have not been that crucial. But everybody sees that is not the case,” he added.

Numbers vs high-level targets

Money is not the only dividing line in talks over the adaptation framework. Governments are also split over the wider set of targets that should be included in the text.

Developing nations are pushing for specific numerical targets driving adaptation action. A long list of proposed options includes, for example, measures to protect all humanity with early warning systems for hazardous events by 2027, to boost climate resilience by at least 50% by 2030, and to reduce adverse climate impacts on agricultural production by 50% by 2030.

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Developed countries, on the other hand, prefer high-level targets that focus more on the process of adaptation policy rather than on specific activities. Both the EU and the UK, for instance, have called for the inclusion of a deadline by which all countries have national adaptation plans in place.

“We are hesitant on quantification. You cannot copy and paste the template of emission reduction targets, it doesn’t really work for adaptation,” a developed country negotiator told Climate Home. “We don’t have baselines, it’s difficult to measure, there are plenty of questions there.”

The post Talks to boost ‘underfinanced’ climate adaptation split over money appeared first on Climate Home News.

Since 2013, China has been trying to make cities like Beijing more flood-proof by replacing roads, pavements and rooftops with natural materials like soil that soak up water and by giving more space to water bodies like lakes to absorb stormwater.

But despite these measures, massive amounts of rainfall in recent weeks caused floods which killed at least 33 people, destroyed tens of thousands of homes and shut down the Chinese capital’s second busiest airport.

Experts told Climate Home the flooding shows the limited progress China has made on its plan to invest $1 trillion into sponge cities by 2030 – with the city still largely concrete.

Sponge airport overwhelmed

Even new infrastructure, build with the sponge city concept in mind, could not cope with the rains.

Daxing airport opened a few months before the Covid-19 pandemic. Its builders described it as a “sponge airport” as it was equipped with plants on its roof, a huge wetland and an artificial lake the size of over 1,000 Olympic swimming pools.

Despite these measures, the runways flooded on July 30 and it had to cancel over 50 flights.

Floods engulf Beijing Daxing Airport, halting flightshttps://www.yenisafak.com/en/video-gallery/news/floods-engulf-beijing-daxing-airport-halting-flights-3668129 pic.twitter.com/YabfuQbC9Y

— Yeni Şafak English (@yenisafakEN) August 2, 2023

Waters diverted

The government tried to collect the rain in 155 reservoirs in the Hai River Basin, but the measure proved ineffective in controlling the deluge.

About 50 years ago, the basin –a natural sponge–was locked with embankments and reservoirs to manage the water flow.

In recent years though, these structures have made flooding worse as climate change has increased the frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall. These structures lead to overflow, collapse and the authorities have blown them up to ease flooding.

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Reuters reported that flood waters locked in reservoirs were diverted to low-lying populated land in Zhuozhuo, a small city around 80km from Beijing, to flush out the stormwater from the country’s national capital.

Residents of Zhuozhou were angry at the government’s response, Reuters reported. The government reacted by shutting down criticism on social media.

More work needed

Experts argued that these problems show that, rather than abandoning the sponge city project, China and Beijing need to double down and make them better.

Kongjian Yu is the founder of Turenscape, a company involved in the project. He said that just “maybe 1% or 10%” of the city has been converted to a sponge city.

The government’s target is 20% by 2030. “We have a long way to go,” he said.

Yu added that sponge cities are worth doing not just because they control floods but for managing droughts and refilling groundwater supplies too.

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Tony Wong, professor of sustainable development at Monash University, said that progress was always going to be slow as “it takes a long time and a lot of money” to convert a city like Beijing, with lots of people and concrete buildings crammed into a small area, into a sponge city.

More work is needed, says Wong, because Beijing and many other cities lack effective urban planning, and there is no provision for a safe channeling of extreme floodwater.

“What the city needs is the inclusion of green corridors, just like Singapore – another high-density city- has done to transport excess stormwater into low-lying areas to prevent loss of lives and property.”

If China pulls this off it could become an example for many developing countries with high-density cities struggling to control urban flooding, added Wong.

The post Devastating Beijing floods test China’s ‘sponge cities’ appeared first on Climate Home News.

The journey is equal parts dramatic and harrowing—with canyon-like views of the Atlas Mountains via treacherous switchbacks, and a vast landscape of desert beyond Ouarzazate.

Along the way—some 330 kilometers from Marrakech—the commune of Imider sits nestled on Morocco’s National Route 10 (N10). Hardly registering to passing tourists, Imider is one of the poorest and most-water stressed communities in Morocco. The climate is semi-arid—it rains only a few times a year—and poverty levels are nearly triple the national average.

Indigenous adaptation

Despite general disregard from passersby and neglect from Morocco’s central government in the northwest, Imider’s residents are proud members of the indigenous Amazigh Ait-Atta tribal confederation (otherwise known as “Berber” to western audiences).

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For centuries, Amazigh communities have populated much of the country’s southeast, adapting to the harsh and semi-arid climate that comes with being east of the mountains and isolated from the seaside. Despite the unforgiving landscape, these groups are agropastoral—herding sheep and goats and farming a variety of crops like olives, almonds dates, and vegetables. In Imider, most people live on less than a dollar a day.

In a region where annual precipitation can range from a few inches to less than an inch, water is life—or “aman iman,” as residents say.

Drought-affected fields in the Tinghir province. Photo: Rachel Santarsiero

To adapt to such low rainfall levels, Amazigh groups have long depended on a traditional system of water storage and distribution, known as ‘khettara’. This system relies on a series of underground canals to source water for farming fields and is incredibly efficient in arid and semi-arid climates. To the Amazigh, the khettara is sacred.

But as higher temperatures and drought conditions become the norm in Morocco, and as privatized companies continue to mine the south and southeast for phosphate and silver—as has been done in Imider—the centuries-old irrigation system is under threat.

The khettara irrigation

Among those affected is Mohammed Boumnir, a farmer in Imider who maintains his family’s plot of land, and harvests olives, dates, figs, grass, buckthorn, pomegranates, and radishes. The hand-dug canals of the khettara separate each set of crops like a lattice, but today they are bone dry. “This drought, the mining, it’s all affecting the farm. It’s cut off more than 80% of our water”, he told me.

In place of the dried-out khettara system, Boumnir has had to install irrigation pipes to help source water. Other farmers on adjacent plots have installed solar panels and mechanized wells to pump water from deeper beneath the ground. Those are costly endeavors that not all farmers in the area can afford.

Even with these advancements, the results of these new technologies are mixed. “The figs, almonds, olives—they’re all getting smaller, and they taste different than they used to”, Boumnir said.

With the onslaught of climate change, the Kingdom of Morocco has sought to position itself as a leader in the green technology economy—both within Africa and on the world stage with its western partners.

Mining dependence

Despite its sustainable agenda, phosphate and silver mining contributes to over 10% of the country’s GDP – just behind agriculture and tourism. But Morocco’s dependence on mining gets overshadowed by its flashy renewable energy projects, most notably the Noor Solar Power Station in Ouarzazate.

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Extractive capitalist projects in the southeast, like the Noor Solar Plant, or the deleterious silver mining in Imider, only exacerbate the harsh conditions that vulnerable Amazigh communities are struggling with. And while the Kingdom of Morocco continues to uphold its “green” façade to the international community, Amazigh locals in the southeast—battling land grabs, groundwater depletion, and resource extraction—are being left behind.

Hope for the future is hard to come by in Imider. Many locals are unemployed, and others are moving away. But there is one phrase that’s continually shared amongst residents, in native Tamazight: “You can pluck all the flowers, but you can’t stop the march of spring.”

Rachel Santarsiero is a climate researcher at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

The post Morocco’s centuries-old irrigation system under threat from climate change appeared first on Climate Home News.

The fraught negotiations in Germany centered on the framework for the global goal on adaptation, an initiative aimed at enhancing nations’ resilience to extreme weather events, flooding, droughts and sea level rise.

Nations reached a compromise on the outcome of the two-week-long discussions, averting the real possibility of having to start all again from scratch at Cop28.

In that scenario – negotiators and observers told Climate Home – it would have been virtually impossible to find an agreement on adaptation goals at the summit in Dubai.

“That would have been a real catastrophe”, a negotiator from a country at the forefront of the climate crisis told Climate Home.

Contrasting expectations

Argentine negotiator Pilar Bueno Rubial said from the beginning it was clear the two factions had entered the talks with diverging expectations.

“Developed countries just wanted to start the conversation, while developing nations wanted to focus on the substance”, she told Climate Home.

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A coalition of 135 developing countries, called G77+China, wanted to agree on an eight page draft text that included a list of options for specific adaptation targets.

These included measures to preserve land and water, to protect all humanity with early warning systems for hazardous events by 2027, and to enhance the global population’s resilience to the effects of climate change by at least 50% by 2030

“For us, this captured the conversation fairly and laid the foundation for an ambitious agreement in Dubai”, a negotiator from a developing country told Climate Home.

But rich nations, led by the US, EU and the UK, pushed instead for a one-page text focussing only on the main structure of a future decision without outlining detailed measures, according to four people in the negotiating room.

This option delegated the development of specific targets to future workshops. In their own submissions, the EU and the US specifically pushed for the inclusion of no specific targets.

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To complicate matters further, Bueno Rubial claimed that adaptation negotiations had been “taken hostage” as part of broader divisions between the two blocks over whether emission reductions talks and climate finance should be on the official agenda in Bonn.

The contrasting positions were clearly reflected in the options put forward by the two sides for a final decision to be adopted at the end of the Bonn talks.

Adaptation struggle

Defining what adaptation is and how to measure it has always been a complicated task. Unlike efforts to cut the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, less clear metrics are available to track the many diverse activities that can be called adaptation.

Measures can include seawalls, air conditioning, early warning systems, improved mobile phone and internet coverage and changes to farming methods.

A session of the Global Goal on Adaptation body. Photo: IISD/ENB – Kiara Worth

The Paris Agreement established a global goal on adaptation, but stopped short of defining its content. Six years later, at Cop26 countries agreed to launch a two-year long work program to solve this problem and turn a vague commitment into concrete actions.

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The body is due to end its work in Dubai, where developing countries are keen to achieve ambitious targets. This – they hope – will in turn lead to more money being invested in measures to boost resilience to climate change.

The United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) estimates that rich countries should will need to provide developing ones with $71 billion a year every year until 2030 to cover their adaptation needs. But, in 2020, they only provided $29 billion.

Less engaged

A negotiator from a developing country group claimed adaptation is less of a problem for rich nations so they appear to be less engaged in the talks.

In Bonn, the rift reached boiling point in the final meeting of the body tasked with sketching out the framework. In what observers described as a heated exchange, countries were unable to reach an agreement and stared at the possibility of ending the talks without any formal resolution.

On Thursday, just hours before the end of the talks, the body’s chairs offered a compromise text in what negotiators described as a “take it or leave it” situation. The document is more similar to the option developed nations fought for but includes – as a footnote – a link to an informal note on the specific targets. Developing nations have hailed that as a victory.

All eyes on Dubai

Mokoena France, the lead negotiator for the least developed countries, said the group is pleased to see a proper outcome, but it is concerning that it took until the very last minute. “Nevertheless we hope to see more progress and successful adoption of the framework at Cop28”, she added.

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A negotiator from a developing country said he was seriously worried the same dynamic will play out in Dubai.

David Waskow, International Climate Director at the World Resources Institute, said the failure to make progress on the global goal on adaptation leaves much to deliberate ahead of Cop28.

“It is critical that countries agree on an ambitious set of targets for adaptation action and finance must be made much more accessible”, he added.

The EU and the US have not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.

The post Last-minute compromise avoids break down on adaptation goals appeared first on Climate Home News.

So far, global efforts on adaptation have been reactive and incremental for two key reasons. One is a significant shortfall in finance for adaptation and the second is these issues being sidelined in multilateral climate agendas.

Climate adaptation is an immediate, intergenerational problem – one with disproportionate existing impacts on vulnerable communities in the Global South. The African continent is a revealing example, as countries battle one extreme weather event after another.

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Despite having contributed less than 4 per cent to global emissions, the continent is already facing disproportionate climate impacts. Climate models predict that the impacts in Africa will only become more severe and frequent with large parts of the continent warming at twice the global rate, leading to more extreme weather events.

Every degree of warming will have ramifications for food production and food security, livelihoods, access to water, health, poverty and inequality, conflict, and more. In 2022 alone, extreme weather events killed roughly 4,000 people and affected a further 19 million people across Africa.

Earlier this year, Cyclone Freddy left behind a wave of devastation in Malawi, Mozambique, and Madagascar, while the latest series of flash floods left hundreds of people dead and thousands displaced in Eastern Uganda, Rwanda, and Congo. These deadly weather events send a clear message – scaling up climate adaptation and resilience in Africa is urgent.

Investing in transformative community-led measures is the first step to scaling up climate adaptation. These measures are unique in that they are often context-specific solutions geared toward local realities that help protect people, communities, and ecosystems by building social and ecological resilience to extreme weather events.

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In the African continent, community led adaptive solutions like agroecology, food sovereignty, forest restoration, and more already exist, particularly at the grassroots and community level.

Agroecology is considered transformative in that it drives system change by challenging power dynamics underpinning the food system, placing power and control back in the hands of the farmer.

As a set of practices, agroecology has numerous co-benefits ranging from enabling farmers to strengthen their farm’s resilience to extreme weather events, to protecting biodiversity, bolstering food production and food sovereignty, and restoring soil fertility.

Equally, boosting finance and investments for locally led adaptation to climate change not only builds resilience, it’s also far more cost effective than reactively paying for and responding to severe crises. Studies estimate that climate adaptation action in African agriculture and food systems will likely cost less than one tenth of inaction – in other words, the cost of action is $15 billion versus $201 billion per annum if no action is taken.

A major stumbling block to African countries and communities developing adaptive capacities and becoming more resilient is the significant gap in adaptation finance.  As it stands, Africa will face a $265 billion shortfall in climate finance for adaptation by 2030.  To address and close the existing debt for climate adaptation, those most responsible for the climate crisis have a moral responsibility to drastically increase adaptation finance to African countries.

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If they fail to do so, vulnerable and frontline communities across Africa, and the Global South at large, will continue to bear the brunt of the climate crisis – a crisis they did not cause.

As the recent report spotlights, we need a political response at Cop28 that fast tracks global climate action efforts and places us back on track to meet the Paris Agreement goals.

As one of four pillars, the report calls for higher priority to be given to adaptation that is people-centred and sustains livelihoods.

For climate adaptation support to be truly transformative for the African context, access to decision making platforms, resources, investments, and finances must involve and reach local African communities most affected by the climate crisis. A people centred, rights based approach that protects communities and biodiversity must be at heart of these upcoming climate negotiations and decisions.

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In the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries agreed to set a global goal on adjusting, which is known as adaptation. But it is still very difficult to track and demonstrate progress towards this target because of a lack of rigour in how these projects are officially reported and evaluated.

Two years ago, we at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) set out to create a synthesis of evidence on the effectiveness of adaptation action and support. But the UK government cut its aid budget and our project was one of those to be scrapped as a result.

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Beyond funding, however, our analysis was hindered by a widespread and pervasive lack of rigour in adaptation project reporting and evaluation.

Evaluation of adaptation efforts has long faced difficulties. For six years, climate negotiators tried to assess progress towards the Paris Agreement’s imprecisely worded global goal on adaptation.

But, as governments recognised at Cop26 in 2021, they faced “methodological, empirical, conceptual and political challenges”.

In 2021, the two-year Glasgow–Sharm el-Sheikh work programme on the global goal on adaptation aimed to address these.

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Lots of adaptation action takes place in the form of discrete project interventions financed by public sources, including directly from governments and from funds that rich countries put money into.

By assessing these interventions in ways similar to those used in development finance, we hoped to obtain a picture of the effectiveness of adaptation action and support, and thus of progress towards the global goal on adaptation.

But we found that data on project outputs and outcomes is not easily accessible or publicly available.

If information is available, it is scattered across multiple sources and fragmented across databases. Moreover, most of this information is only entered into databases at the time the project is approved.

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Information about how the project is going is even harder to find, as it is often not made public or remains scattered across multiple locations, from project websites to academic publications.

The lack of a uniform system of adaptation indicators also leads to inconsistencies in how funders monitor, evaluate and report outputs and outcomes of adaptation interventions.

Moreover, baseline data is commonly missing and outcomes are often confused with outputs. Outputs are the tangible and measure results that can be observed in the short term while outcomes are the longer term effects that are expected to be achieved as a result.

