United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres opened the world’s largest annual climate conference this week with a dire warning that climate change is not just a problem for future generations.
“The deadly impacts of climate change are here and now,” Guterres said Nov. 13 during his opening speech of the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Guterres said that it is too late for the world to focus exclusively on climate mitigation strategies, or policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions to prevent future temperature increases. Rather, he said the world needs to devote half of its climate funding to adaptation strategies, which communities can adjust to.
The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) published its annual Adaptation Gap report days before the opening of COP27, which pointed out that one-third of climate financing currently goes to adaptation compared to two-thirds for mitigation. The report also said that by 2030 the world will need to spend $160 billion to $340 billion per year on climate adaptation policies, or roughly 5-10 times the $29 billion that governments earmarked for adaptation policies in 2020. The UNEP estimated that the figure would grow to $315 billion to $565 billion by 2050.
The adaptation gap is particularly acute in the Middle East, a water scarce region that is already struggling with food insecurity as increasingly volatile weather patterns wreak chaos on crop yields, said Moustafa Bayoumi, a research fellow focused on climate finance at the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
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