GENEVA - As climate impacts intensify and hit the world’s most vulnerable hardest, the Adaptation Gap Report 2024: Come hell and high water, from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), finds that nations must dramatically increase climate adaptation efforts, starting with a commitment to act on finance at COP29.

Global average temperature rise is approaching 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, and the latest estimates from UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report put the world on course for a catastrophic rise of 2.6-3.1°C this century without immediate and major cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.

Released just ahead of the COP29 climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, the report finds that there is therefore an urgent need to significantly scale-up adaptation this decade to address rising impacts.

“But this is being hampered by the huge gap that exists between adaptation finance needs and current international public adaptation finance flows,” according to the report.

“In addition to finance, there is a need to strengthen capacity-building and technology transfer to improve the effectiveness of adaptation actions – which is in line with the focus on means of implementation at COP29,” it stressed.

The report suggested that increased efforts will be needed to realise the global goal on adaptation through the 11 objectives of the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience.

The report said, “International public adaptation finance flows to developing countries increased from US$22 billion in 2021 to US$28 billion in 2022: the largest absolute and relative year-on-year increase since the Paris Agreement.”