Evaluations of adaptation interventions are rare. A recent systematic review of global adaptation research revealed that only 58 out of 1682 articles reported change in climate risk reduction outcomes after implementation.

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This suggests that, for now, the UN’s new global stocktake on adaptation must rely chiefly on fragmented and scattered project documentation.

When evaluations are conducted, they tend to emphasise implementation processes rather than outcomes.

A recent assessment of the Least Developed Countries Fund considers mainly how its projects are aligned to reducing vulnerability and increasing resilience, rather than if these objectives have actually been achieved.

Meanwhile, an evaluation of the adaptation portfolio of the Green Climate Fund counted the number of beneficiaries but was unable to assess impact.

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Here are four ways to fix this.

1. Create a global adaptation database: A free, comprehensive and easy-to-use global database of adaptation interventions must be established to analyse and synthesise the effectiveness of these interventions. It should include sources of funding, project duration, alternative project names, intervention design, adaptation outcomes and all evaluations. Such a database would complement existing efforts that include some of these elements, such as IATI’s d-portal, SEI’s AidAtlas and Unep’s Adaptation Gap Report.

2. Standardise and improve reporting of adaptation outcomes: The Sharm-El-Sheikh Adaptation Agenda proposes a set of 30 outcomes to report on adaptation progress. These should be used to develop a set of common indicators to be adopted under the new framework for the global goal on adaptation. These indicators should then be used consistently when evaluating and reporting project-level outcomes. For the global stocktake, these indicators must also allow for global aggregation of evaluation results.

3. Invest in rigorous adaptation evaluations: Funders must require and invest in rigorous monitoring and evaluation of and learning from the interventions they support. Project evaluations should be transparent about whether it is possible to attribute an outcome to a specific intervention. Evaluation guidance must include procedures to inform funders and other stakeholders of both intervention successes and failures. Initiatives in this direction include the new evaluation policy of the Adaptation Fund, which includes long-term evaluation.

4. Learn from the development community: Adaptation evaluators should take advantage of existing knowledge of and experience with impact evaluation in development when assessing progress in adaptation. The development community has put forward tried-and-tested methodologies for impact evaluation, and established organisations such as 3ie and the Campbell Collaboration already support, produce and synthesise rigorous evaluation evidence on development effectiveness.

Richard Klein and Biljana Macura are Senior Research Fellows and Nella Canales is a Research Fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Richard Klein leads the team “International Climate Risk and Adaptation”.

The post Reporting on climate adaptation is a mess – here’s how to fix it appeared first on Climate Home News.

Twitter recently announced it would limit the number of automated tweets that non-paying users can post to 50 in a 24-hour period. To post more will cost each account $100 a month from April 29.

A spokesperson for the NWS said that, since 2014, it has auto-posted the latest warnings for tornadoes, severe thunderstorms and flash floods on Twitter.

These warnings are seen by emergency managers, the media and people in the path of dangerous weather, they said.

Twitter announced on 3/29/23 that it will begin limiting automated tweets. Should this implementation occur, the automated watch/warning/advisory graphics shared on this account may not be posted. Have multiple ways to receive weather information and alerts.

— NWS Austin/San Antonio (@NWSSanAntonio) March 31, 2023

“Without this automated process,” the spokesperson added “it would take minutes for forecasters to manually prepare warning information into a tweet. For every warning issued, seconds could make the difference between life and death”.

“Twitter informed NWS there are no plans for exemptions,” they said.

Climate Home asked Twitter to confirm this and received an emoji of a human faeces with a face on it. Twitter’s new billionaire owner Elon Musk made this the automatic response to all press enquiries last month.

press@twitter.com now auto responds with

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 19, 2023

Last year, the US was hit by tornadoes across the south and south-east, a winter storm across the centre and east of the country and flooding in Missouri and Kentucky.

Twitter’s changes will be rolled out globally and affect any weather service which uses automated tweets.

Khan Rahaman is an assistant professor at Saint Mary’s University in Canada and has studied how social media is used during of cyclones in Bangladesh.

He told Climate Home: “The limit will not do any good for early warning.”

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Scientists have highlighted the importance of social media, and Twitter in particular, in disseminating warnings about climate disasters and saving lives.

An IPCC scientific report found that “timely access” to early warnings through social media, radio and text messages “can be crucial to respond and mitigate the impacts of emergencies such as floods and drought”.

“Among the various forms of social media, Twitter is widely used as a social sensor to detect what is happening in a disaster event” it added.

A 2020 study found that two-thirds of survey recipients in eastern India had seen warnings about Cyclone Amphan on social media including Twitter, Facebook and Whatsapp.

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“Social media played an important role in disseminating pre-cyclone warnings and information on post-cyclone relief work” during cyclone Amphan, the IPCC report found.

NWS has advised people to check their website, listen to the radio, watch television and look for alerts from local or county emergency management agency.

Asked why they are not paying for automated tweets, an NWS spokesperson declined to answer, saying: “Our statement and pinned tweets on our forecast office twitter accounts speak to the way forward on our part”.

Last month, Axios reported that US White House officials will not pay for Twitter’s previously free blue tick, which is supposed to verify a user is who they say they are. A source familiar with plans told Axios that the White House may send guidance to some agencies and departments in the future.

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“I won’t ever recover what I invested,” said 67-year-old Kalua Mehmood, a sugarcane farmer in Shahabpur, a village in western Uttar Pradesh, in northern India. Due to scarce rainfall, his sugarcane farm will deliver a poor harvest this year.

The rainfall during the monsoon season, between June and September, was erratic this year, he told Climate Home News. 10 years ago, farmers could count on steady rainfall. “But this year I have already irrigated my crop 10 times with a tube well [diesel pump] and even now the sugarcane has no juice,” Mehmood said, showing its stunted growth and dry yellow leaves.

Mehmood is one of millions of Indian sugarcane farmers who is suffering the onslaught of climate change. More intense and longer droughts and floods, caused by climate change, are destroying sugarcane crops and plunging millions of farmers and their families into debt, while creating dangerous working conditions. In August and September, Climate Home travelled to Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, to hear their stories.

India’s most valuable crop

India is the largest consumer and producer of sugar in the world. Sugarcane is a critical crop for the economy; it accounts for about 10% of the country’s agricultural output and the livelihoods of 50 million farmers and their dependents.

“It is no secret how important sugarcane is to India,” said Devinder Sharma, an independent food and agriculture expert. Further expansion of the sugar industry “needs to be discouraged,” said Sharma. “It is taking too much water.” The crop needs about 2,000 litres of water to produce 1kg of sugar.

“There is just no reason for us to continue pushing for sugarcane when we have options like corn syrup available,” said Sharma. “Rather than looking at adaptation measures, we need to prepare a package to take farmers away from the sugarcane cultivation.”

A tractor ploughs a sugarcane field in Hardoi district, Uttar Pradesh. 

Climate impacts

The industry is feeling the impacts of climate change, Mahesh Palawat, vice president of Skymet Weather, a private weather forecaster in India, told Climate Home.

In 2022, India suffered an extreme heatwave and recorded the hottest March in the last 122 years. Maharashtra recorded temperatures of over 46C and in Banda district in Uttar Pradesh temperatures reached 49C. According to a Lancet report, heat-related deaths of people over 65 years increased by 55% in India from 2000-2004 to 2017-2021.

Following the heatwave, Maharashtra experienced heavy downpours [in July and October], which damaged many sugarcane crops, Palawat said. In Uttar Pradesh, there were drought-like conditions until mid-September and “then we suddenly had heavy rain.”

Maharashtra experienced a sixfold increase in floods between 1970 and 2019, according to a report by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, a Delhi-based think tank.

“Agriculture requires stable weather… these episodes of extreme weather events are harmful,” said Palawat. “What this can result in is that we may have a bumper crop in one region in a particular year but that can quickly change in the next year due to unpredictable weather.”

Intense heat or extreme cold deteriorates the quality of the sugarcane juice and the overall quality of the final sugar product, according to a government report. Temperatures exceeding 35C-40C stunt the growth of the sugarcane crop and reduce the overall yield, according to a 2016 study.

Despite these climate challenges, sugarcane is still considered a better bet than other crops. According to a government report, the net return on cultivating sugarcane is 200–250% higher than for cotton or wheat.

Not enough water

Between May and September 2022, very little rain fell on Uttar Pradesh.

When Climate Home visited Shahabpur in Uttar Pradesh in September, it had just rained for the first time in 40 days. Farm owner Firasut Ali said the area only saw three proper rain spells during the entire monsoon season.

250km away in Uttar Pradesh’s Hardoi district, Ammar Zaidi, a former banker, said that when he started farming in 2014, he was able to secure 40,000-42,500kg of crop per acre. But in the last two years, this has shrunk to about 30,000-36,000kg per acre due to heatwaves. “We are in the thick of the monsoon season but if you touch the ground all you can feel is dust.”

Sitting in his sugarcane field, Zaidi showed Climate Home his diseased sugarcane crop. According to Bharat Rachkar, from the Central Sugarcane Research Station in Maharashtra, when temperatures exceed 40C, “we see the problem of bugs and parasites in the stem”.  When temperatures drop below 25C, germination is also affected.

“I have calculated all my inputs and my overall costs. At the end of the day, I am not getting the return [on investment] I need to survive in this profession,” said Zaidi. “If I started making a balance sheet, I would be in the negative every year.”

“For every investment of 100,000 rupees ($1,230), a farmer is only able to secure 90,000 rupees ($1,100),” he said.

“Why am I still doing this? It is probably because like many others in my area my family has been connected to this land and farming for ages. I can’t just leave.”

Labourers prepare sugarcane fields in Sangli district, Maharashtra

Broken dreams

Diljinder Singh, who lives in the village Sheetlapur in Uttar Pradesh, told Climate Home News that he has many broken dreams. He used to work for Jet Airways and live in Gurugram, the swanky neighbouring city of Delhi.

In 2012, he left his job and returned to his village, where his family owns land, to run a sugarcane farm. His parents warned against it. Singh believed that with better sowing and irrigation methods, he could farm in a more productive way. But his harvests languished.

“The whole pattern is disturbed,” Singh said. “About 5-7 years ago, we used to get good rainfall and we didn’t require irrigation but today people are dependent on diesel-run generators to irrigate their fields.”

Too much water

Heat isn’t the only problem. In late September, heavy downpours hit Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, damaging 2.3 million hectares (23,000 sq km) of crops, including sugarcane. When heavy rains like this hits, it leads to waterlogged soil which impacts the germination process and stunts the root development, said Rachkar.

“I was born in 1989 and until 2006 I had never seen floods in my region. Since then I have seen [floods] three times,” said Ankush Churmule, a farmer whose family has been involved in sugarcane farming for 50 years.

“Areas of western Maharashtra, where the sugarcane is grown near the river, are facing a lot of impact due to successive floods. In those areas, the farmers are moving to bamboo,” said Rahul Ramesh Patil, president of the Weather Literacy Forum, a group that raises awareness about changing weather patterns.

A farmer removes weeds from floodwater in Kolhapur district, Maharashtra, India

The poor harvests caused by excess flooding also impact people with associated livelihoods such as rearing bulls or transporting goods. Kiran Shamrao, who rears bulls for sugarcane farming in Maharashtra, told Climate Home that flooding had severely reduced his profits.

“Our life runs on the bulls. Before, there was little rain, so we had some work for the bulls. But now, because of so much rain, the bulls don’t have work anymore, and we are at a loss,” he said.

Price guaranteed, timing not

If these regions are so prone to droughts and floods, then why do farmers continue to grow sugarcane? The simple answer is that sugarcane fetches them an assured price as it is regulated by the government, unlike other crops such as cotton and soy beans.

“From production to export, every part of the sugar industry is regulated in India. Farmers have an assured buyer and price and they know every last cane will be purchased,” said Sonjoy Mohanty, director of the Indian Sugar Mills Association.

That does not mean payment is swift. Sharma told Climate Home that payments are “often delayed for a year and sometimes even more, bringing hardship to farmers”.

Because of delayed payments, farmers are struggling to make ends meet and are falling into debt, Zaidi said. “Except for sowing, farmers have nothing in their control– neither production nor the final price.”

Representatives for sugarcane farmers told Niti Aayog, the government think tank, that climate threats, such as droughts and floods, “restrict their ability to switch to alternate crops”.

“These weather conditions lead to poor forecasting and the risk of crop failure is higher with other crops [such as cotton, wheat and soybean],” they said.

The Indian government has established a National Agriculture Disaster Management Plan to understand the impact of climate change on farming and focus on disaster risk reduction and possible adaptation measures for the sector.

But farmers told Climate Home they need more support.

No going back

In such a catch-22 situation, what is the solution?

“With climate change being a reality, the crop patterns need to be adjusted otherwise it will heavily impact the yield,” said 50-year-old Suresh Kabade, who has worked as a sugarcane farmer for the past 30 years. “We need to change with climate change.”

A 2019 study by a group of Indian scientists recommended the development of efficient irrigation practices, the adoption of a heat-tolerant cane variety and reducing the use of fossil fuel fertilisers in the near future to assist the sugar industry and help it adapt to the changing climate in northern India.

Other measures could include farmers adopting solar-powered pumps, getting crop insurance, and being taught to use weather forecasting tools, which are readily available but not widely used due to a lack of training.

Most of the farmers Climate Home spoke to were pessimistic about what lies ahead. Singh said there are times when he regrets leaving his corporate job but now there is no option but to continue. “We can’t go back.”

Asked if he will encourage his daughter to follow in his footsteps, Singh was direct. “My nine-year-old daughter enjoys farming and helps me in the fields. Considering my achievements, I would encourage her to take up farming… but if I consider present-day policies, I would never ask her to go into agriculture.”

Reporting by Mayank Aggarwal and Arvind Shukla. Photography by Meenal Upreti. Data visualisation by Gurman Bhatia. The Pulitzer Center supported this project with a reporting grant as part of its Your Work/Environment initiative.

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The annual event is taking place on a backdrop of growing uncertainty, divisions and an erosion of momentum for climate action.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has deepened geopolitical tensions, sent energy and food prices soaring, and compounded inequalities.

On the heels of a pandemic, global inflation is increasing the debt burden on vulnerable developing countries, leaving no fiscal space to invest in resilience.

After a summer of extraordinary heat, Pakistan is reeling from one of the worst climate disasters ever. Unprecedented monsoon flooding has left the country with an estimated $30 billion recovery bill, spotlighting the inadequacy of humanitarian aid.

Meanwhile, wealthy countries are chasing alternative gas supplies, ramping up fossil fuel production at home and backing gas infrastructure abroad.

China, India and Russia are too preoccupied with domestic concerns to send their presidents, based on a draft schedule dated 2 September and seen by Climate Home News. Nor is Australia’s new prime minister expected to attend.

But for those who show up, energy and climate concerns are shaping the agenda. As world leaders take to the UN podium from Tuesday, here are five things to watch.

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Climate reparations

The scale of the damage in Pakistan has led to full-throated cries from developing countries on the need for finance to help climate victims recover.

Wealthy nations have for years opposed opening a new channel of funding to pay for the losses and damages caused by climate-related disasters.

The tragedy in Pakistan could be a turning point in that conversation. Pakistan’s prime minister Shehbaz Sharif is set to put the issue at the top of the political agenda.

Sharif has been invited to share the scale of his country’s finance needs at a leaders’ roundtable on climate action convened by UN chief António Guterres on Wednesday.

Pakistan, a strategic ally for rich nations in the region, also chairs a group of 134 developing countries, known as the G77, which is calling for a funding facility for loss and damage.

Small island states are organising intergovernmental meetings on the sideline of UNGA to drum up support for a fund. Expect some pointed speeches from leaders during the debate.

Rachel Kyte, dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University, said the events in Pakistan “will open up a new political space” on loss and damage. The question is whether rich countries are ready to shift their positions.

“Maybe this tragedy is the one that could do it,” she said.

Displaced people from heavy monsoon flooding rest at a temporary tent housing camp organized by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), in Sukkur, Pakistan, Saturday 10 September 2022 (AP Photo/Fareed Khan)

Remaking the financial system

Plugging the shortfall of funding for vulnerable nations to cope with climate impacts and build resilient economies requires more than a quick fix.

“This has to be the UNGA where we point to the fact that there needs to be systemic change in the way that we find resources for resilience and adaptation, for loss and damage and crisis responses,” said Kyte.

