Climate change adaptation is being prioritized in policy and planning across the world. According to the Adaptation Gap Report, at least 79% of all countries have executed at least one national-level adaptation planning mechanism (ie, a plan, strategy, policy, or law).
At COP21 in 2015, after the developing countries demanded the necessity to scale up adaptation, it was incorporated into the Paris Agreement (PA) as a long-term goal. The Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) was addressed in PA to “enhance adaptive capacity, strengthen resilience, and reduce vulnerability to climate change” (UNFCCC, 2016a). At COP21, Parties also created the global stocktake (GST) in Article 14 of the Paris Agreement to acknowledge the progress towards long-term goals of adaptation, including the GGA. However, there were no comprehensive next steps outlined on how it would be operationalized over the next few years.
This was the case due to the methodological and political complications involved with establishing a global goal that tried to capture multifaceted and contextual realities of adaptation around the world. The African Group of Negotiators (AGN) kept an agenda item on the GGA at COP25 in 2019; however, it was not established.
Many formal and informal discussions took place to unpack the GGA throughout 2020 and 2021. In 2021, the Adaptation Committee (AC) of the UNFCCC developed a technical paper to review the overall progress in achieving GGA. At COP26, in 2021, Parties launched the Glassgow-Sharm-el-Sheik programme (GlaSS) to do extensive work on the GGA by setting eight objectives to operationalize the GGA and increase adaptation action at the local, national, and regional levels to recognize the context-specific dynamics of the countries.
However, the GGA will be ineffective if the GlaSS Work Programme is unable to promote the local communities' participation and decision-making capacities through its eight objectives. The GGA should make sure that communities hold individual and collective influence over defining, prioritizing, designing, monitoring, and evaluating adaptation actions to implement adaptation solutions and improve finance flow.
The GlaSS Work Programme can be a catalyst and an inclusive space for developing countries to acknowledge adaptation matters in their own locality. The GGA will be a vital tool to promote the co-production of knowledge through integrating cultural practice and ancestral knowledge for effective alignment with local institutions.
Additionally, the GGA should ensure that accountability and transparency are ensured by developing a framework for conducting the Locally-led Adaptation Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning (LLAMEAL). This can be a feasible approach to achieving GGA, by tracking the eight principles of LLA by capacitating the implementers, funders, and local communities to decide their needs for developing external expertise and access to information.
For instance, principle 1 will help to track the community leaders who possess decision-making power within international and national platforms and delivery mechanisms for adaptation. This also aims to assess if 70% of adaptation finance flows directly to local institutions -- or directly via the relevant national institutions to identify investment behind community priorities.
Whereas principle 2 will help to understand the pace of platforms that incorporate adaptation decisions and see if local adaptation engages with the drivers of risk and vulnerability, considering gender and intersectionality.
Principle 3, on the other hand, will help to track long-term adaptation initiatives that are incentivized through Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), National Adaptation Plans (NAPs), and long-term strategies, reducing the focus on short-term projects. Principle 5 will enable us to analyze the participatory processes across the programme cycle to comprehend if generational knowledge is taken into account in decision making. Other principles can also be tracked similarly.
For tracking actions happening at a local level, it might be beneficial to shift towards a more outcome-oriented tracking, which will make it more flexible and create room for local organizations to comply with standards, especially as they operate in dynamic operational environments.
Afsara Binte Mirza is working as a Research Officer at ICCCAD. Can be reached out by [email protected]. Md Bodrud-Doza Zion is working as an Operations and Business Development Manager at ICCCAD. He can be reached at [email protected].
