World leaders gathered in Scotland on Monday to launch the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, amid dire warnings of the effects of a heating planet for humankind, especially people in lower-income countries.
The high-stakes event began just as a summit of the G-20 group of nations closed, failing to achieve major breakthroughs on climate, as many had hoped.
There was little in the way of big announcements at the World Leaders Summit subevent as COP 26 opened, with the major exception of a commitment from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi that his country would reach net-zero emissions by 2070.
But there were some key takeaways for the development sector from leaders’ speeches Monday — which saw climate adaptation rapidly advancing up the agenda:
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U.S. President Joe Biden announced the President’s Emergency Plan for Adaptation and Resilience, which will go by the abbreviation PREPARE. It “will serve as a comprehensive framework to mobilize U.S. government resources and expertise in support of climate adaptation … for more than half a billion people worldwide,” Biden told world leaders.
PREPARE contains a raft of measures, including mobilizing $1 billion of public and private finance for climate-resilient water and sanitation services by 2030, launching the Green Recovery Investment Platform for private investment in climate finance, and coordinating support from the U.S. Agency for International Development for helping vulnerable countries with climate adaptation. Under the plan, Biden will work with Congress to provide $3 billion annually in adaptation finance by fiscal year 2024.
Kelly Parsons, CEO at WaterAid America, welcomed the announcement. “We’re excited to see the Biden Administration emphasize adaptation and resilient systems that can withstand climate shocks and keep communities healthy, safe and productive,” she said in a statement, which also applauded the focus on locally led adaptation.
The U.K. government announced an extra £1 billion ($1.4 billion) for the country’s climate finance contribution, which is funded from official development assistance — but only if the U.K. economy grows as forecast, which would also return aid spending back to 0.7% of gross national income from the current 0.5%. But economists have voiced doubts that such progress is likely.
NGOs were quick to point out that the U.K. aid budget has already been reduced by around £4.5 billion, with the cancellation of climate-related programs and myriad others seeing cuts. Climate finance is also supposed to be additional to regular aid spending. And if the extra £1 billion does appear, it is not clear if it will come at the expense of other programs.
Climate Action Network UK’s director, Catherine Pettengell, called the announcement “the worst kind of smoke and mirrors just so that the prime minister can suggest he is making progress on climate finance” and said the announcement fell short of what was needed.
Modi’s net-zero announcement was not his only comment of the day. Along with Biden and a host of leaders from climate-vulnerable states, he made adaptation the main theme of his remarks to delegates, saying that the topic had not received the “importance … that mitigation has” in the global climate debate. Modi said this was an “injustice to those developing nations that are more impacted by climate change.”
“We will need to make adaptation the key component of our development policies and projects,” Modi told world leaders. Projects in India have both provided adaptation benefits to citizens and “improved their quality of life,” he added.
He also said that preservation of local lifestyles can “be an important pillar of adaptation” and called for all countries to join the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure, an international coalition of states, U.N. bodies, and other groups.
Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced £1 million specifically for loss and damage in a bid to demonstrate her country’s climate leadership and positioning. This area of climate policy has historically been more contentious than adaptation, but it has been creeping up the agenda more recently, with the U.K. government set to host an “Adaptation, Loss and Damage” thematic day at the summit on Nov. 8.
“We don’t have the resources of other Western governments, but we can lead by example,” Sturgeon said in a statement. “I hope this will galvanise other organisations to support the partnership – and show world leaders that where small nations lead they can follow, by making similarly ambitious commitments during COP26.”
Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley called for the International Monetary Fund to issue more Special Drawing Rights every year for another two decades. This year, IMF released $650 billion in SDRs to help fund the global COVID-19 recovery, but Mottley said much more was needed to help countries fund climate adaptation.
“We are asked now to adapt to a 1.5 degree [Celsius]-plus world. We cannot do it without the assistance of the rest of the global community. … We need ... for us ideally to put aside $500 billion of SDRs for 20 years,” she said. Echoing many other leaders of climate-vulnerable nations, Mottley repeated calls for a 50-50 split of climate finance between adaptation and mitigation; it is currently skewed greatly toward the latter.
Mottley also called for “vulnerability” instead of per capita income to be a criteria for accessing World Bank climate finance, as the latter “has excluded all of us from an early start on adaptation.” Small island states such as Barbados are considered by some international organizations to be higher-income countries, preventing them from accessing some climate finance under international rules. Mottley said it was “ludicrous that Barbados cannot borrow from the World Bank for climate and only just got exceptional access for the pandemic.”
Update, Nov. 2, 2021: This article has been updated to clarify that Narendra Modi is India’s prime minister.