The charming, narrow streets of Marrakech’s Medina teach you to share and co-exist. Perhaps the COP’s large open venue has had the opposite effect on Parties. Yesterday the High Level Ministerials twice passed over or delayed the opportunity to listen to civil society, doubling down the exclusion of civil society from most of this COP.
In the spirit of co-existence, multiple civil society constituencies—youth, women, farmers and environmental NGOs—brought together their diverse perspectives to convey their priorities on adaptation finance in just a few minutes, though to no avail. So ECO steps forward to provide space to voice their concerns.
Adaptation, a pillar of Paris Agreement, needs urgent, ambitious, and transformative public climate finance for vulnerable and impacted communities. The recently released US$100 billion roadmap shows that adaptation finance flows by 2020 will double the current levels. Yet that will still fall far short of the parity with mitigation finance that the Paris Agreement asks for. That gap cannot be filled by profit-seeking private finance, which favours mitigation activities. As well, that will favour richer developing countries, because they are more capable of absorbing private investment. That’s why developed countries should prioritise adaptation to help protect development gains in developing countries.
The methodologies applied by developed countries have consistently exaggerated the climate-relevance of actual funding. Also, instruments such as loans, equity or guarantees may be counted at face value instead of the underlying net assistance. The roadmap should only be seen as an input to the discussion but not as a blueprint, as it would bypass ongoing discussions on finance accounting under the SBSTA.
Adaptation finance requires a robust institutional set-up. The Adaptation Fund is already operational. It has delivered innovative financing approaches on the ground and has a well-developed project pipeline that needs funding to serve urgent needs of vulnerable communities. For this reason, we call for the Adaptation Fund to serve the Paris Agreement in co-existence with Green Climate Fund, as already enshrined in the Paris Agreement. ECO acknowledges and applauds the pledges from Germany and Sweden to replenish the fund.
Of course, climate finance should be counted as new and additional to existing commitments on Official Development Assistance, such as the commitment to dedicating 0.7% of GNI to ODA.
Lastly, developed countries should also fully support that addressing loss and damage has become the third pillar of climate action and is critical to co-existence on the planet. Loss and damage finance needs to be truly additional, over and above what has been pledged for adaptation and mitigation.
Addressing the adaptation finance gap and ensuring that finance gets directed to those who need it most must be the next chapter in the global fight against climate change, and it needs to be written down here and now, in Marrakech.