Climate change has gained sharply more attention in recent years as its pace has accelerated and its impacts have become pervasive and more damaging. But the vital focus on preventing a climate cataclysm through reducing carbon emissions has seen the world’s most vulnerable countries move into climate crises with scant attention to ways of preventing their plight.
This emphasis on carbon-reducing climate emission beside a relative neglect of life-protecting climate adaptation has become a North versus South point of tension, sparking disputes at COP26 and COP27, and now placing the need to ‘correct course’ on adaptation finance firmly onto the COP28 agenda.
Yet the costs are set to be huge. The Climate Policy Initiative estimated in 2022 that Africa’s climate financing needs were running at $250bn a year and East Africa’s at $82bn. These figures dwarf the $100bn a year pledged by developed nations in 2009 as a total climate investment flow into all the world’s developing nations, yet even that pledge has never yet been achieved. Moreover, public funds are now under added pressure following the Covid 19 pandemic.
However, private finance inflows are far smaller still, covering just 0.56 percent of climate finance needs in Ethiopia, for example. Yet, the region is in acute need, with 60 million people now in need of urgent humanitarian assistance as a result of droughts, agricultural failures, locust swarms, floods and heat. The region’s rain patterns have changed, bringing frequent drought, and irregular and truncated rainy seasons. Temperatures have risen, drying out soils and resulting in rains that run off into floods. Large regions are desertifying, as farmers lose livestock and crops, pests and diseases gather pace, and the fabric of energy, water and road infrastructure is destroyed.
This report explores how ‘correcting course’ on global investment can empower the Global South to combat droughts and floods while building a profitable, resilient future.