That means linking climate finance with debt relief and forgiveness and other forms of economic support, such as IMF special drawing rights (SDRs).

Barbados’ prime minister Mia Mottley has led the way in proposing a new financial settlement for the climate frontlines. She argues that vulnerable countries cannot repay mounting debt as they face growing costs of recovering from climate disasters.

Her speech, scheduled for Thursday afternoon, is one to watch.

Barbados prime minister Mia Mottley addresses world leaders at the Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow (Photo: UN Climate Change/ Kiara Worth/ Flickr )

Clean energy transitions

In response to soaring energy bills, governments are conveniently forgetting pledges to end fossil fuel subsidies. Some have embraced a windfall tax on oil and gas profits. Others are effectively subsidising the sector through bill relief for consumers and backing gas developments to increase supplies.

Bill Hare, chief executive of Climate Analytics, told Climate Home, that hiked fossil fuel prices should create an opportunity for faster renewable rollout.

“But the fossil fuel industry is taking advantage of the situation,” he said, citing a dash for gas in Africa and Australia. And high energy prices are leading to a rollback of energy access in developing countries.

Going into Cop27, UNGA could signal that for some developing countries the energy transition is “a prospect for development,” said Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation.

In coal-dependent developing economies, just energy transition partnerships, modelled on the deal with South Africa agreed at Cop26, are one way of financing the shift to clean. This new funding model could get a lot of air time. So far, donor nations have focused on five countries.

The UK has been leading negotiations with South Africa and Vietnam, together with the EU. The US and Japan have taken the lead in Indonesia. The US is working with Germany on a similar deal in India, and Germany and France are driving talks with Senegal.

Pakistani prime minister promises compensation to flood victims

Bridging the 1.5C gap

Countries’ climate plans don’t put the world on track to limit global heating to 1.5C by the end of the century.

To close the gap, governments agreed at Cop26 in Glasgow to “revisit and strengthen” their 2030 climate plans by the end of this year.

Few major emitters have heeded that call. Australia, Egypt and UAE’s updated plans make for slim pickings. India formalised pledges made at Cop26.

Despite positive policy developments in the US and the EU, “we are not seeing the international push that we need… Not at the G7 level. Not from the G20, and it’s really these major emitters that need to come to the table,” said Hare of Climate Analytics.

With a deadline of 23 September for plans to be included in a UN Climate Change progress report, UNGA is a moment for nations to showcase how they will increase action.

But the leaders of Indonesia, Mexico and Vietnam, which promised to step up their plans, are showing little sign they will travel to New York.

This “lack of momentum” only increases pressure on Cop27 to make greater strides, said Hare.

Vanuatu’s quest for climate justice

A family stands next to what used to be their outdoor toilet after the passage of Cyclone Pam in Vanuatu’s capital, Port Vila (Photo: Silke von Brockhausen/UNDP/Flickr)

Vanuatu is gathering support for the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to provide an advisory opinion on countries’ legal obligations to protect people from climate harm.

Under the proposal, the ICJ would be tasked with interpreting what international human rights and environmental laws mean for states’ responsibility to act on climate change.

Vanuatu is organising a high-level event on the sideline of the general debate as “a political moment to gather support from member states,” Kevin Chand, a legal advisor to Vanuatu’s permanent mission at the UN, told Climate Home.

Expect some countries to state their support for the initiative during the debate.

A resolution is expected to be introduced to the general assembly at the end of October, with a vote taking place after Cop27 in late 2022 or early 2023.

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While three African presidents flew to the Netherlands for the Africa Adaptation Summit on Monday, only Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte was there to meet with them.

Rich countries have unmet promises to financially support poorer countries in boosting climate resilience.

Senegal’s president Macky Sall said: “I cannot help but note, with some bitterness, the absence of leaders from the industrial world. I think if we made the effort to leave Africa to come to Rotterdam, it would be easier for the Europeans and others to be here.”

Ghana’s president Nana Akufo-Addo associated himself “wholly with the sentiments of president Macky Sall about the failure of certain vested interests to be present with us at this meeting” and the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) Felix Tshisekedi said “it is my turn to also deplore the absence of leaders of industrialised nations”.

Ethiopia’s president Sahle-Work Zewde, speaking by video link, echoed their criticisms. She added: “Sometimes, we should not appear to be talking to each other while those who should be with us are not present.”

United Nations deputy secretary-general Amina Mohammed said the meeting was “lop-sided” and “a bird only flies on two wings”. She praised African leaders for showing up, adding “it’s not because [they] don’t have anything important do back at home”.

Unmet promises

In 2009, wealthy countries promised to deliver $100 billion a year to developing countries in climate finance by 2020. They fell $17bn short of this target in 2020 and have still yet to meet it, with the US responsible for the vast majority of the shortfall.

The shortfall between a country’s climate finance in 2017-18 and its fair share. (Photo: ODI)

At the meeting in Rotterdam, Macky Sall linked this failure on finance to the viability and fairness of African emissions reduction measures. Senegal is promoting offshore oil and gas exploration while the DRC is auctioning off oil concessions in rainforests and peatlands.

Sall said: “When countries of Africa are asked to renounce polluting developments to deal with the current state of emergency on the planet, it is only fair that, as a counterpart, the cost of adaptation to this should be shared equitably also… notably the financial commitment of $100bn a year.”

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Analysis of six African national plans by PowerShift Africa finds on average they are investing the equivalent of 2.8% of GDP on adapting to climate change. The UN Environment Programme estimates that developing countries will collectively have to spend up to $300bn a year on adapting by 2030.

Rich countries pledged at last year’s Cop26 summit to double their adaptation finance contributions from 2019 levels by 2025. This would increase it from $20bn a year to $40bn. A group of self-proclaimed “adaptation champions”, which does not include the US, has formed to try and meet this goal.

Africa is responsible for just 3% of total historic emissions.

Worries closer to home

In Rotterdam, the European Commission’s climate lead Frans Timmermans said that many European citizens would not be persuaded by the “moral point that those suffering the most consequences are not responsible for creating the crisis”.

He said: “Let’s be frank, many of our citizens in Europe will not buy this argument today because their worries are linked to their own existence in this energy crisis, in this food crisis, in this inflation crisis. This might seem very strange from an African perspective but it is always what is closer to your own worries is always bigger on your agenda than someone else’s worries.”

A more convincing argument for Europeans, Timmermans said, is that “without success in Africa,  there can be no success in Europe – our destinies are so intimately intertwined that if we are not collectively responsible for development in Africa, for Africa being able to use the opportunities it has… we will sink together in an ocean of despair”.

Deadly flash floods in UAE highlight need for resilience investment

Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte joined the meeting for the afternoon. He said: “I would have loved to have more of my European colleagues here.”

The Global Center on Adaptation said it had invited the leaders of its traditional funders in France, Norway, Denmark, Canada and Finland.

France’s Emmanuel Macron met instead with French regional leaders in Paris while Canada’s Justin Trudeau stayed home to deal with a mass stabbing in Saskatchewan.

The governments of Finland and Norway did not reply to requests for comment on what their leaders Sanna Marin and Jonas Gahr Store were doing instead.

Denmark’s prime minister Mette Frederiksen was occupied with a national military remembrance day but told African leaders by video message: “I know that you want Europe to engage more in your struggles and we should.”

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The shrinking water levels can even be seen from space. An analysis of satellite imagery by Climate Home News, with the support from the monitoring platform Planet, shows significant impacts to freshwater ecosystems around the world.

“What we have experienced this summer is what climate scientists tell us is going to happen in the future. This summer matches the predictions that we have for a hotter, drier future,” said Christine Colvin, advocacy director of the nonprofit The Rivers Trust.

Climate change is now becoming one of the “key drivers” of degrading freshwater ecosystems worldwide, according to the latest report by the UN’s panel of climate scientists. These ecosystems are fundamental for water access.

In China’s case, a month-long heatwave preceded the country’s worst drought in history. In a matter of weeks, some of the Asian country’s largest water bodies began to shrink, leading to economic and even cultural impacts.

“We are clearly witnessing the impacts of climate change,” said Wenjian Zhang, WMO assistant secretary-general.The situation in China is “complex”, he said, and has tested the country’s disaster prevention and relief work.

Although many of these water bodies —such as Lake Poyang— drop seasonally, this year’s drought was the worst in recorded history, Chinese officials said.

Attribution to climate change can be different depending on the region and can only be determined by conducting local studies, said Andrew Hoell, co-lead of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Drought Task Force.

However, Hoell added that “almost all regions of the globe have observed a trend to increasing temperatures that have led to more intense and longer duration heat events.”

In Europe, for example, the UK’s heatwave would have been almost impossible without current climate change, which has already warmed the planet by 1,2°C. After this event, drought was declared in large parts of the country.

Along the same lines, Europe’s Global Drought Observatory stated in its August report that low precipitation levels combined with “a sequence of heatwaves from May onwards”. As a result, water levels dropped in some major European rivers such as the Rhine in Germany, the Loire in France and the Tagus in Portugal.

In the Rhine, for example, some parts of the river were running at 45% of their average level for August, said Germany’s Federal Institute of Hydrology. Cargo ships were forced to carry lighter loads, increasing transport costs.

The impacts were even more significant because most of the continent’s wetlands were also depleted, said Colvin. This has left many freshwater ecosystems without their natural “buffer areas,” she added.

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Abnormally heavy monsoon rains led to flash floods in July which killed at least 550 people across Pakistan, with rural communities in the impoverished southwestern province Balochistan hardest hit. At least 77 children have lost their lives and more than 500 people were injured in the floods.

More than 34,000 homes were deluged and 977km of road infrastructure and 61 bridges were destroyed.

Zia Salik, head of fundraising at Islamic Relief UK, was in Balochistan when the floods hit. 

“The flash floods destroyed and demolished entire villages. [These are] impoverished villages, built entirely out of mud bricks… they had no chance against the heavy floodwaters,” Salik said, adding that 85-year-olds he spoke to said they had never seen that much water in their lives. “Most people have lost their livestock and their land – they will not be able to grow anything until next year.”

Villagers raised the alarm which led to mass evacuations, but there were no early warning systems in place, said Salik. “Considering the size of the floods, the loss of lives has been relatively low.”

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In Balochistan alone, over 150,000 people are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance, according to Islamic Relief. 

“I spoke to families who had not washed themselves for over a week because all water pipes were destroyed by the floods,” Salik said.

Aid groups are on the ground distributing tents and food packs, but a lack of media coverage and aid cuts means there is little funding available to help communities rebuild, he said.

“Ordinarily the UK would allocate significant funds to such a disaster but I haven’t seen any announcement,” said Salik, attributing the silence to the government’s decision to freeze international aid over the summer.

Pakistan was the biggest recipient of UK bilateral aid 2015-19. It dropped to seventh place after the UK government decided in 2020 to scale back the aid budget from 0.7% to 0.5% of national income.

The US, Japan and Germany have also been major aid contributors to Pakistan in recent years, along with multilateral agencies.

Three children walk among the rubble in a village in Balochistan, Pakistan, which was badly hit by flash floods (Photo: Islamic Relief Pakistan)

Pakistan is one of the world’s most vulnerable countries to climate change, according to the Climate Change Risk Index 2021 by NGO German Watch.

This past month was the wettest in three decades, according to Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority, Reuters reports. Balochistan received 305% more rain than the annual average, according to the agency.

“Authorities in Pakistan have traditionally focused more on flood management and less on disaster risk reduction,” Aisha Khan, executive director for Civil Society Coalition for Climate Change in Islamabad, told Climate Home News.

“This is largely due to lack of resources for taking necessary adaptive measures and also due to inability to anticipate the sudden onset and intensity of floods,” she said. 

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In its latest climate plan, Pakistan estimated it needs $7-14 billion annually until 2050 for adaptation investments, primarily in infrastructure.

“Without access to climate finance for adaptation this will remain a recurring challenge beyond the country’s coping capacity,” Khan said. 

“Impact-based forecasting can help but indicative modeling is not precise and there is a limit to preparing for anticipatory adaptation as the scale, scope and intensity of climate induced disasters is highly unpredictable,” she said.

The most urgent adaptation needs are resilient infrastructure, which will require hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of investment, said Salik. Houses should be rebuilt with concrete foundations and steel girders, not with mud bricks which can be washed away, and the government should invest in dams, walls and channels to divert floodwaters, he said. “The real challenge is the infrastructure cost.”

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That’s the target set today by the leaders of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations (UN).

An early warning system is when metereological organisations use weather data to predict risks and pass warnings on to authorities and the public so they can prepare.

The WMO estimates it will require $1.5 billion in investment over the next five years, which will come mainly from wealthy governments. The WMO will unveil a plan to meet the target at the Cop27 climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt in November.

Speaking at the WMO’s 72nd anniversary celebration, the organisation’s head Petteri Taalas said: “Besides very critical mitigation [reducing emissions], it is growingly important to invest in climate adaptation [adapting to climate change].”

He added: “One of the highest returns on investment is reached by improving the weather, water and climate early warning services and related observing infrastructures.”

A senior UN official on a briefing call said it would be “challenging” to raise the money but the sums involved were “a mere rounding error of the $14 trillion mobilised by G20 countries over the last two years to recover their economies from Covid-19”.

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The WMO estimates that one third of the world’s population is not covered by an early warning system.

This includes 60% of Africans, particularly in the continent’s poorest countries in central, west and east Africa.

Many small island developing states also lack weather forecasting capacity.

Many Africans are not protected by early warning systems. (Source: WMO)

Ephraim Mwepya Shitima is an adaptation expert from Zambia and chair of the African Group of Negotiators.

He told Climate Home it was “a very good target” as “early warning is critical to ensure steps are taken to reduce or minimise the expected impacts”.

He added that achieving the target would require “substantial support” in the form of money, technology, equipment and training for relevant staff.

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David Smith is a Jamaican coastal engineer. He told Climate Home that Jamaica uses information from the National Hurricane Centre in Miami, USA, to give hurricane warning updates.

To make that information more useful, Smith said, there should be a map of the built-up shoreline and the storm surge limits which would result from various hurricane strengths and approach directions. This would show which areas of the Jamaican coast are under threat from specific storms.

He said this is a “large undertaking, usually done as part of a larger hazard, vulnerability and risk assessment” and would require “fiscal resources” to carry out.

A 2019 global commission on adaptation report found that early warning systems could provide a tenfold return on investment – the most of all the adaptation measures studied.

It found that just 24 hours’ warning of a coming storm or heatwave can cut the ensuing damage by 30% and that spending $0.8 billion on such systems in developing countries would avoid losses of $3-16 billion per year.

One of the world’s poorest countries, Bangladesh, is held up as an example of how investment in early warning systems can save lives. In 1970, a cyclone killed 500,000 Bangladeshis. After decades of investment in warning systems and cyclone shelters, in 2020 cyclone Amphan killed just 26 people.

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The figure in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on climate impacts and adaptation paints a stark picture of the threat facing humanity. It also ventures into sensitive territory.

A map showing how scientists arrived at that number was deemed too misleading and problematic by many national representatives to include in the summary for policymakers. A version of it remains in the underlying report.

It painted much of the African continent red, for “very high” vulnerability, while Caribbean islands threatened by intense hurricanes and sea level rise – but with more money and infrastructure to cope – were depicted as less vulnerable. Australia, where 20 people died recently in extreme flooding, is ranked as one of the safest places to live.

This depiction matters both as a matter of pride – no country wants to be seen as a basket case – and access to resources. Under the UN climate convention, wealthy countries have agreed to provide financing to developing countries, “especially those that are particularly vulnerable”. But there is no agreed method for measuring vulnerability.

While IPCC reports do not prescribe policy, they may influence decisions on which countries merit special treatment.

A map on observed human vulnerability from the draft summary for policymakers of the IPCC sixth assessment report Working Group II, which did not make it into the final version. A similar map was published in the full report

The classification provides “a simplified bird view” of global vulnerability, said Jörn Birkmann, a coordinating lead author of the report, who researches climate vulnerability at the University of Stuttgart in Germany.

It helps show that Micronesia is more vulnerable than Australia, “even though there is a lot of flooding and suffering in Australia. And that’s an important message,” he told Climate Home.

Defining vulnerability is “a political question,” said Richard Klein, a senior researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute. “There is no [single] truth when it comes to vulnerability because there are many different possible interpretations. Indices can tell you whatever you want them to tell you.”

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The IPCC defines vulnerability in its report as “the propensity or predisposition to be adversely affected” and “lack of capacity to cope and adapt”.

