Illuminem - Finding money for adaptation action – why is this such a challenge?

Our team at Globalfields was asked to contribute to Illuminem, a Platform for energy and sustainability information powered by AI content ranking.  The full article can be accessed here: Illuminem - Finding money for adaptation action – why is this such a challenge?

Andreas Biermann | Niloufar Javadi Abhari | Thomas Lechat

The focus of the article was on adaptation to climate change. While the poorest 50% of the world’s population are responsible for only about 7% of global emissions, they will face 75-80% of the costs of climate change. This means that those who have contributed the least to the adverse impacts of climate change, will experience its worst effects, making climate adaptation a priority in the fight against climate change.

Implementation of adaptation measures requires considerable funds. However, significantly less money is available for adaptation than there is for mitigation. There are several reasons for this:

- Climate adaptation funds for helping vulnerable communities are difficult to model financially, ie they may not be commercially viable (although they may have considerable socio-economic benefits) or may not have a revenue-generating stream. This challenge is compounded by a focus by donors and climate funds on ‘innovative finance instruments’ (usually to stretch scarce donor finance over more projects).

- Additionally, adaption solutions are often highly local, unlike mitigation measures which are relatively mobile and universal, climate adaptation can look very different in different contexts. This makes it difficult to devise a singular technological solution like wind or solar energy, thus limiting access to global, tech-driven funds for adaptation.

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