The first official workshop out of four under the Glasgow – Sharm el-Sheikh (GlaSS) Work Programme on the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) was not any sort of workshop ECO would recognize. This is despite the calls from several Parties for creative and innovative solutions in their recent submissions.
It is thus not surprising that the draft text to the SBs requests that subsequent workshops “be more interactive, involving breakout groups and round tables and contributions from experts and Non-Party Observers”. Because what happened on Wednesday and Thursday last week was far from that.
IPCC tells us that the window of opportunity to adapt is closing fast. But they also indicate how we are to plan, implement, and measure adaptation collectively with such diversity at national, sub-national, and local levels. The GGA must help in organizing adaptation evidence and to lead to faster and better actions.
However, ECO feels that committing to specific systems comes hard for Parties. Part of it is due to an ongoing misunderstanding about what the technical concepts mean in practice for them. Top-down frameworks don’t lead to effective action at the best of times, let alone for such an elusive notion as adaptation. A series of meaningless aggregated indicators is the last thing we need, and it is not helpful either to define adaptation in a global framework.
Rather, let’s all celebrate diversity at the global level. Each country defining what adaptation means for them, what they need to do, how they are going to do it, and how they are going to monitor and learn from their experience.
ECO understands that this will not be easy. For many countries, this adaptation cycle is dispersed between a variety of ministries, sectors, academic institutions, as well as commercial and local actors. It is fragmented and lacks coherence. An inclusive GGA can support countries to draw the elements together in order to create their own adaptation narrative and encourage them to report on that.
It is not surprising that the Small Island Developing States have the greatest clarity in actioning the GGA. Of course, they are among the most critically and urgently vulnerable, but also their perception of national action is the closest to the local scale – where action is most effective.
The GGA is the latest international framework to be designed, and as such, an opportunity to change – dare we say transform? – the way that global mechanisms respond to local realities.
ECO will be keeping a careful eye on the plans for the next GlaSS workshops to see if this spirit of transformation will start to more fully permeate the process.