This article was written by Cecilia Butini and originally published in SciDev.Net

This article was supported by the Adaptation Research Alliance.

[BARCELONA] One year ago, climate leaders hailed the conclusion of the first major assessment of the world’s progress on tackling climate change.

The so-called “Global Stocktake” aimed to review the commitments set out in the Paris Agreement and hold countries accountable for what still needed to be done in the global response to climate change.

In a two-year process, to be repeated every five years, specialists collected data on emissions, climate-change adaptation efforts and financing, and to come up with ways for countries to strengthen their climate actions.

The first Stocktake report, published in September 2023, made clear that although the Paris Agreement spurred action that improved forecasts for future global warming, much more needed to be done.

One year on, and only a few weeks ahead of the upcoming COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, it is unclear which of the Global Stocktake recommendations are already being implemented, and to what extent.

“We need to set clear goals that will help to measure the progress and be accountable for delivering adaptation.”Saskia Werners, senior scientist, United Nations University – Institute for Environment and Human Security

However, experts who watched closely or participated in the Global Stocktake told SciDev.Net, that climate finance—which will be the main topic of discussion at COP29—will be crucial to seeing results.

“Many countries are saying that although they agreed on Global Stocktake objectives, they can’t implement them until financing is available,” said Marine Pouget, policy advisor for global climate governance at Climate Action Network France, which published position papers and coordinated advocacy around the Global Stocktake.

Difficult negotiations

The upcoming climate conference in Azerbaijan will look at how much countries need to spend to implement climate goals, starting from a base of US$100 billion a year and including the needs of low-income countries.

But with the talks approaching fast, the gap between what’s needed and what’s on the table still appears wide.

“I think the negotiations are really very difficult,” Niklas Höhne, climate policy expert and co-founder of the NewClimate Institute in Germany, told SciDev.Net. A difficult geopolitical situation like the current one can also affect climate progress, he adds.

What should hopefully happen to get talks out of deadlock is for a group of rich countries to come forward with a very concrete financing proposal, saying “this is how much we want to contribute”, which would be a way to get things moving, says Höhne.

But “right now, they are simply not moving”.

For countries that are fighting climate change on a limited budget, that could be a problem.

Paulo Artaxo, professor of environmental physics at the University of São Paulo, says he isn’t expecting much from COP29, especially considering Azerbaijan’s reliance and connection to the fossil fuel industry.

“Eventually they will approve some financial help for developing countries to mitigate and to adapt to the new climate, but that is a very small fraction of what is needed,” Artaxo told SciDev.Net.

Fragmented adaptation

Many low- and middle-income countries that are hit hard by climate change are in need of urgent interventions to adapt to it, but may not have the resources to implement these.

In Brazil, for example, the number of days with rainfall exceeding 100 millimeters have increased four-fold over the last century, according to Artaxo. This means that a city like São Paulo, home to 22.8 million people, needs a complete redesign of its drainage system. Not to mention the need to make the country’s healthcare system more suitable to deal with frequent heatwaves, he explained.

“It will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Brazil doesn’t have that money,” said Artaxo.

Still, Brazil’s situation is far better than that of poorer neighboring countries like Peru or Bolivia, he added.

Saskia Werners is a senior scientist at United Nations University’s Institute for Environment and Human Security, a member of the Adaptation Research Alliance. Her team contributed to the Global Stocktake with a submission on climate adaptation.

According to Werners, only 51 countries had national adaptation plans in place when the Global Stocktake was unveiled, and adaptation efforts are still lagging. “[They] are still rather fragmented and also unevenly distributed across regions”, she said.

But climate-change adaptation is important “because we have to acknowledge that climate change is happening”, added Werners.

Werners said that she wasn’t sure to what extent COP29 parties could push for more financing and attention on adaptation at the upcoming Baku conference, but there is currently a drive to put it on a more equal footing with mitigation efforts such as emissions reduction, she said.

At the same time, setting global goals around adaptation is more difficult, because adaptation takes place locally.

“We need to set clear goals that will help to measure the progress and be accountable for delivering adaptation,” Werner added.

‘Slow process’

The landmark 2015 Paris Agreement’s main goal was to keep the increase in average global temperatures to below 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels.

Eight years later, the Global Stocktake found that the world was lagging behind those goals.

Parties have two years to react to the report’s recommendations “so it’s likely that if they were asked now, they would say that they still are working on them”, said Pouget, of Climate Action Network France.

Werners, of United Nations University, says it’s hard to say whether recommendations have already been implemented in the year since the Stocktake report, given that such processes are usually slow.

One cause for optimism, however, could be countries’ commitment to implement early warning systems by 2027 to protect people from extreme weather events, she says. She sees this as one of the most concrete commitments to have come out of the Global Stocktake.

This piece was produced by SciDev.Net’s Global desk.

The article was supported by the Adaptation Research Alliance (ARA), a global coalition which supports action-oriented research to inform adaptation solutions and reduce risks from climate change. ARA’s secretariat is hosted at SouthSouthNorth, a non-profit climate resilience consultancy based in Cape Town, South Africa.

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