The 3.3-3.6 billion figure corresponds to the estimated number of people that live in countries ranked in the two most vulnerable tiers of a five-tier classification system.

Mozambique, Somalia, Nigeria, Afghanistan and Haiti are labelled “very high” vulnerability, while India, Pakistan and the Philippines are in the “high” bracket.

On the flipside, 1.8-2 billion people are estimated to live in countries with low or very low vulnerability. The last category includes the UK, Australia, Canada and Sweden.

“We are not assigning a specific vulnerability label to a specific person. We are not saying that all people in Chad or Afghanistan are vulnerable,” explained Birkmann.

Rather, the authors looked at each country’s resilience as a whole, judged more by development criteria than climatic conditions.

China plans huge wind and solar power rollout in Gobi desert

The classification is based on indicators from the INFORM Risk Index and the World Risk Index, which cover factors such as access to basic infrastructure and health care, nutrition, extreme poverty levels, literacy rates, inequality, governance and perception of corruption.

It does not take into account exposure to sea level rise, storms, heat stress or floods. Nor does it include projected risks. That reflects a lack of consensus on how to compare the severity of various climate hazards.

Some countries expressed concerns the national averaging couldn’t account for differences within countries. Others considered criteria on governance and corruption as policy prescriptive and biased towards wealthy nations.

Debra Roberts, who co-chaired the IPCC’s work on climate impacts and adaptation, defended the approach. As head of the sustainable and resilient city initiatives unit at eThekwini municipality, the local government body for Durban, in South Africa, she understands the policy implications.

The vulnerability assessment was useful “in that it gives us a sense of the scale of the problem,” she told Climate Home. And while the map relies on a small set of indices, it talks to “a much broader narrative that some of our foundations are simply at risk”.

Swap Russian gas for renewables, EU tells member states

The IPCC acknowledges the limits of this national level assessment of vulnerability, noting that there are highly vulnerable groups in low vulnerability countries.

For example, in Northern America, urban ethnic minorities, immigrants and indigenous peoples are more likely to live in climate danger zones. Poor households and elderly people in Europe are more vulnerable to flooding and heat stress.

While important, these vulnerable demographics do not make a fundamental difference to the global picture, Birkmann said.

Countries like the US, Germany and the UK have the funding and institutional capacity to reduce these groups’ vulnerability, he added. “That’s not the case in Somalia.”

For Klein, having resources and capacity to respond to climate disaster doesn’t necessarily mean a government will put them to best use.

“I think it would be helpful to be much more differentiated about what it is that actually makes people vulnerable, not countries. And to help design adaptation strategies that lift people out of vulnerability. And that’s a different story,” he said.

The post Mapping vulnerability: why the IPCC’s geography of climate risk is contentious appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report has a new emphasis on “maladaptation”, when measures taken to adapt to the effects of climate change cause more problems than they solve.

While seawalls do protect coastal properties and beaches, they are expensive, damage wildlife, mainly benefit the rich and encourage risky building near the coast.

Experts around the world told Climate Home News that green buffers like mangroves are generally a better way of dealing with sea level rise than hard infrastructure like seawalls and levees, although they are not suitable for every location.

Melanie Bishop is an associate professor of marine ecology at Australia’s Macquarie University. “Hard engineering structures, such as seawalls, have historically been the primary approach to coastal hazard reduction,” she said.

“While these structures have in many instances effectively protected coastal assets from erosion and inundation, their use has come at considerable cost – not only in economic terms, but also environmentally and socially.”

Revealed: How rich and at-risk nations fought over science of climate impacts

A near-final version of the report summary, drafted by scientists and seen by Climate Home News, said that “seawalls reduce impacts to people and assets in the short-term but can result in lock-ins and increase exposure to climate risks in the long-term”.

After government representatives had their say during the approval plenary, this criticism was softened and the advantages of seawalls emphasised. The caveat “unless they are integrated into a long-term adaptive plan” was added into the final version and the word “effectively” was added before “reduce”.

Seawalls are also “inflexible and/or expensive to change,” the summary concluded.

Two sources with knowledge of the talks told Climate Home that European countries emphasised the benefits of nature-based solutions while India, China and small island states argued that all adaptation options should be on the table.

IPCC: Five takeaways from the UN’s 2022 climate impacts report

Seawalls’ price tags have sparked debates around the world over what should be protected and who should pay for it.

In California, tech companies like Google and Facebook have bought billions of dollars of properties next to San Francisco Bay. Due to sea level rise, the area is vulnerable to flooding during a storm surge.

To build a levee, Facebook will pay $7.8 million, while the nearby low-income community of East Palo Alto is chipping in $5.5 million, 13% of its annual budget.

Mark Lubell is an environmental science professor at the University of California. He told Climate Home: “There are equity and environmental justice issues. Seawalls are expensive. Poor communities with people of color have a harder time affording them, and poor communities in the Bay Area (and most parts of the world) are more vulnerable to sea level rise.”

US seeks to remove ‘losses and damages’ from scientific report

Due to their cost, seawalls are less common in the developing world. Anoka Abeyratne, director of Sri Lankan environmental consultancy Aayusha Global, said most of Sri Lanka’s seawalls are “not the type of large scale ones used in the US”.

She added: “Most are rudimentary with just rocks held together with wire mesh. These are used to save the sandy beaches from washing away.”

Unlike the 36-page summary for policymakers, the full 3,675-page report is not subject to line-by-line approval from governments.

It highlights seawalls’ ecological as well as economic cost, saying they “reduce the space available for coastal ecosystems”.

A sea turtle grazes on seagrass (Photo: P Lindgren/Wikimedia)

Walls on beaches can block animals like turtles off from reaching parts of the beach. According to the Sea Turtle Conservancy, turtles are forced to lay eggs nearer the water where their eggs are more likely to be washed out to sea.

Nature-based solutions like mangroves are a cheaper and greener way of blocking storm surges as they suck in carbon and provide a habitat for wildlife. However, planting mangroves is not always possible, particularly in urban areas.

Retreat from the sea is also an option. The report notes that the Fijian coastal community of Vunidogoloa collectively relocated to another site within their customary land.

But the report warns: “The availability of customary land for the new site was a key factor of success in this relocation example, although this will not guarantee success in every case as relocation may expose communities to new risks.”

Mangroves on Indonesia’s Papua island (Photo: Paul Hilton/Greenpeace)

David Smith is a Jamaican coastal engineer working for Smith Warner International. He told Climate Home that, for many Carribean and other small islands, there is nowhere to retreat to.

In Barbados, he said, all the businesses and homes are by the coast. “Once you go into the mountains, they’re subject to landslides and much more difficult conditions for construction”, he added.

Smith said that many engineers are looking at combinations of green and grey infrastructure like a seawall with a belt of mangroves in front of it.

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The community of Ebeye in the Marshall Islands has even less of an opportunity to retreat than in Barbados.

Ebeye is a strip of land around 300 metres wide with the Pacific Ocean on both sides. The Green Climate Fund is contributing $25m towards building a $60m 1.5km-long seawall.

Albon Ishoda, the Marshall Islands ambassador to Fiji and the Pacific Islands, told Climate Home that the IPCC report made valid criticisms of seawalls but that there are no other options for many atoll communities.

A seawall in Majuro Atoll, Marshall Islands. (Photo: Genevieve French/Greenpeace)

“Many times, people think we have options lined up,” he said. “The reality is we don’t, unless some benefactors are able to commit hundreds of millions for some hard adaptation that includes relocating people and raising islands, then perhaps seawalls will be the last option. Some of the places that national efforts have mobilized to create sea walls are critical.”

He added: “Sometimes, people think we can simply move inland. The fact is, as atoll nations, many communities rely on underground aquifers for water. Once that source of water is contaminated with salt water, plants and people will struggle to find fresh water for drinking.”

The post Scientists warn seawalls can make rising waters worse in the long run appeared first on Climate Home News.

As Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine and explosions of military artillery resonated across the capital Kyiv on Thursday, “we woke up in a different world,” she told Climate Home News from her flat in the south of the city.

A senior scientist of applied climatology who introduced climate models to Ukraine, Krakovska was leading an 11-strong delegation in the negotiations to approve the “summary for policymakers” that accompanies the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on climate impacts.

This was the first time Ukraine was represented by such a large delegation, allowing experts to bring their regional perspective from Europe’s largest country (aside from Asia-straddling Russia). “Before, I was alone,” Krakovska said.

As Russian troops advanced towards the capital, the survival of Ukraine as a sovereign state and the completion of the IPCC report both became critical for Krakovska.

“As long as we have internet and no bombs over our head, we will continue to work,” she recalled telling the plenary of the IPCC meeting on Thursday. But the fighting intensified, and when rockets hit the city, the delegation was forced to withdraw from the discussions.

“It is not possible to make science when you are under attack,” she said. “I’m sad that instead of presenting key findings of this report in Ukraine, we need to fight for the existence of our country.”

IPCC: Five takeaways from the UN’s 2022 climate impacts report

A mother of four, Krakovska was born in Kyiv and has decided to stay in the city with her family.

A war in Europe in 2022 “is not acceptable” but “we don’t panic, we stay strong,” she said, visibly moved during a Zoom interview.

Krakovska says there is “a very direct connection” between climate change and the war. “Russia has a lot of money from fossil fuels and these fossil fuels make this war possible.”

Issues of water scarcity in eastern and southern Ukraine are also likely to have played a role, she said. Access to water supplies in the Russian-occupied Crimea became a major issue and led to increased concerns of Russian military threats following widespread drought in 2018, 2019 and 2020.

Krakovska said that 10 of the last 12 years had seen below normal precipitation levels. In 2020, water levels in Ukraine’s rivers and reservoirs hit their lowest levels since record began in 1885.

In the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, where Russian-backed separatist forces have been in conflict with the Ukrainian military since 2014, water woes were exacerbated by shelling and damage to infrastructure.

The IPCC report published Monday states that droughts induced by higher levels of global warming, “by increasing vulnerability, will increasingly affect violent intrastate conflict”.

For Krakovska, Russia’s war on Ukraine shows this can become a cross-border issue.

Revealed: How rich and at-risk nations fought over science of climate impacts

Krakovska knows Russia well. She was born under the Soviet Union, studied meteorology in Saint Petersburg and went on several expeditions to study cloud modelling across Russia.

She joined the Ukrainian Hydrometeorological Institute, where she now heads the applied climatology laboratory, in September 1991, days after Ukraine’s declared its independence from the Soviet Union.

Krakovska first experienced signs of climate change on a trip to the Arctic in October 1991, when mild temperatures meant that the sea still hadn’t frozen as was usual for the time of year.

In the late 1990s, she was one of the first Ukrainian women to travel to Antarctica on a scientific expedition.

A visit to the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, took her research in a new direction. There, she met with a group of scientists working on regional climate modelling.

She soon started to work on projections for Ukraine, which have since been used to plan adaptation measures across the country.

Svitlana Krakovska at the Ukrainian Akademik Vernadsky station on Galindez Island in 1997 (Photo: Svitlana Krakovska )

Since the invasion started, Krakovska has received dozens of messages of support from the scientific community across the world.

Russian delegate Oleg Anisimov apologised for his country’s invasion of Ukraine during the IPCC approval session’s closing plenary on Sunday – at risk of incurring the wrath of his government.

“The courage of the delegation of Ukraine, which continued to contribute to our deliberations [on Thursday] is remarkable. Science has no borders,” tweeted Climatologist Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, of the Belgian delegation.

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But the future of Ukraine and its scientific community are uncertain. Last month, on the anniversary of the 2014 revolution that severed Ukraine’s ties to Russia, Ukrainian scientists wrote in Nature that national science spending remained low, government funding was used inefficiently and low salaries discouraged students from embarking on research careers.

Even that small budget is likely to be redirected to defence – and Krakovska is not complaining.

“We are the poorest country in Europe and we’re really poor scientists if I’m honest,” said Krakovska. “But now I’m really happy that they use this finance to make our army stronger.”

The war is a direct threat to Ukrainian research institutions. In Crimea, those that were previously run by the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine were transferred to Russian control. Since 2014, the conflict in the east has led 18 universities to relocate to other parts of the country, with many researchers losing their homes and laboratories.

“I hope that we survive and continue to do science as Ukrainian scientists in an independent Ukraine,” Krakovska said.

As our conversation came to a close, she realised she hadn’t checked her phone for warnings to get to a shelter. “I hope that my voice will make a difference,” she added.

The post Under attack: the Ukrainian climate scientist fighting for survival appeared first on Climate Home News.

Adaptation finance, nature-based solutions and solar geoengineering were among the most contentious topics as online talks at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ran into overtime on Saturday.

Sources monitoring the two-week discussions, which are closed to media, said that a group of developed nations including the US, Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Norway pushed for key phrases and figures to be removed from the summary for policymakers (SPM).

These include the US seeking to replace the mention of adaptation finance with “investment” and pushing for greater emphasis on the role of the private funds. The government representative objected to putting a percentage range on the amount of global tracked climate finance that had gone to adaptation. Scientists had expressed “high confidence” in the proposed 4-8% range, which came from analysis by the Climate Policy Initiative.

IPCC: Five takeaways from the UN’s 2022 climate impacts report

Developing countries, led by India, reportedly stood their ground and the term “finance for adaptation” appears in the final SPM, albeit without concrete figures.

The US also led efforts to replace the term “losses and damages” with “adverse impacts” – but ultimately only succeeded in adding words. A draft SPM obtained by Climate Home two weeks ago said climate change had caused “widespread losses and damages to nature and people”. Monday’s final version instead references “widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages”.

“The Biden administration is not only shutting their eyes to the reality of the climate crisis – they’re trying to blindfold the rest of the world too,” said Teresa Anderson, climate policy coordinator at ActionAid International.

“They appear to wear a badge of climate leadership, while doing all they can to block those most in need from getting help. It’s dishonest and utterly shameful.”

IPCC: UN report shows us human costs of climate failure

Observers said that developed nations lobbied hard for references to the benefits of “nature-based solutions” (NbS) – projects such as conservation and tree-planting – to be included in the summary. This prompted pushback from several countries, led by South Africa.

The term is seen by some as deflecting responsibility away from burners of fossil fuels. It appeared in a main paragraph of the draft SPM, but in the final version it has been relegated to a footnote, stating: “The term is the subject of ongoing debate, with concerns that it may lead to the misunderstanding that NbS on its own can provide a global solution to climate change.”

The concept of “overshoot” – temporarily exceeding temperature caps before cooling off later this century – also provoked intense debate. An attempt by vulnerable nations to include reference to the Paris Agreement temperature goal of 1.5C in the heading of the overshoot section failed.

And, at China’s insistence, a footnote appears in the final SPM qualifying that there is limited evidence on the impacts of temporary 1.5C overshoot. 

According to sources monitoring the talks, the US stood alone in seeking to keep a draft paragraph referencing solar radiation modification (SRM), carbon dioxide removals (CDR) and carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a single block.

Other countries pushed to separate SRM, which could cool the planet but does not address the underlying cause of heating – that is, levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

‘Nature-based solutions’ prove divisive at Glasgow climate talks

Sources said the US “aggressively fought” for a “balanced” statement that took five hours of side huddles at the virtual talks to resolve. When it became clear that SRM would be separated from emission reduction and carbon sequestration options, the US sought to drop the mention of SRM altogether due to the focus on its risks. 

The final SPM states that SRM would “introduce a widespread range of new risks to people and ecosystems, which are not well understood”.

Several developing countries rejected draft phrasing which portrayed migration as an option for adapting to climate impacts, and the link was dropped in the final summary. They also pushed successfully for a mention of “past emissions”.

While they wanted language acknowledging specifically that past emissions had constrained their development options, the final phrasing is more nuanced: “Past and current development trends (past emissions, development and climate change) have not advanced global climate resilient development.”

This article was amended after publication to clarify that the 4-8% adaptation finance share was of global tracked climate finance from public and private sources, not exclusively flows to developing countries.

The post Revealed: How rich and at-risk nations fought over science of climate impacts appeared first on Climate Home News.

Nevertheless, Africa is facing the brunt of the climate emergency. The rates of temperature increase and sea-level rise are higher in Africa than the global average, according to a report from the UN’s World Meteorological Organization.

In 2020, deadly floods across the Sahel region compounded the socio-economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Climate-related disasters pushed the number of people affected by food insecurity up by 40%, and are the single leading sources of displacement.

