Speech prepared for delivery at the Nature-Based solution track at the Global Adaptation Summit
Thank you to the governments of Canada and Mexico for organizing this event and co-leading the Global Commission on Adaptation’s Nature-based Solutions Adaptation Track. Your work, and this Summit, comes at a critical time. We are still not doing enough to cut greenhouse gas emissions and limit growing climate impacts.
But even if we limit global warming to well below 2°C, or even 1.5°C, the poorest and most vulnerable will feel the weight of further loss and damage. Vulnerable communities are already at high risk from climate-related shocks, including crop failures, spikes in food prices and more diseases. Without efforts to cut emissions combined with adaptation and resilience, another 100 million could fall into poverty this decade.
It is worth recalling that in the Paris Agreement, we undertook to keep scaled up finance to achieve a balance between adaptation and mitigation. And it is with regret that I have to say that, as the UNEP Adaptation Gap Report released this month found, we have not been living up to that commitment. Our analysis of adaptation actions showed that we are still very much in the early stages of implementation on the adaptation action side, with very few initiatives reporting evidence of real reductions in climate risks. And, pertinently for this event, action is lagging on nature-based solutions, such as ecosystem-based adaptation.
To catch up, it is vital that we focus on three areas.
First, we must put financing in place for adaptation.
Adaptation financing remains at around 5 per cent of total climate finance, coming at at about USD 30 billion each year on average for 2017 and 2018. We have to see more money pledged before, and at, COP26 – in line with the Paris Agreement commitments.
Pandemic-recovery packages provide a great opportunity to get funding flowing to adaptation. The economic benefits of adaptation measures make investments in adaptation perfect for a nature- and climate-positive recovery. For example, the Global Commission on Adaptation in 2019 estimated that a USD 1.8 trillion investment in adaptation measures would bring a return of USD 7.1 trillion in avoided costs and other benefits.
We also require greater public-private partnership finance to stimulate investment. In the Caribbean region, for example, post-storm mangrove restoration on 3,000 km of coastline makes for an opportune investment by the insurance industry. The Global Ecosystem-based Adaptation Fund, supported by Germany and implemented by UNEP and IUCN, is stepping up to boost financing for such initiatives by providing seed capital. The initial capitalization of the fund is 15 million euros, with the first call for proposals coming this year.
Secondly, we must place a stronger focus on nature-based solutions in updated NDCs.
Nature-based solutions provide cost-effective approaches to adaptation.
So, it makes sense to strengthen nature-based solutions in NDCs, and there is plenty of scope to do so. Only 17 per cent of NDCs involving nature-based solutions for adaptation have set quantifiable targets. Good examples include Vietnam, where the area of protective forests in coastal areas is to be increased to 380,000 hectares, including up to 50,000 hectares of additional mangrove planting.
We must encourage more such initiatives with clear targets in the NDCs and the follow through to ensure the targets are achieved.
Thirdly, we must unite the nature and climate agendas.
It is, however, critical to recall that nature-based solutions are not only about climate change. They provide a host of benefits across the Sustainable Development Goals. The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which begins this year, shows how we can simultaneously tackle biodiversity loss, climate change and poverty with nature-based solutions – generating trillions of dollars in ecosystem services and removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
The bottom line is that investing in “nature’s infrastructure” – our estuaries, our mangroves, our coastal forests, our waterways, our flowering meadows, our kelp forests, our peatlands, and our forests — makes sense. It is good for nature and biodiversity, good for climate, good for human health and good for planetary health.
So, we must push hard on the decade, get nature featuring strongly in updated NDCs at COP26, and agree a strong and ambitious post-2020 framework on biodiversity at COP15 to protect and restore nature’s benefits. All of this should come alongside a concerted effort to protecting standing forests.
We have to do all of this because we live in a world that is both more vulnerable and unequal. We cannot afford to lose the race to resilience.
Thank you.
Executive Director
