ECO listened carefully to governments’ opening statements and is pleased to hear that adaptation is not forgotten. Ambitious adaptation is necessary for countries’ sustainable efforts to succeed despite the growing impacts of climate change, which are unavoidable. Contributions such as the 50 million Euros pledge for the Adaptation Fund by Germany on day 1 of COP 23 should inspire other developed countries to follow suit.
So, adaptation is crucial. However, as is often the case, adaptation is scattered across various agenda items and it is easy to lose sight of the full adaptation picture. That is why ECO is offering this handy guide:
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- Adaptation Fund (AF): The easy answer to the question of whether the AF shall serve the Paris Agreement is: YES! And Parties could agree on this answer here in Bonn, while sorting out remaining details in the next year.
- Adaptation Communications: Under the Paris Agreement, Parties should make progress on the guidance required in order to report what they have been doing on adaptation, outlining their plans for future actions, and informing the Global Stocktake. Just repeating what is already enshrined in the Paris Agreement is not enough. Parties have to say what they want in the adaptation communications, capture common points, sort out the differences and start to write down the draft guidelines! And of course, in those guidelines, the guiding principles for good adaptation contained in Article 7.5 of the Paris Agreement have to be reflected.
- Global Goal on Adaptation: Parties agreed in Paris to set a global goal on adaptation, but have not done much progress on operationalizing it or figuring out how it can be reflected in the Global Stocktake.
- National Adaptation Plans(NAPs): Although they do not feature prominently on this COP’s agenda, Parties should remember to accelerate the development of participatory, gender-equitable NAPs in 2018, as a contribution to the required ambition increase. ECO is pleased to see that vulnerable countries can increasingly benefit from support from the GCF and expects a good and effective use of those resources on the development of their NAPs.
Adaptation Finance: COP23 has to prepare the ground for an increase in adaptation finance, reflecting the polluter pay principles, so that when ministers meet for the 2018 ministerial dialogue on climate finance next year, they will report on the progress they have made towards the 50:50 balance between adaptation and mitigation. The guidance for this dialogue needs to be shaped here. 