Some African countries are already spending up to 9% of their GDP on measures to adapt to the climate crisis, according to a study published by the UN Economic Commission for Africa. The study notes that Africa’s spending is disproportionately high compared to its small contribution to global emissions and is also significantly higher than international resources available to the continent.

Africa’s investment, however, is a drop in the bucket of $30-50 billion needed per year by 2030, according to IMF estimates.

Germany’s new government has an opportunity to design, implement, and lead a different kind of engagement with African countries. It can do this by capitalising on what foreign minister Annalena Baerbock has said will lead the way Germany engages with the world and a centrepiece of its G7 presidency: climate diplomacy.

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Germany should strategically partner with African countries in creating big, well-designed, whole economy solutions. Piecemeal approaches are no longer enough. The Just Energy Transition Partnership with South Africa, announced during COP26 in Glasgow last year, worth $8.5 billion over five years, is a start.

Like the South African partnership, solutions must be based on African countries’ priorities. The EU-Africa Summit in February would be a good opportunity to enter into further partnerships.

They however must go further with bigger, more ambitious sums that consist of more grants than loans. They must cover a wide range of issues, starting with the urgent need to adapt to the effects of the climate emergency, and extending to mitigation measures and large-scale infrastructure investments.

The International Climate Initiative, a German funding vehicle that supports the achievement of the Paris Agreement goals, can be deployed to develop such strategic partnerships and whole economy solutions.

Storm Ana’s devastation in southern Africa highlights need for early warnings

Under its G7 presidency, Germany must then ensure that the club of rich, high emitting countries, who make up about a tenth of the world’s population but are responsible for more than half of cumulative emissions, pay for such solutions.

This could be included as a key component of the international climate club that Chancellor Scholz has been championing and that he has announced will be a key goal of Germany’s G7 presidency.

However, the climate club should not be an exclusive club of rich countries, but an alliance in which industrialised countries join forces with emerging and developing countries and work hand in hand on climate-friendly transformation.

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On the security front, which has been the main obsession of Germany’s Africa policy: Germany needs to restructure and climate-proof its security policy. For there is no greater fuel of insecurity and displacement than the gradual and inexorable disappearance of livelihoods linked to the climate crisis.

Efforts to address security must directly address the loss and damage from the climate crisis while improving livelihoods. Focussing on this core existential crisis will therefore help Germany connect the dots on its apparent interests in Africa – especially security and displacement.

It is impossible to ignore the devastating effects of the climate emergency in Africa – a crisis Africans did not create and, perhaps because of that, do not have the resources to address. The crisis, however, also presents opportunities. It is an opportunity for African countries to recast their economies in ways that address the climate emergency while creating jobs, the key consideration for a continent of young people.

It is also an opportunity for Germany. As the largest economy in Europe, with a new government that seems intent on climate solutions, and which has made climate diplomacy a key part of its G7 Presidency, it is a chance to not merely support African countries’ efforts to address the climate emergency. It is also an opportunity to lead in climate diplomacy by providing a blueprint for how external actors can effectively partner with Africa.

Dr Olumide Abimbola is executive director of APRI – Africa Policy Research Institute, a Berlin-based think tank. He previously worked on trade and regional integration at the African Development Bank, and on natural resources governance at the GIZ.

The post Germany must bring African nations into its G7 ‘climate club’ appeared first on Climate Home News.

In the final hours of the talks, the US, backed by the EU, and a group of 134 developing countries known as the G77 remained deeply divided about how to secure support for vulnerable nations to adapt to more frequent and intense flooding, droughts and cyclones.

Wealthy countries pledged a voluntary $356 million to the Adaptation Fund, including first-time contributions from the US and Canada. But developing countries wanted a more reliable source of adaptation finance than the changeable pledges of rich nations.

In a final diplomatic push, the G77 demanded that a share of revenue from voluntary and bilateral carbon trading be provided to the Adaptation Fund. For the African Group of Negotiators that was a red line.

The US, which strongly opposed the idea, refused to back down, seeing the proposal as a tax that infringed on the government’s ability to legislate.

“The developed world was saying ‘trust us, we’ll fund this voluntarily’,” Gabon’s environment minister Lee White told Climate Home News.

At that point, he said, “it was almost certain that if we started reopening the body of the final text of the Glasgow agreement, we weren’t going to get an agreement until Egypt,” where the next rounds of talks will be held in 2022.

“It’s going to get bumpy!” – Papua New Guinea sparked final day panic at Cop26

The issue is critical for African countries. A recent study by the UN Economic Commission for Africa found that Cameroon spends 9% of its GDP on coping with climate change, Ethiopia 8% and Sierra Leone, Senegal and Ghana are all more than 7%.

Yet adaptation finance only accounts for around a quarter of climate finance flows.

Under the Glasgow climate pact, donor nations agreed to “at least double their collective provision of climate finance for adaptation to developing countries from 2019 levels by 2025” – but the low baseline means this is a far cry from what vulnerable nations actually need.

African nations estimated their combined adaptation needs to cost between $7-15bn per year by 2020.

Countries agreed in Glasgow to earmark 5% of revenues from carbon trading under a centralised carbon market for the Adaptation Fund but a contribution is only “strongly encouraged” for bilateral transactions.

As the issue came to a head on Saturday, US special climate envoy John Kerry walked across the plenary floor to the G77 lead negotiator Ahmadou Sebory Toure to talk things through.

“It was the first discussion we had had at a political level about the issue,” said White, who was quickly pulled into the huddle.

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Several diplomats involved in the discussions told Climate Home that Kerry refused to concede. He said the US had already agreed to doubling its adaptation finance and argued that the developing world had a lot to lose if it rejected the deal on the table.

Recalling the conversation during an interview, White told Climate Home: “I asked [Kerry] very clearly, if he was making a moral commitment to do all you can to make sure that these funds [for adaptation] flow. And he very clearly said: ‘Yes, I am making a moral commitment to Africa.’.”

After a similar conversation with EU green deal chief Frans Timmermans, a meeting was called between developing countries to assess Kerry’s assurances. But views on the US’ trustworthiness diverged.

The Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis) and Costa Rica argued that the final draft text was a better outcome than no deal at all, according to sources in the room.

For Africa, the pill was a lot more difficult to swallow. “How can you trust them to deliver? That is naïve if you believe they will,” said one African negotiator, adding that the adaptation money promised by the US was “insignificant” compared with what is needed.

Yet, walking away from the talks is not an option for many vulnerable nations, which have no other international space to make their voices heard, they said.

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Eventually, “we decided that it was more beneficial to the people we represent to move forward with that strong moral commitment then to block everything for another year,” minister White said.

Speaking in Glasgow, Kerry said: “From our friend from Gabon who asked specifically that he have some reassurance before he leaves here on adaptation funding. I can assure our friend from Gabon and from the other countries concerned that every effort in the world will be made.

“There is a commitment that is real to double adaptation finance, including our own and that we will work in other ways to address the challenge of adaptation.”

Ambassador Janine Felson of Belize told Climate Home: “The ball is in the developed country parties’ court,” to present credible plans for delivering.

And there is no time to wait for the next round of talks at Cop27 to announce those plans, she added. “Rather, by the time we arrive in Egypt, they should be able to provide information on how those plans are progressing.”

The post African nations settled for ‘moral pact’ with US on adaptation finance at Cop26 appeared first on Climate Home News.

Diplomats worked through the night on Friday to make headway on some on the last unresolved issues of the rules to implement the Paris Agreement.

But there were still a wide range of options on the table for the most contentious issues, including establishing common rules for a global carbon market, on whether climate plans should cover a five or 10 year timeframe and on the transparency process for reporting progress.

Ministers arrive in Glasgow for week two to broker a political deal. Their ability to reach consensus hinges on all countries feeling their concerns are taken seriously – and support for those on the frontline of climate impacts is a weak link.

Cop26 president Alok Sharma told reporters on Saturday: “Over the last week, I have discussed adaptation finance with a number of countries and I hope we will be able to make progress next week.”

But Matthew McKinnon, a spokesperson for the Climate Vulnerable Forum, which represents 48 developing countries, told Climate Home News discussions on support for those on the frontline of the climate crisis were “not progressing enough”.

While there has been a flurry of pledges on phasing out coal and cutting emissions in the first week of the UN climate conference, announcements on helping developing countries adapt and respond to droughts, flooding, cyclones and sea level rise have been less forthcoming.

The UK presidency has made adaptation, loss and damage the theme for Monday. But it’s unclear what wealthy nations will bring to the table. Unlike with days dedicated to finance and energy, no major announcements have been trailed in advance.

Jennifer Tollmann, of think tank E3G, told Climate Home News what happens on Monday could “make or break” the deal.

The US said this week it would dedicate $3 billion annually for adaptation finance by 2024 pending approval by Congress. That alone won’t be enough to reassure vulnerable nations, which have grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of high-level attention adaptation receives.

They are calling for at least a doubling of adaptation funds to help them cope with climate impacts.

South Africa $8.5bn finance package offers a model for ending reliance on coal

On top of adaptation finance, developing countries are calling for additional and dedicated funds to help them recover from loss and damages caused by climate impacts affecting them now – following a precedent set by Scotland at the start of the talks.

“We need to establish a financing mechanism for those that are losing the most,” Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, Fiji minister for the economy and climate change, told reporters on Friday.

“This needs to go beyond access to insurance and risk transfer arrangements to have the impact required and it must be additional and separate to the annual financing target.”

Frances Fuller, of Antigua and Barbuda, an advisor to the Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis), told Climate Home: “We’ve certainly be having some challenges there,” citing push back from donor countries.

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What wealthy nations deliver on Monday in support for vulnerable ones will “set the tone for how things progress in the week,” said Fuller. “Finance is a critical part that has not made as much progress and we’d like to see some more there.”

The fact that wealthy nations arrived at the talks not expecting to meet a long-overdue commitment to mobilise $100bn a year from 2020 before 2023 put finance discussions on a back foot.

In a submission to the UN on Friday, the African Group of Negotiators (AGN) called out donor countries that haven’t reported on their climate finance provisions to do so by next year.

“It’s pretty clear that we are so far off the $100bn. I say so far off because it is about the quality [of the finance] as well,” said Fuller.

Developing countries have repeatedly called for a 50/50 split between adaptation and mitigation finance. But in 2019, only a quarter of all finance went to help communities adapt to climate impacts.

“In 2021, we are a lot further behind than we need to be. The response to the challenges that small island developing states are facing is entirely inadequate,” Fuller said.

Comment: To keep 1.5C alive, the super rich must change their high carbon lifestyles

Inside the negotiations, talks on a post-2025 climate finance goal and on defining a global goal on adaptation have been difficult.

Some donor countries are resisting a tighter definition of climate finance, including specific targets for grants as opposed to loans and sub-targets for adaptation or loss and damage.

This lack of predictability of long-term adaptation finance flows is holding hostage parts of the negotiations on carbon markets.

The African Group of Negotiators is demanding a share of revenue from carbon trading deals between countries go to the Adaptation Fund. But the US strongly opposes it, slamming the proposal as a tax.

“The whole world is suffering from climate impacts… it’s not just an African issue,” Mohamed Adow, director of NGO Power Shift Africa, told Climate Home. “It’s in our own interest to detoxify these negotiations and collectively build resilience.”

The post Support for vulnerable nations could ‘make or break’ Cop26 talks appeared first on Climate Home News.

Delayed by a year because of the coronavirus pandemic, heads of state, diplomats, business leaders, campaigners and journalists are due to meet in person in Glasgow, UK, from 31 October to 12 November.

The hosts are aiming to mobilise a step up in climate action and keep hope alive of meeting the tougher goal of the Paris Agreement: limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C.

That means curbing emissions deeper and faster, adapting to a new era of climate impacts and scaling up the financial support developing nations need to build low-carbon and resilient economies.

Here is what you need to know about the conference.

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First things first. What is a Cop? 

“Cop” is short for Conference of the Parties, which refers to the meeting of the 197 members to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, known as UN Climate Change.

The talks are hosted every year by a different country and bring together delegates from every national government to advance global efforts to prevent dangerous climate change.

Cop1 was held in Berlin, Germany, in 1995. This year, the 26^th session of the talks is known as Cop26.

At the core of the Cop are negotiations on the legal mechanisms for governments to hold each other accountable. Orbiting that core are politicians, business leaders, campaigners and journalists, engaged in a lively discourse on what climate action means in the real world.

Who is in charge at Cop26?

The UK and Italy are joint presidents of Cop26. As host of the main event, the UK government has the bigger role, in coordination with the devolved administration in Scotland. Italy is due to hold some pre-Cop meetings in Milan.

Alok Sharma, a politician with the UK’s ruling Conservative Party, was appointed Cop26 president in February 2020. For nearly a year, Sharma also served as business and energy minister before dropping ministerial responsibilities to focus exclusively on Cop26 preparations.

UN Climate Change is responsible for keeping the climate negotiating process running year to year, led by Mexican diplomat Patricia Espinosa.

Cop26 president designate Alok Sharma of the UK meets China’s climate envoy Xie Zhenhua in Tianjin, China (Photo: Alok Sharma/Twitter/Flickr)

How is ambition measured at Cop26? 

A key responsibility of the Cop26 presidency is to mobilise greater ambition from other nations. This is primarily measured against the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement.

In 2015, in Paris, 197 countries agreed to collectively cut emissions to limit global temperature rise “well below 2C” and strive for 1.5C. To meet this goal, every country was asked to contribute emissions reductions and set out targets for doing so by 2025 or 2030. These plans are known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs).

This bottom-up approach means governments decide how fast to decarbonise their economies. But the plans submitted so far will lead to a lot more than 1.5C of warming by the end of the century – 2.4C if implemented in full, according to analysis published by Climate Action Tracker in May.

UN Climate Change found that updated plans by the end of 2020 put the world on track to stabilise emissions by 2030. To halt heating at 1.5C, scientists say global emissions need to fall 45% from 2010 levels in that time.

Cop21 president Laurent Fabius holds up the text of the Paris Agreement (Photo: IISD/ENB/ Kiara Worth)

What needs to happen now? 

Under the Paris Agreement, every country agreed to update their NDCs every five years, with each plan more ambitious than the last and reflecting their “highest possible ambition”.

Cop26, which was due to take place in 2020, is the first test of this “ratchet mechanism”.

The US, Canada, the EU and the UK are among 110 countries, largely developing economies, to have formally submitted improved plans to the UN by the end of July. But many of the world’s largest emitters missed the repeatedly extended deadline. China, India and Saudi Arabia’s plans are notably absent from the list.

Others like Australia merely reaffirmed old targets with no increase in ambition. Brazil even weakened its commitment by changing its baseline.

Ahead of Cop26, the UK will need to use its diplomatic clout to get Beijing, New Delhi and others to commit to stronger targets.

What else are the organisers trying to achieve? 

UK prime minister Boris Johnson has summarised the host nation’s agenda for the conference as: “coal, cash, cars and trees”. Let’s unpack that.

Coal: The UK wants to make Cop26 the summit that “consigns coal to history”. The G7 agreed in May to end new direct government support for unabated coal power by the end of 2021 – but avoided setting an exit timeline for burning the fuel. Italy is trying to orchestrate a similar pledge from the G20, against resistance from members like China, Russia and India.

Cash: Developed countries agreed in 2009 to mobilise $100 billion a year in climate finance to the developing world by 2020. At the last count, they were $20bn short. Germany and Canada have been tasked with making a plan to plug the gap ahead of Cop26. This is critical to trust in the process for recipient nations. Negotiations are due to start on what the next collective finance goal beyond 2025 should look like. Then there are various initiatives to “shift the trillions” of private sector cash towards achieving global net zero emissions by mid-century.

Cars: The UK is hoping to speed up a switch to electric vehicles, proposing a 2040 deadline for selling the last petrol cars. It established a Zero Emission Vehicle Transition Council bringing together ministers and representatives of major car markets – although China was not on the list.

Trees: “Calling time on deforestation” is another Cop26 goal. Together with the US and Norway, the UK launched the Leaf Coalition, which aims to mobilise $1 billion of public and private finance in 2021 to cut emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

Did they miss anything?

That four-word soundbite does not cover everybody’s priorities. The world’s poorest countries, which don’t have too many cars or coal plants to worry about, want to see more action to address the impacts of climate change they are already experiencing.

The Paris Agreement established a global goal on adaptation to climate impacts, but six years later it is still unclear what that means in practice. The agreement has a section on loss and damage, in recognition that people are already losing homes, lives and livelihoods to extreme weather turbocharged by the fossil fuel burning of the industrialised world, but practical support has been slow to follow.

