New Delhi: The world is gearing up for climate resilience without the money to get there. The latest Adaptation Gap Report by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)  opens with dispiriting news ahead of the COP30 in Brazil.

Wealthy countries have failed to meet their promised targets to help poorer nations prepare for worsening climate calamities, the UN report, titled 'Running on Empty', warns. This makes countries in the Global South – including India – vulnerable to dangers triggered by climate change without the financial support to fight it.

"Climate impacts are accelerating. Yet adaptation finance is not keeping pace, leaving the world's most vulnerable exposed to rising seas, deadly storms, and searing heat," UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in his message on the report.

"Adaptation is not a cost – it is a lifeline," he added.

The report finds that adaptation finance needs of developing countries by 2035 are at least 12 times as much as current international public adaptation finance flows.

Adaptation, gap, and an adaptation gap report

A term that is frequently used – also recently by India's environment minister Bhupendra Yadav – adaptation is the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate effects, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Adaptation seeks to either fully avoid or moderate the effects of climate harm. It can involve the building of a river embankment or research into a particular variety of drought-resistant rice.

As Yadav's statement shows, adaptation is set to be a major focus of the COP30 discussions. “COP30 should be the COP of Adaptation," the minister has said.

The difference between actually implemented adaptation and a set goal is the adaptation gap – the very thing that the UNEP's report seeks to highlight. This mismatch is determined by how much a society can tolerate the impacts of climate change. It reflects resource limitations and competing priorities and is exactly what the 'Adaptation Gap Report' series hopes to catch. 

At a formal interaction held with journalists in Copenhagen under the Chatham House rules at which The Wire was present, one of the members of the report's steering committee and the lead author of one of the report's chapters had noted that their goal with this report is to primarily communicate the crisis in digestible terms and to maintain nuance despite the obvious tension of the fact that an life-saving effort that needs money is not getting it.

'The finance is not coming'

Indeed, adaptation needs money. Yet, as Inger Andersen, the executive director of the UNEP says, the 2025 Adaptation Gap Report shows that "this finance is not coming."

The report's numbers are humbling. Anderson writes in her foreword to the report, "The estimated adaptation finance needs of developing countries range from US$310 billion to US$365 billion per year by 2035. Meanwhile, international public adaptation finance flows from developed to developing countries fell from US$28 billion in 2022 to US$26 billion in 2023."

This is at odds with the decision by richer countries at Glasgow in 2021 to double annual public adaptation finance for developing countries to around $40 billion by 2025.

The numbers for 2024 and 2025 are not yet available, but the picture is clear enough for Anderson and the report to conclude that "unless trends in adaptation financing turn around" – something which Anderson says seems unlikely – multilaterally set goalposts like the Glasgow pact and the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) on Climate Finance "will not be achieved, and many more people will suffer needlessly." The NCQG aims to mobilise $1.3 trillion in climate finance by 2035.

Inflation and other worries

During COP29 in Baku last year, developed countries took the lead in mobilising at least US$300 billion per year by 2035 to developing countries for climate action. While this target appears significantly higher than the previous NCQG goal for developed countries – US$100 billion by 2020 for developing countries – the report finds that this new goal is "clearly insufficient to meet adaptation finance needs in 2035."

This is because inflation would increase these needs to US$440-520 billion annually by the year 2035, the report says, and also because while the NCQG covers both mitigation and adaptation, so far, no adaptation subgoal has been agreed during UNFCCC negotiations.

The report thus updates the cost of adaptation finance needed in developing countries, putting it at US$310 billion per year in 2035, when based on modelled costs.

When based on extrapolated needs expressed in countries' Nationally Determined Contributions and National Adaptation Plans, this figure rises to US$365 billion a year.

Meanwhile, international public adaptation finance flows to developing countries were US$26 billion in 2023, as Anderson noted above. This makes adaptation financing needs in developing countries 12-14 times as much as current flows, the report says.

Geo-politics

At the Copenhagen meeting, the two report authors had noted that this Adaptation Gap Report comes under very different geo-political situations compared to last time.

A major source of anxiety in climate and adaptation finance now is the fact that the US under Donald Trump has pulled out of the Paris Agreement of 2015. Trump has also wrapped up operations of the US's main foreign aid and development organisation. Just a day ago, Trump declared victory over what he called was the "hoax" of climate change, after billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates said a warming world would not end civilisation.

Throughout the Global North, which has traditionally led emissions rankings, there is now an increased skepticism of climate change. India, whose stand has been to push for climate finance and technology sharing, is now faced with growing challenges as the Global North's unwillingness to part with either, deepens.

Plans

Planning, this report says, is critical to minimise and address current and future climate risks effectively. Having in place national
planning instruments is an important indicator of progress towards the global goal on adaptation, it stresses.

A total of 172 out of 197 countries worldwide have a national adaptation plan, strategy or policy in place, but in perhaps heartening news, out of the 25 that do not, only four have not started developing one. Last year's report had said 10 had not begun the process.

India has been preparing a National Adaptation Plan which is to be its national policy response to climate change. Reports have said that it is scheduled to be released soon. India has missed the February 2025 deadline for its updated Nationally Determined Contributions.

The illustration below finds that the South Asian region – of which India and its neighbours is a part – has the second highest adaptation finance needs at US $ 112 billion.

The report also soberingly mentions that 36 countries have plans that are outdated or have not been updated for a decade, which calls into question their relevance and effectiveness under present day or future conditions.

The report advises on engaging the private sector and the financial system more broadly. And here, it cites an Indian example too. The report notes how the Reserve Bank of India carried out a survey in 2022 to assess the status of climate risk and sustainable finance among leading commercial banks and concluded that it needs to fully grasp the physical risks associated with climate risk and actively start managing these to make their loan and investment portfolios more resilient.

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