If the ‘global goal on adaptation’ (GGA) document is adopted at the Dubai climate summit (CO), more than 195 countries will have to undertake risk and vulnerability assessment of climate hazards, and formulate their specific national adaptation plans by 2025.
They will also have to establish multi-hazard early warning systems and climate information services for risk reduction by 2027. Its adoption, however, depends on consensus of all countries as adaptation action will need a huge amount of money.
Though India has already been taking several adaptation measures as part of its national plan on climate change, the country would need INR 57 lakh crore for adaptation alone in a “business as usual” scenario till 2030 over the 2023-24 base year. The country’s climate action is, currently, largely financed by domestic resources as climate finance flows from developed countries are falling far short of what is needed to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
The draft on GGA speaks about scaling up finance mobilisation by developed countries to help developing ones in their adaptation efforts but the overall finance provisions appear to be quite weak in terms of scale and scope. It merely urged developed countries to “at least double their collective provision of climate finance for adaptation” to developing countries by 2025 from 2019 levels, for achieving a balance between mitigation and adaptation.
The draft on GGA, released under Article 7 of the overarching Paris Agreement, came hours before the negotiators moved to ‘majlis’ (gathering for informal discussions) to thrash out their differences on the draft text on global stocktake (GST) – the other deliverable at CO. Building consensus over the language used for phase out of fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal) is the biggest task of the ‘majlis’ before the presidency comes out with a final text.
CO president Sultan Al Jaber, meanwhile, repeatedly called on all countries to build consensus on the language on fossil fuels for the final outcome text.
“Now, time has come for all parties to constructively engage and to come to me with that language. I want everyone to show flexibility to act with urgency and to find common ground,” said Al Jaber while responding to a question in a press conference.