With those climate vulnerabilities compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic, the least developed countries are calling for a solidarity package that includes progress on these neglected topics.

It remains to be seen how progress on any of these elements will be packaged into a meeting outcome. Some climate thinkers are proposing a Glasgow PACT.

UN talks in Copenhagen in 2009 (Photo: UN Climate Change/Flickr)

What do negotiators need to agree on?

There are technical issues negotiators in Glasgow will need to address.

The Paris Agreement rulebook was due to be finalised three years ago at Cop24 in Katowice, Poland, but a number of contentious items remain unresolved.

These include the rules of a new global carbon market, under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. How to avoid double counting emissions reductions, the role of old credits from the Kyoto climate regime under the new system and whether to allocate a share of proceeds from the market to the Adaptation Fund are among the stickiest issues.

Negotiators will also need to find agreement on the transparency rules for reporting emissions reductions and whether countries’ future climate plans should all cover the same time period of 5 or 10 years.

A passenger has his temperature checked at Incheon airport, South Korea (Pic: Jens-Olaf Walter/Flickr)

What about the Covid-19 pandemic? 

The organisers are planning for around 20,000 people to attend Cop26 in person, despite the ongoing threat of Covid-19 infections. They insist the health and safety of participants and the host community is paramount.

But stark inequalities of the vaccine roll out between rich and poorer nations have raised serious concerns about participation from developing countries. As of 4 September, 64% of the UK population had been fully vaccinated. For many African countries, the figure was less than 5%.

While vaccines are not mandatory to attend the summit, the UK host “strongly encourages” all delegates to be vaccinated. With the UN, the UK government set up a Cop26 vaccination programme to provide jabs to delegates who aren’t able to access vaccines in their home country. The first doses are expected to reach delegates in September.

There are other financial and logistical barriers to participation. Delegates travelling from countries on the UK’s “red list” will need to isolate in a quarantine hotel facility for five days if they are vaccinated and 10 if they aren’t. The UK government has offered to foot the bill.

A Covid-19 protocol is also being put in place for the conference with regular testing, masks and social distancing.

The post What is Cop26 and why does it matter? Your guide to the Glasgow climate summit appeared first on Climate Home News.

Although its wind speed fell after it made landfall near New Orleans, Ida brought intense rainfall to the New York City area and lethal flash-flooding.

Much of the city has been inundated and dramatic footage shared on social media showed water gushing down its underground train system, known as the subway.

New York’s infrastructure is completely unprepared for climate change pic.twitter.com/EZybrGdzDa

— Dr. Lucky Tran (@luckytran) September 2, 2021

As climate change heats up the oceans, much of the world is experiencing more intense storms and more frequent, heavy rainfall events.

As gravity drags water down, underground subway systems are particularly vulnerable to flooding.

New York has experienced this before, as Hurricane Sandy swamped the subway in 2012.

Across the Atlantic, this led London’s Underground to commission a report which found it was “only a matter of time” before serious flooding would strike the world’s oldest subway system.

This summer, that prediction came true as flash floods closed down nine stations on London’s subway system.

Perhaps the most shocking example of subway flooding happened a few weeks earlier when 200 millimeter of rain fell on the Chinese city of Zhengzhou in just one hour and several commuters drowned on a subway carriage.

Even when it doesn’t lead to death, flooding can cause injury, distress and damage to expensive infrastructure.

Edwar Forero-Ortiz and Eduardo Martinez-Gomariz, of the CETaqua Water Technology Centre, have researched how to stop Barcelona’s subway system flooding.

They told Climate Home News that much of the water enters subways the same way people do – through stairs and lifts.

Climate Crisis.
London is flooding.
This is Sloane Square tube station flooding after torrential rain hit the city.

HT @chunkyboyjames pic.twitter.com/EavZh5yyw4

— Daniel Moser (@_dmoser) July 14, 2021

The water can be stopped with sandbags or by permanent obstacles like raised entrances – although this can hinder disabled peoples’ access.

A Shanghai subway station with a raised entrance (top) and a Paris station without one (bottom) (Photo: Sushiya/WikiCommons)(Photo: Moonik/WikiCommonskr)

Another solution is submarine-type doors, which former New York governor Andrew Cuomo promised for stations in low-lying areas in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

Water also enters through ventilation grates, which are designed to bring fresh air from ground level to the subway. These can be raised to keep groundwater out, fitted with waterproof covers and can double as seating and bicycle parking.

As low-lying stations and sections of track are more liable to flooding, planners can build them higher up where this doesn’t conflict with other planning considerations.

A raised ventilation grate in New York. (Photo: Pi.1415926535/WikiCommons)

Drainage pumps are designed to remove water from the system. But, Andres-Forero said, when water starts flooding the network at speed, the pumps become “useless”.

Ultimately, when sudden and intense rainfall is predicted, the only thing you can do, as New York did, is evacuate people.

Forero-Ortiz told Climate Home that, so far, “metro system administrations would rather pay the cost of post-event fixes than implement measures to prevent them, presumably at a higher cost, even though the frequency of these events is increasing significantly”.

But, he said, even a small increase in rain can have a “superlative” impact on the ability of subways to cope.

Most of the research into stopping subways from flooding has been carried out in China, which is home to the largest number of subway systems in the world, Andres-Forero said.

But dozens of new underground networks are being planned, particularly in China, India and Iran, as well as in storm-prone places such as Dhaka, in Bangladesh, Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, in Vietnam, where planners have a chance to minimise the impact of flash-floods on the system.

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Nor did the firefighters foresee that the entire ground floor of the house would be flooded. They returned five hours later, at 1:30am, to tell the Ball family – the woman, her husband and elderly mother – to evacuate immediately. By then, the water had reached their doorstep.

That same night, in a care home just around the corner, 12 disabled occupants could not escape their flooded rooms in time and drowned. Heavy rainfall had turned the Ahr, a usually quiet flow that winds past Sinzig, into a torrential river that swept away cars, houses and even bridge piers.

Similar scenes played out in parts of Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands between 12 and 18 July. It is estimated that, across the region, the catastrophic floods killed over 200 people and damaged nearly 72,000 buildings at a cost of over $10 billion.

A month after the disaster, the survivors are trying to understand how they were caught off guard – and who is responsible for preventing a repeat.

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It is not that the weather forecasts were wrong, according to Jeff Da Costa, PhD researcher in environmental sciences at the University of Reading. Several days in advance, the European Flood Awareness System (EFAS) accurately predicted the severe risk of flooding and issued a notification to the German authorities.

EFAS notifications are designed for experts and only consider big rivers like the Rhine, not its tributary the Ahr. “A hydrologist knows exactly what [the models] mean to all the adjacent water ways,” said Da Costa. “But oftentimes the people who make the decisions are not experts in the field.”

At a state level, the flood alert service for Rhineland-Palatinate was slower to predict just how extreme the flooding would be in the Ahr valley. It issues warnings on a five point scale.

A spokesperson from the service told Climate Home News that the water level of the Ahr rose abruptly on 14 July. The flood forecast “jump[ed] straight from warning level two to level four”.

This happened at 11:17 am, automatically notifying the district authority of Ahrweiler, where Sinzig is located, by an app. At 5:17 pm, the notification was updated to level five, meaning a flood that statistically occurs once every 50 years, at most.

Still, “everyone thought the situation was manageable,” the spokesperson said. “The drama only came about in the evening.” Too late did it become obvious that the flooding would be far more severe.

One of many cars wrecked in the floods, at a scrapyard in North Rhine-Westphalia (All pics: Marlene Jacobsen)

The district authority of Ahrweiler is facing a lawsuit for negligent homicide as it only ordered evacuations at 11:09 pm. A press officer declined to comment, saying they did not want to “pre-empt” the ongoing investigations.

The timing of the floods made them more dangerous for two reasons, Stefan Greiving, a professor of spatial planning at the Technical University of Dortmund, explained.

Firstly, the waters rose rapidly at night when most people were asleep, at risk from collapsing buildings and not alert to any warnings. Secondly, flooding in summer is not only unusual, it had never before occurred at such a large scale in the Rhine river basin.

In the winter months, reservoir operators are legally required to leave enough space to accommodate heavy rainfall. In summer, there is no such regulation. But after a rainy few months, the reservoirs in the region were “fuller than ever before in July,” Greiving said, averaging 96% of capacity.

As a result, the reservoirs could not absorb the rainfall of 148 litres per square metre that hit northern Rhineland-Palatinate 14-15 July.

This fast food restaurant on the high street in Euskirchen, North Rhine-Westphalia, was destroyed by the flood. The line on the wall (right) shows how high the water rose.

“We were powerless against these water volumes,” said Alexander Krüger from the fire brigade in Euskirchen, another hard hit town in the neighbouring state of North Rhine-Westphalia. As the head of the crisis team he coordinated the firefighters in the aftermath of the floods, and told Climate Home that even an earlier warning would not have prepared them for an event of this scale. “We tried to pump the water away but had nowhere to pump it because there was water everywhere.”

Such heavy rainfall events are likely to become more frequent and increase the risk of flooding in high-latitude regions including northern Europe and northern Asia, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

At a global scale, river floods are projected to occur more frequently and intensely under a global warming scenario of 1.5C. Reaching 2C instead of 1.5C would have a stronger effect on heavy rainfall events, flood events and high flows in rivers, the IPCC report published this month shows.

A rapid attribution study by the World Weather Attribution group found that warming to date of 1.2C from pre-industrial levels made the extreme rainfall that triggered the floods between 1.2 and 9 times as likely to happen.

IPCC: Five takeaways from the 2021 climate science report

Flood forecasting is largely based on historical data, which is not a good guide to future events, Greiving said.

The Ahr’s previous record high water level in 2016 was 3.71 metres, in what was judged to be a 1-in-100-year event. This time it peaked at an estimated 7 metres – estimated because the measuring gauge was torn away by the torrent. “This was a once-in-a-millennium event,” Greiving said, “so, many of the affected places were not at risk according to the models.”

This helps to explain why the district of Ahrweiler ordered on the evening of 14 July that residents living 50 metres from the Ahr should leave their houses, but not the care home where 12 people died, which was more than 250 metres from the river. “The local crisis team… did not expect an event of this dimension,” said Greiving. “You cannot prepare for something that you do not consider possible.”

Stefan Pohl and Brigitte Kuchta, founders of “Meckenheim helps”, in the children’s section of the donation warehouse

The previously unimaginable has become a painful reality to those who have lost everything in the floods. What remains is solidarity. Brigitte Kuchta and Stefan Pohl, both from Meckenheim, about 20km from Sinzig, founded the relief campaign “Meckenheim helps”. Supported by around 50 volunteers, they store and sort material donations – at first in an empty office space, now in a significantly more spacious warehouse.

Multiple times a day, volunteers drive to the affected towns, some of which still do not have electricity or running water, and distribute donations ranging from shovels to toiletries. Now that the summer holidays are coming to an end, the helpers make many parents and children smile as they hand out school bags filled with everything pupils need.

The volunteering can be “emotionally exhausting,” Kuchta said, as the helpers witness a lot of grief. “Most people are still in complete shock and only just starting to process what happened,” Pohl added.

In Sinzig, the sound of hammers and drills drones through the streets. The rebuilding will come at a high price. “At the end of the day, they all need a lot of money, that is the only thing that will help,” Pohl said. The government is offering up to €3,500 ($4,129) to each affected household.

Financing recovery might be the most urgent task for the government, but they must also start preparing for the next disaster, said Lothar Schrott, a researcher and lecturer in disaster management at the University of Bonn.

Critical infrastructure and facilities with vulnerable populations, such as the care home in Sinzig, should not be rebuilt in areas at risk of flooding, he said. Risk awareness and what to do in a crisis should be taught in schools.

“We have to get used to the fact that we live in a world that is far more prone to disasters,” Schrott told Climate Home. “That means we need to be prepared for events beyond one hundred-year floods.”

This article was updated after publication with the findings of a rapid attribution study.

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The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change underscored that weather extremes will intensify and sea levels rise this century in all emissions scenarios.

Yet six years after the Paris Agreement established a global goal to help people cope with these threats, what that means in practice remains “unacceptably vague”, according to vulnerable countries. They want the next UN climate summit, Cop26, in November, to focus political attention on the issue.

South Africa is proposing a quantitative target: to increase the climate resilience of the global population 50% by 2030 and at least 90% by 2050.

“What we felt was that we needed to move beyond having technical discussions. The intention is to shift the discussion from process to a goal that we can debate,” South Africa’s environment minister Barbara Creecy told Climate Home News.

That is easier said than done. There is no universal metric to assess resilience to climate impacts, which vary widely from place to place.

Nigeria to end gas flaring by 2030, under national climate plan

For Timo Leiter, an expert on climate change adaptation who co-authors the UN Environment Programme’s Adaptation Gap report, “it’s almost impossible to come up with a simple quantitative way of measuring adaptation that would be meaningful and help guide countries”.

“If it was possible it would have been done in 2015,” he told Climate Home.

There are both technical and political challenges, Leiter explained.

Technically, to put a numerical value on the impact of an adaptation measure, you need a counterfactual scenario, which is difficult to judge. Specially bred seeds and irrigation systems might help farmers to cope with drought, but how do you know what their harvest would have been in the absence of those interventions?

Often, adaptation interventions are hard to distinguish from general development. For example, job creation and women’s empowerment make communities more resilient to a whole range of challenges, including but not exclusive to climate change. Where to draw the line has been the subject of heated debate on the UN’s Green Climate Fund board.

Politically, the choice of indicators can make a country look more or less vulnerable. That matters when they are competing for a limited pool of climate aid.

In a 2009 article, Richard Klein, of the Stockholm Environment Institute, concluded that comparing climate impacts “requires a subjective judgement as to which outcomes are ‘better’ or ‘worse’” and is therefore a political question. The issue has spurred competition between nations seeking to obtain “special circumstances” status within UN climate process.

In 2018, nations agreed that the submission of adaptation communications to the UN was “not a basis for comparisons between parties”.

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“To assume that everyone would be able to quantitatively measure adaptation is not helpful,” Ephraim Mwepya Shitima, a climate adaptation expert from Zambia, told Climate Home. But that doesn’t mean that some quantitative elements can’t be used when assessing progress, he said.

Where data and metrics are available, such as targets for the diversification of crops or the installation of early warning systems, quantitative indicators could be used alongside qualitative ones.

In its improved 2030 climate plan, Zambia identified four indicators that the country will use to track progress, with ratings from “low” to “high”.

These are the level of resilience of ecosystems, the adaptive capacity of human systems, the level of knowledge for adaptation planning and the level of resources to respond to climate impacts.

Behind each of them, Shitima said a lot of work had been done to translate what this might mean for different sectors, from agriculture to forestry.

More than defining a specific goal, “what is key is that countries are able to assess progress in increasing resilience,” he said.

As negotiators are to discuss the issue in Glasgow, Shitima said countries need to adopt a flexible approach to measuring adaptation that includes a range of methodologies.

“It’s dangerous in my view if the focus is on adopting a single approach… because that will be untenable.”

While it might be “too ambitious” to expect a framework for measuring adaptation to be fully agreed at Cop26, moving the discussion from concepts to methodologies would be good, Shitima said.

Sri Lanka rules out new coal power, promotes rooftop solar

South Africa is calling for a focus on health and well-being, food and water security, infrastructure and ecosystem services, particularly in Africa, small island states and least developed countries – which speak to globally agreed 2030 sustainable development goals which countries are already working to implement.

“It’s not like these goals are not already part of the multilateral system. Let’s draw on what we already have,” minister Creecy said.

The 2021 edition of the Adaptation Gap Report, due to be published during the first week of the summit, will help to advance the agenda. But Creecy is in no doubt hurdles remain.

“As South Africa, we don’t feel that these are going to be easy issues to solve,” she said. But Cop26 offers “a window of opportunity” to advance the discussion that should be seized.

“And where we can play a role that we have traditionally played in creating a bridge between developed and developing countries, we will play that role,” she said.

The post Developing nations push to define ‘unacceptably vague’ adaptation goal appeared first on Climate Home News.

The East African nation country has more livestock than anywhere else in Africa. The sector, dominated by cattle, accounts for 48% of national greenhouse gas emissions, according to its improved climate plan submitted to the UN this week. 

The government has identified agriculture as a priority sector to help create rural employment opportunities, boost exports and help achieve economic growth of 10% a year over the next decade.

