It sort of doesn’t matter what the details are that have delayed progress this session towards the operationalisation of the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA). To the millions condemned to autonomous adaptation – that is people dealing with the increasing impacts of the climate crisis on their own – this means that they are going to be waiting for help even longer. Still, there remains a global responsibility for adaptation and it is in these halls that Parties are meant to have been working on meeting it.
The workshops last week might have made some progress after an initial false start – when Parties pretended to carry out negotiations but very quickly went back to quibbling, wasting more time on that than was set up for the workshops. And they still don’t have an agreed text to send to the SBs. This means that we don’t know how the next seven workshops (which is the GlaSS work programme) are going to be organised. It appears to ECO that some Parties still prefer the quite useless mode that failed so notably last week. So, sorry to those flooded in India, parched in Somalia and sweltering in Pakistan; you are just going to have to wait.
And the delays have also put off any discussion about finance. Yesterday saw the comprehensive collapse of the session for formulating and implementing National Adaptation Plans. The discussion on addressing priority gaps and needs was taken over by the money negotiators, adaptation people were swept aside, and nothing was achieved. Decisions will be left to the already over-full agenda for COP27. The elephant in the room really does take up all the space.
So, what of the rights to food security, to water, to health, to benefit from biodiversity? Achieving the GGA could well be measured by these universal challenges of the climate crisis. If in doing so, the GGA transforms the inequalities and gross injustices faced by the world’s most marginalised and vulnerable people, and recognises that while adaptation is a global responsibility it is down to local and locally led action, then ECO will celebrate rights upheld and justice done.