Finance for Adaptation and Loss and Damage

Locally Led Adaptation & Resilience

Advocacy

Time to Step Up Action

This Oxfam International and CARE brief outlines the key challenges on adaptation finance that governments could advance at the One Planet Summit and in the course of 2018 to raise ambition.

Adaptation finance continues to be neglected. There is virtually no progress in increasing the share of adaptation finance in overall climate finance, despite the objective to reach a balance between mitigation and adaptation. Worse, adaptation finance is too often provided as loans, rather than grants, indebting developing countries further, in order to address a crisis they had little or no role in causing. And developed countries usually over-estimate the actual support they are providing, by using a generous accounting methodology for projects where adaptation components are only minor or adaptation is only one of several objectives. Furthermore, there is still a lot of work to do to ensure adaptation initiatives – projects, programmes, policies – promote gender equality and human rights and integrate key principles of good adaptation practice.

Following COP23, the One Planet Summit is an important high-level event targeting climate finance. Jointly, these events set the stage for 2018 which must be a year of increased action and ambition on all fronts, given that the world is heading towards a large-scale, planetary disaster if emissions are not curbed immediately and significantly. Increasing finance to support developing countries in tackling climate change impacts, through adaptation and addressing loss and damage, is essential to put people and the planet at the centre. Good adaptation can save lives and protect livelihoods, and it requires sufficient resources to be scaled-up across many countries.