Urbanisation and a growing population is expected to increase demand for meat, which risks driving up methane emissions, Fekadu Beyene Aleka, commissioner for the environment, forest and climate change commission of Ethiopia, told Climate Home News.

Cattle belch methane, which has a stronger warming effect than carbon dioxide. To limit methane emissions, the government wants to increase the share of poultry, fish, and small ruminants. Under its updated climate plan, Ethiopia said it wants to replace non-dairy cattle with chickens, sheep and goats.

By 2030, the government wants to increase the amount of commercial chickens sold from 33,000 tons to nearly 81,000 tons and produce nearly five times more sheep and six times more goats.

The plan includes replacing cattle and oxen used as working animals with tractors and improving the health and productivity of cattle to produce more diary and meat per animal.

The measures are projected to reduce emissions by 7.6% compared with business as usual by 2030 – subject to international finance.

South Africa proposes global goal for adaptation at pre-Cop26 ministerial

Ethiopia said it would cut emissions nearly 69% below business as usual in the next nine years, conditional on 80% of the $316 billion price tag coming from international sources.

Ethiopia contributes just 0.04% to global emissions and has 1.5% of the global population.

With national resources alone, Ethiopia pledged to cut emissions 14% below business as usual by 2030 – which would see emissions increase slightly compared to 2010. The calculations are based on a revised 2010 baseline, which reflects updated economic and emissions data.

After livestock, the land-use and forestry sector is the second largest source of emissions in Ethiopia and provides the largest potential for emissions reductions. 

By restoring 5 million hectares of forests and reforesting 3 million hectares of land by 2030, the government hopes to turn the sector from a source of emissions into a carbon sink – reducing the sector’s emissions by 171% compared with business as usual projections for 2030. 

The plan was developed on the country’s 10-year development plan finalised in 2020 and its Climate Resilience and Green Economy Strategy.

Drought and water mismanagement spark deadly protests in Iran

Commissioner Beyene told Climate Home the document “isn’t just a political statement, it’s a technically sound plan”.

With nearly 80% of the population living in rural areas as smallholder farmers, livestock is mainly used a means of livelihood in Ethiopia. Cattle and beef are exported to neighbouring countries, bringing cash income to farmers and pastoralists for whom keeping live animals is also a sign of social prestige, Beyene said.

“It’s also about shifting the culture from keeping large animals to small animals,” he said, adding that implementing the measure will require engagement with communities, adequate market infrastructure for farmers and incentives that will be piloted on small-scale projects.

“People don’t want to move away from the status quo unless there is a proven opportunity,” he said.

Cynthia Elliott, of the Global Climate Programme at the World Resources Institute, which supported a consortium of consultants to help the government update its climate plan, told Climate Home that given Ethiopia’s limited resources, the government has shown “tremendous ambition”.

She described measures to shift from beef to poultry as “still a bit exploratory”, with the details to be worked out.

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For Simon Addison, of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), promoting the diversification of the livestock sector may do more to help the country adapt to climate impacts than cut emissions.

“If you are looking at this as a measure to increase production and market value of the livestock sector and increase its resilience by diversifying the animal mix, this offers quite a reasonable strategy,” he said. “I am not sure it’s such a good way to deal with the mitigation side as it massively increases the scale of the livestock sector.”

Sheep and goats, which browse on bushes and shrubs, are relatively resilient to the droughts that are becoming more frequent in the Horn of Africa because of climate change. Cattle need more water and access to green pasture.

Pastoralists affected by drought or conflict that have lost their livestock or access to grasslands are increasingly looking to poultry as an alternative livelihood. “Poultry can be a good option for those who are no longer mobile,” Addison said.” It is possible to produce quite intensively, with little capital and it has a high market value.”

Although there already is a significant shift towards diversifying livestock among pastoralists, the measure could be seen as a top-down “imposition of maladaptive measures” from the government onto communities that want to continue mobile beef production, Addison warned. This could have “serious implications for cultural norms, social capital and social dynamics among mobile pastoralists,” he said.

Through holistic rangeland management, mobile pastoralism can also help sequester carbon in the soil and improve rangeland health, he added.

G20 climate and energy ministers split over coal exit

And the share of agriculture in the GDP is predicted to fall by nearly half between 2011 and 2030, while construction and services are expected to drive economic growth, with urbanisation and industry increasing emissions.

Carley Reynolds, a climate and energy analyst at Climate Analytics, told Climate Home energy emissions are low in Ethiopia with more than 95% of power generated from renewables, overwhelmingly hydropower. “The challenge will be to keep its power system clean… and avoid investing in fossil fuels” as electricity access increases, she said.

Under the plan, Ethiopia aims for 100% of households that aren’t connected to the grid to use off-grid renewable electricity for lighting by 2030 – up from 40% currently.

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Environment minister Barbara Creecy told a ministerial meeting designed to make progress on key issues ahead of the Cop26 climate talks that countries should agree on a quantifiable increase of vulnerable communities’ ability to adapt to extreme weather events, flooding, droughts and sea level rise.

Creecy said focus should be put on increasing health benefits, food and water security and adapting infrastructure to anticipated climate impacts particularly in Africa, small island developing states and least developed countries.

Scaling up adaptation was one of five themes discussed during the two-day summit at London’s Park Plaza hotel, which gathered 51 ministers from a representative group of countries.

Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Cop26 president designate Alok Sharma said countries agreed on the need for Cop26 to” accelerate progress on the global goal on adaptation”.

While there were no breakthroughs on the most contentious issues ahead of the Glasgow summit, Sharma described the talks as “positive” and “hugely refreshing” to meet in-person after more than 18 months of virtual discussions.

G20 climate and energy ministers split over coal exit

Under the Paris Agreement, countries agreed to establish a global goal on adaptation to enhance nations’ adaptative capacity, strengthen resilience and reduce vulnerability to climate change.

But the accord stopped short of setting out what the goal should look like and how progress should be assessed.

While there are well established methods for monitoring emissions and efforts to limit global temperature rise, finding a common metric for various ways of adapting to regional climate impacts is challenging.

In a letter to all countries earlier this month, Sharma said Cop26 needed to start a work programme to define the objective and the indicators against which progress should be assessed.

Nearly 100 developing countries, including South Africa, have previously described progress towards defining and implementing the goal as “glacial” since the 2015 climate accord was signed.

“Cop26 needs to deliver a substantial acceleration,” they said in a five-point-plan setting out benchmarks for success at Cop26.

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Zaheer Fakir, a climate negotiator and chief policy advisor in South Africa’s environment minister, told Climate Home News that it was important to reflect the priorities of developing countries.

“South Africa is of the view that limited progress in elaborating granular details on adaptation undermines the political balance achieved in Paris, as well as the intent of achieving parity between mitigation and adaptation,” he said.

Creecy also floated a number for the next collective climate finance goal, suggesting $750 billion should be mobilised annually by 2030. Talks on the issue are due to start in earnest in Glasgow on how to go beyond an overdue $100bn target.

In a proposal ahead of the meeting, nearly 100 developing countries said rich nations should supply at least $100bn a year of public finance from 2025, to be supplemented from other sources.

Neither idea got much reaction from the states that would be expected to deliver.

But UN Climate Change head Patricia Espinosa said the tone of the conversation on finance was shifting.

“I think we are entering into a very serious and deeper conversation regarding climate finance ,” she said.

Indonesia to burn coal well into the 2050s, under updated climate plan

Espinosa said discussions across the two-day meeting had been “unusual” in that ministers were “really engaging with each other in a conversation” rather than merely reiterating entrenched positions. Potential landing zones and compromises emerged, she added, “but the homework is not yet done”.

To make progress in the next three months, the UK has mandated a small group of countries to advance discussions on specific topics.

Canada’s Jonathan Wilkinson and Germany’s Jochen Flasbarth have been tasked to deliver a roadmap for how donor countries will meet and exceed the $100bn milestone for climate finance.

Rwanda and Switzerland will hold informal ministerial discussion towards an agreement on aligning countries’ climate plans to cover a period of 5 or 10 years while Singapore and Norway will seek common ground on carbon markets.

Comment: Europe’s floods hit my childhood home, sweeping away my parents’ sense of safety

Meanwhile, the UK will continue its work to keep the 1.5C temperature goal within reach, pursuing a contentious global agreement to exit coal.

Sharma said he was “very disappointed” that the G20 failed to sign up to that agenda last week.

“Unless we are going to get all countries signed up to an unabated coal phase out, keeping 1.5C within reach is going to be extremely difficult,” he said. The UK will continue to discuss the issue with G20 nations to “see how we can try and get this over the line over the coming months”.

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I drove from my house in Luxembourg City to my hometown on the only road that was still passable – and even that didn’t stay that way for long. The streets were empty and I passed no one. My parents had already called the fire service for help, but they were advised that they could not come in the next few hours.

I arrived to find the lower level of my childhood home submerged. There we were, together as a family, holding torches, knee deep in the water, trying to get as much of it out, one bucket at a time.

My parent’s experiences will largely be counted in material loss. But water damage does not capture what they and many others went through that night. During the pandemic, people have related differently to their homes. Declared a place of refuge from the invisible threat of the virus, home is supposed to be one place you can feel safe. This is especially true for the most vulnerable and the elderly. I was heartbroken to see my parents’ sense of safety swept away in a matter of minutes.

The author’s parents house (Jeff Da Costa)

In my PhD research, I study how we can effectively adapt to the consequences of increasing severe weather events under climate change and what can be done to prepare for them and mitigate their impact. One area I’m interested in is early warning systems, or the lack thereof, during extreme weather events, such as the recent floods in western Europe.

While the climate is certainly a complex system that is difficult to predict with any certainty, the unfolding catastrophe is a sad reminder of just how inadequate early warning systems can be.

The European Flood Awareness System (EFAS) issued a flood notification at the beginning of the week, announcing that there would be extreme rainfall and the risk of floods mid-week in the most severely hit regions (western Germany, Luxembourg, eastern Belgium and southern Netherlands).

This information was passed to a variety of national authorities, which can differ depending on the member countries. In Luxembourg it’s the fire and rescue service. These bodies are in charge of transmitting the message to relevant local authorities.

The author’s hometown (RSS Hydro/Jeff Da Costa)

It is within each country’s laws and regulations to determine which authority has the power to issue warnings to their citizens.

This delegation of responsibility meant that the southern Dutch province of Limburg issued evacuation warnings on the Wednesday afternoon, well before the flood hit the region, while in neighbouring Germany, the state of Rhineland-palatinate only started evacuating people when it was too late.

Evacuating people when they are already knee deep in water is not a successful way to mitigate against disaster and it does not bode well for the ability of countries to adapt to these events in future. Early warning systems cannot be successful if used in this manner.

EFAS did send out early notifications, sometimes in addition to information from national services. But the bodies receiving this information were specific to each country. As a result, the responsibility of implementing any actions on the ground based on a flood warning is taken at a political level.

Red flood alert still in place over Luxembourg https://t.co/7FVAmHsk2s pic.twitter.com/508rMuMZ35

— Luxembourg Times (@LuxTimes) July 16, 2021

So why are there no coordinated warning systems in place for all affected areas, regardless of borders and local government? The system is fundamentally flawed. While the EFAS is highly effective in detecting threats, the different ways countries delegate responsibility for warning their citizens creates a gridlock along the chain of transmission. Ordinary people pay the price, sometimes with their lives.

There are systems in place to protect us. Weather models have high enough resolution to warn us, often in enough time. But somewhere along that line from meteorologists to the public, there is a gap. That is where I will be focusing my attention in my research. After all, if we cannot manage the present, what does that say about our plans for the future?

This article was originally published by The Conversation. Jeff Da Costa is a PhD researcher in Environmental Science at the University of Reading.

The post Europe’s floods hit my childhood home, sweeping away my parents’ sense of safety appeared first on Climate Home News.

The extraordinary heat that engulfed the north west of Canada and the US last week broke temperature records by several degrees, with temperatures settling above 40C for days and reaching 49.6C in the village of Lytton, Canada.

Shortly after, Lytton was destroyed in wildfires. In Western Canada, nearly 500 people are estimated to have died and experts expect the death toll to rise.

Without the influence of human-caused climate change, the heatwave would have been “virtually impossible”, according to a rapid attribution analysis by an international team of 27 leading climate scientists that worked around the clock to publish the study.

Climate change, they found, made the heatwave at least 150 times more likely to happen – with such extreme heat not occurring under current statistical analysis.

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The findings have prompted scientists to question their understanding of climate change’ impact on heatwaves, which could lead to some climate models having to be revised.

Friederike Otto, of the Environmental Change Institute in Oxford University, one of the study’s author, said climate science had been “a bit complacent” on how it understands heatwaves.

The intensity of heatwaves is increasing in orders of magnitude not seen for other extreme events, she said. “Heatwaves is how climate change kills us. It’s how climate change manifests itself more strongly.”

Using observations and computer stimulation, scientists compared the past climate in the area covering Portland, Seattle and Vancouver with current trends after global warming of around 1.2C since the late 19^th century.

They found that temperatures during last week’s event were so extreme that it was difficult to estimate with confidence how rare the event was but suggested it equated to a once in a thousand year event in today’s climate.

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Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological, another of the authors, told reporters the heatwave shattered previous temperature records by up to 5C – “an extraordinary event”.

“As comparison, here in the Netherlands we were really shocked when the previous record was broken by 1.8C and this is more than double that.”

The heatwave, Van Oldenborgh said, is “both a major disaster and weather event but also a major scientific challenge to understand what happened”.

He said the state of climate science in 2020 would have shown the heatwave to be “basically impossible” and more research was needed to understand how it came about and whether such an event could happen in other parts of the world.

“It’s rather shaking that our theoretical picture of how heatwaves behave was broken so roughly,” he said. “We are much less certain about how climate [change] affects heatwaves than we were two weeks ago.”

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The authors of the paper identified two possible explanations for the extreme jump in peak temperatures observed in North America.

The first is “really bad luck” and that, albeit exaggerated by climate change, this remains a very low probability event. However, in a future world with 2C of global heating, such an extreme heatwave could happen once every 5 to 10 years, the study found.

An alternative explanation is that the climate system in that area has crossed a threshold that increased the probability of such extreme heat far beyond the gradual hike in temperatures peaks that have been observed so far.

Under this scenario, record-breaking heatwaves like last week’s event are already more likely to happen than climate models predict – something which the team of scientists say requires further investigation.

“This is such an exceptional event that we can’t rule out the possibility that we’re experiencing heat extremes today that we only expected to come at higher levels of global warming,” said Otto.

If this second scenario proved to be correct, it may lead to the revision of climate models.

If an essential climate process is missing from the current climate models, these will “definitely have to be improved,” said Van Oldenborgh.

The post North American heatwave broke records – and the climate models appeared first on Climate Home News.

Tensions rose during the online board meeting of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) after only one out of three adaptation projects submitted to the fund’s secretariat was presented to the board for approval.

Two adaptation projects and one project with both adaptation and emissions-cutting elements didn’t make it pass the fund’s technical advisory panel.

The independent body said it wasn’t clear if the projects were focused on climate adaptation, as opposed to general development, and historical data was lacking.  

One of the rejected projects was to “build resilience to hydro-meterological hazards” in Timor Leste, with a large share of funding earmarked for fire trucks. The technical panel deemed the project’s climate impact to be “weak”. While drought and heat can drive wildfire risk, slash and burn techniques to clear land were seen as the dominant cause of fires.

The result was that the board only had four bids to consider, instead of seven, and the balance tilted towards mitigation. All four worth $501 million were approved. In grant equivalent terms, just 18% went to support communities coping with erratic weather and sea level rise.

“It is no longer acceptable to come to the board and be presented with such a deeply imbalanced portfolio,” said Richard Muyungi, of Tanzania, representing African nations.

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Victor Viñas, of the Dominican Republic, told the meeting the technical body alone shouldn’t have the power to veto adaptation projects.

“This is unfair to least developed countries,” shouted Jeremiah Sokan, of Liberia.  “You are not putting money in the GCF to deprive vulnerable countries. And let people die because they don’t have the data. That’s not what we are for!”

In a fiery exchange, Sokan accused the chair of the technical panel Daniel Nolasco of considering himself “a demi-God” for denying these projects — remarks for which he later apologised.

Sokan added that requesting low-income countries, with low institutional capacity, to provide 30 years of climate impact data was “automatically impeding countries to access funding”.

Nolasco insisted national circumstances were taken into account when judging the projects and called for policy guidance from the board.

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Board members from developing countries said rules that prevent projects that haven’t been endorsed by the technical panel to reach the board should be temporarily suspended until more robust guidance could be provided to the panel. Members from richer nations opposed the idea, pushing the debate to the next meeting.

The GCF has committed to split its funding 50/50 between adaptation and mitigation projects, in grant equivalent terms – which it is on track for. But in nominal terms, 66% of funding has so far been allocated to mitigation projects, against 34% for adaptation.

While donors face calls from recipient countries to close the adaptation finance gap, the climate credibility of such initiatives is under scrutiny. Many have been accused of inflating adaptation funding figures by counting spending on earthquake resilience, for example.

In a statement following the meeting, GCF executive director Yannick Glemarec promised to “step up our efforts to prioritise adaptation projects for our next board meeting”.

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After repeated delays and wrangling over procedural issues, the board agreed to partner with the fossil-fuel backing Japanese bank Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group (SMBC).

SMBC was accredited by the fund after the bank announced in May that it will no longer finance newly planned coal-fired power plants and the expansion of existing plants.  

But campaigners say the bank’s new policy is “misleading” and includes loopholes that could see support for coal projects that use “clean coal technologies” and the co-firing of coal with biomass, with carbon capture and storage for example.

And the bank has no plans to phase out support for oil and gas. SMBC is involved in oil and gas pipelines in the US, Canada, Uganda, Mozambique and the Balkans.

More than 450 organisations signed a petition urging the board to reject the bank’s bid.

Lidy Nacpil, of the Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD), described the accreditation decision as “a big letdown for people and climate”.  

“SMBC is among the world’s biggest fossil fuel financiers. It will now have access to climate finance, which are public funds intended to support developing countries most vulnerable to climate change. These are countries devastated by fossil fuel projects supported by this dirty company,” she said.

The post Row erupts at Green Climate Fund over who defines climate adaptation appeared first on Climate Home News.

The World Food Programme (WFP) and the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) are pleading for help from the international community, warning that 14,000 people are facing famine and that “lives are at stake as hunger tightens its grip” in the region.

For the first time since a methodology to rank food security threats was introduced in 2016, people have been recorded in the “catastrophe” category – the highest level of the five-step scale describing people who have exhausted their coping strategies.

In the space of a few months, the situation has worsened “in an exponential manner,” Theodore Mbainaissem, head of WFP’s Ambovombe office, in southern Madagascar, told Climate Home News. The future looks “even more catastrophic,” he added.

Swathes of the population on the island’s most southern areas have resorted to eating insects, wild roots, and a mixture of white clay with tamarind juice, he said.

“These are foods that are not at all nutritious but people are eating them just to fill them up and not die of hunger,” Mbainaissem said.

The crisis is hitting children hardest, who are not getting the necessary nutrients to develop properly. In some villages, dozens of deaths have been recorded, Mbainaissem added.

Children eat food distributed by the World Food Programme in the village of Sihanamaro, Androy region, southern Madagascar (Photo: WFP/Krystyna Kovalenko)

Five of the last six years have seen below average rainfall in the southern tip of the country. The severity of the current drought has not been seen since 1981 and has been building over the last three years.

This year’s harvest of crops such as rice, maize, cassava and pulses is expected to be less than half the five-year average, according to the WFP and FAO.

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Climate change is expected to increase the frequency of extreme weather events in Madagascar, such as droughts in the southwest and cyclones in the south east of the country.

Projections show the south of the country is most vulnerable to rising temperatures, reduced rainfall in the dry season and increased variability in the distribution of rainfall – a combination that adds to food security challenges.

Dried out rice fields in the Anosy region of southern Madagascar (Photo: Daniel Wood/SEED Madagascar)

In the district of Amboasary Atsimo, where three quarters of the population are lacking food, 27% of people suffer from acute malnutrition – “alarming” levels that are already causing “irreversible damage to children” the WFP and FAO have said.

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification expects the number of people in the “catastrophe” category to double during the lean season between October and December, when food stocks are usually low. The number of people experiencing acute food security could reach nearly half of the Grand South region of Madagascar’s 2.7 million people.

“We are going to have to multiply our plea for help so that the international community turns its attention to what is happening in the south of Madagascar because we have the impression that this crisis has been forgotten,” Mbainaissem said.

A member of the World Food Programme helps a malnourished woman eat emergency food in Sihanamaro, Androy region, southern Madagascar (Photo: WFP/Krystyna Kovalenko)

Madagascar has among the highest poverty rates in the world and ranked as the fourth most vulnerable nation to climate impacts in the 2020 Global Climate Risk Index.

Around 80% of its 28 million people live in rural areas. Most people in the south of the country depend on rain-fed, small-scale agriculture to survive.

In the past year, streams, rivers and small dams built for irrigation have dried up. Those who were able to plant cassava and potatoes are digging them up early, desperate for food or an income as prices on the market soar. In some areas, locust invasion has destroyed fields of maize.

A dried up river in Ambandrika village, southern Madagascar (Photo: Daniel Wood/ SEED Madagascar)

Years of deforestation and soil erosion have sped up the desertification of land which once produced food. Earlier this year, unprecedented sandstorms swept across large areas of agricultural land, covering fields in sand and stopping seeds from growing – a phenomenon that affected much smaller areas in the past.

Drier soils and higher temperatures caused by climate change, coupled with deforestation, could have contributed to the event, experts say.

Women collecting food in southern Madagascar (Photo: Patrick Razafindrainibe/SEED Madagascar)

Since October, the government and the WFP have distributed food, largely rice, pulses and vegetable oil, to around 750,000 people as well as therapeutic food to address malnutrition in children and pregnant women.

But Mbainaissem said the resources of UN agencies did not meet the growing demand for assistance at a time when the delivery of humanitarian aid is being delayed by Covid-19 restrictions and the halt of all flights into the country.

The WFP has called on the international community to mobilise $74 million to avert a disaster over the next six months.

“We are between the devil and the deep blue sea now,” said Sylvestre Mbola, of the development charity Seed Madagascar, which is raising funds to distribute food in rural villages in the Anosy region.

“People in other places only have one enemy which is just Covid-19 while here in Anosy, we have both Covid-19 and famine as enemies,” he said.

Lisa Bass, director of programmes and operations at Seed Madagascar, told Climate Home the international community had long overlooked Madagascar’s development challenges, making it much harder to secure funds from donors in time of crisis.

More resources are needed to allow the government and donors to articulate “a long-term strategy across the whole of south [of the country] that really targets climate adaptation and supports communities”, she said, rather than focusing on short-term projects.

An empty market in southern Madagascar (Photo: Tsiraiky Rossizela/SEED Madagascar)

For the FAO, adaptation means developing more climate-resilient agricultural livelihoods. Together with the Malagasy government, the FAO has supported around 20,000 farming families in the region by providing fast-growing vegetable seed packs and training in drought-resilient farming strategies.

“Agroecology is key,” Andriamparany Ranoasy, director of the national farmers’ confederation Fifata, told Climate Home.

Identifying areas where irrigation could be developed, rolling out nutritious and drought-tolerant crops such as sorghum and some varieties of sweet potato, and reforesting areas to increase water retention in soils will be necessary to improve resilience, he said.

But even measures like these might not be enough to compensate for insufficient yields across the region, Ranoasy warned. “If the drought continues in the next few years, we will be forced to transfer some population away from the worst affected areas.”

In recent months, thousands of people have left their rural communities and migrated to towns, looking for work and food. “That is very concerning. Those arriving in cities are already very weak and if there is no work, it risks sparking insecurity,” Ranoasy said.

Instead, he believes the government should start identifying areas where people from the south could resettled and cultivate the land. “We should have a managed migration and a real politic of access to agricultural land.”

The post Southern Madagascar at risk of famine amid worst drought in 40 years appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Tomorrow’s Cities programme, which aims to reduce the disaster risk for vulnerable communities around the world, has had its budget cut by 70% this fiscal year from £4.8m ($6.7m) to £1.4m ($2m). The UK has slashed its overseas development assistance from 0.7% to 0.5% of its national income. 

Marina Apgar, the programme’s impact lead said they would have to scale down projects in Nairobi and Kathmandu and stop much of their work in Quito and Istanbul: “Cancelling planned collaborations across the world will damage the UK’s reputation,” she said.

For the intended beneficiaries, Apgar said, “the cut to programme funding means that their exposure to risk will remain high, opportunities of co-produced research to build community resilience will be lost. In some cases, this could potentially result in direct harm to properties, livelihoods and potentially even death.”

The programme’s Nairobi lead Joanes Atela told Climate Home News: “These cuts expose the urban poor to more disaster risks, directly harm the life chances of the most vulnerable today, and could potentially erode partnerships gained by the UK over the last few years.”

Tomorrow’s Cities is a research hub which runs projects in these four cities in collaboration with local researchers and scientists. More than two billion people living in cities worldwide face disaster threats, according to Tomorrow’s Cities.

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The five-year programme is backed by the UK Research and Innovation agency (UKRI), which recently announced that it faces a £120 million ($167m) gap between its planned spending and the money it has been given for this financial year. 

Researchers leading the projects in Nairobi and Kathmandu told Climate Home News that the cuts are reversing their efforts to build safer, more resilient cities during the coronavirus pandemic, and have eroded trust in the UK as a partner.

The Tomorrow’s Cities team in Nairobi is working with local authorities and the British Red Cross to help people living in informal settlements prepare and recover from disasters such as flooding.

Over two million people live in informal settlements in Kenya’s capital. These settlements are extremely vulnerable to flooding, fires and other hazards, said Atela.

In Nepal’s capital Kathmandu, scientists from Tomorrow’s Cities were researching how to make slums more resilient to flooding, working closely with local communities and the government. 

Nepal’s carbon emissions per capita are among the lowest in the world, but the country is highly vulnerable to natural disasters and the impacts of climate change. Between 1980 and 2017, natural disasters such as floods, landslides and earthquakes, caused 21,000 deaths, impacted the livelihoods of 13 million people, and resulted in losses of $5.9 billion. 

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Kathmandu’s slums are regularly flooded due to poor drainage systems and close proximity to the river banks, the city’s lead Dharam Uprety told Climate Home News.

Collaboration with UK universities has ceased as a result of the cuts and engagement with local communities has stopped, he said.  Without proper research to back up policy recommendations, local authorities are unlikely to adopt more resilient measures. “This all risks being lost,” he said.

In a press briefing ahead of next week’s Petersberg Dialogue, Greenpeace International director Jennifer Morgan said she hoped the UK would “come forward with something which demonstrates that they’re not going to be cutting their overseas development assistance but actually be increasing it”.

When the government announced its plan to slash foreign aid, environmental groups warned in an open letter that the cuts would worsen the climate crisis and undermine a core aim of Cop26: increasing support to vulnerable countries.

Last month, leaked documents from the UK’s foreign and development office obtained by openDemocracy revealed that cuts were planned across some of the world’s most climate vulnerable nations, including South Sudan and Somalia. 

This week WaterAid criticised the government for slashing funding for overseas water and sanitation projects during the pandemic. According to a leaked memo obtained by Sky, funding for these programmes will be cut by 80% this year. 

The charity’s CEO Tim Wainwright described the cuts as “savage” and said water and sanitation provide “the first line of defence against the twin threats of Covid-19 and the impacts of climate change.”

The post UK aid cuts hit developing cities’ plans to protect against floods and fires appeared first on Climate Home News.

Campaigners warn Indonesia’s vulnerability to climate change is increasing and a government rollback of environmental regulations is worsening the situation.

Cyclone Seroja made landfall on 5 April, bringing torrential rain and triggering cold lava floods – flows of volcanic debris – in East Nusa Tenggara province, east Indonesia. More than 22,000 people have been displaced and at least 2,000 homes have been damaged.

On Friday, BMKG head Dwikorita Karnawati warned that a second cyclone, named Odette, could hit the islands of Sumatra and Bali this week.

“People are advised to remain cautious of heavy winds and rains that could happen in some areas and be mindful of threats of floods, landslides and flash floods,” Karnawati said.

Seroja is the strongest tropical cyclone to have hit Indonesian land since 2008, according to the country’s meteorological and climate agency BMKG.

The tropical storm is the latest natural disaster to strike the country, which has been battered by a high number of floods and landslide events since the start of the year. In January alone, 197 flood disasters were recorded, according to the National Disaster Mitigation Agency.

In a press conference reported by the Jakarta Post, Karnawati warned Indonesia should prepare for more intense cyclones as climate change pushed the average sea temperature around the country from 26C to 30C in recent years.

“It is something we need to realise together that global warming must be mitigated. Otherwise, these tropical cyclones will become a regular occurrence,” she said.

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Survivors displaced by the cyclone have been moved to crowded rescue shelters where there is a high risk of Covid-19 transmission. 

Indonesia’s disaster agency chief Doni Monardo said families were receiving 500,000 rupiah ($35) so they are able to rent accommodation rather than stay in the evacuation shelters.  “We must avoid crowds inside the tents,” he said.

Fransisca Fitri, country director of YAPPIKA-ActionAid, which has been delivering aid on the ground, said climate change was making the disasters more frequent and severe. 

“Forest and land fires, floods and landslides, are devastating agricultural land and changing habitats, water quality and quantity, and coastal ecosystems,” Fitri told Climate Home News. 

Residents are fleeing to refugee camp after flash flooding destroyed their villages in East Nusa Tenggara province, Indonesia. (Photo: Bengkel APPek)

And these impacts, which directly threaten vulnerable communities, risk being worsened by a government roll back of environmental protection, campaigners say.

In November, the government passed a law on job creation that weakened environmental regulations in favour of business development.

The legislation removed an article in Indonesia’s forestry law mandating that at least 30% of each island and areas of land that drain rain waters into streams and rivers should be maintained as forest. The law also makes it easier for mining companies to operate within forest areas as they are no longer required to obtain official permits. 

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Environmentalists opposed the law on the grounds that it could lead to a rise in deforestation and promotes mining. Forest clearance can intensify flooding as it dislodges the soil and increases the area of surface run-off, they warned.

“High rates of deforestation are exacerbating flash floods and landslides. Between 2018-2020, we lost an area of forest almost as large as the capital Jakarta,” Fitri told Climate Home News in an email.

“Where ActionAid is responding to Cyclone Seroja in Lembata, flooding was worsened because natural forest defences have been cut down to make way for a tourist route to Ile Ape Volcano.” 

Fitri said the government’s decision to prioritise investment in mining “will have a huge impact on forest communities, especially indigenous people, and their access to natural resources, and increase Indonesia’s vulnerability to climate disasters”.

After the legislation was passed, a group of 36 global investors, with a combined $4.1 trillion in assets, wrote a letter to the Indonesian government expressing concerns the new law would damage the environment. 

Situation after storm cyclone seroja last night

Pray for sumba island pic.twitter.com/YXCf1kYZQy

— 4M4TEUR (@ub_x4be) April 6, 2021

“This law has weakened environmental safeguards. [It] prioritises economic growth over the environment,” Adila Isfandiari, climate and energy researcher at Greenpeace Indonesia, told Climate Home News. 

Isfandiari said the law along with the increase in extreme weather events “will become a burden for building climate resilience and adaptation”. 

“If we do not have any resilience, this will severely impact the Indonesian economy, as we will bear a significant number of financial losses due to climate disaster,” she said.

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Indonesia is the world’s fifth-largest greenhouse gas emitter. Deforestation for palm oil production and peatland wildfires are major contributors to its emissions. 

Climate Action Tracker ranks Indonesia’s climate plan as “highly insufficient.” Indonesia plans to install 27 GW of coal power by 2028 and is one of only five countries in the world that constructed new coal plants last year. 

Since the start of the pandemic, the government has spent around $6.78 billion on supporting fossil fuels and just $240 million on clean energy, according to the Energy Policy Tracker. 

Indonesia is not expected to increase its 2030 emissions cuts ahead of the Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow, UK, in November, Isfandiari said. 

A draft plan circulated earlier this year shows the government intends to maintain the current goal of reducing emissions by 29% below a business-as-usual baseline by 2030. 

UK foreign minister Dominic Raab met with president Joko Widodo this week. The statement following the meeting promised climate cooperation but did not specify whether Indonesia would strengthen its target. Widodo is among 40 world leaders invited to attend US president Joe Biden’s climate summit on 22 April. 

“The increasing climate disasters are a clear message to the government that we need a more serious and ambitious commitment,” said Isfandiari.

The post Cyclone Seroja kills 160 people, exposes Indonesia’s climate vulnerability appeared first on Climate Home News.