News

• Finance needs of developing countries now 10-18 times as big as international public finance flows
• Growing gap results from rising adaptation needs and faltering adaptation finance
• Failure to enhance adaptation has huge implications for losses and damages

Nairobi, 2 November 2023 – Progress on climate adaptation is slowing on all fronts when it should be accelerating to catch up with rising c

The world is rushing headlong into a climate catastrophe.

Tbilisi, 25 October 2023 – The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Green Climate Fund (GCF) today announced a USD 19 million project aiming to build climate resilience in the United Republic of Tanzania, part of a landmark collaboration with UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.

The past few months have been another stark reminder that the climate crisis is getting worse.

The Caribbean island of Barbuda still bears the battle scars of its most brutal encounter with climate change. In 2017, Hurricane Irma, a Category 5 leviathan of unprecedented power, roared across its pristine turquoise waters.

The island’s only storm shelter collapsed, with 300 people hiding inside. Around 95 per cent of Barbuda’s buildings were wrecked, including homes, schools and critical infrastructure.

It was something many in the village of Wada’a, Sudan, had never seen before.

A couple of months ago, workers began channeling water from a small dam-like structure into the parched farmland surrounding the community of 17,000, which is in the state of North Darfur.

In another place or at another time, this simple act of irrigation might not have seemed remarkable.

A few dozen kilometres inland from northern Panama’s coast is the Hato Chami school.

Set amid winding roads, green trees and stunning mountains, it has more than 1,000 pupils, most of whom hail from one of Panama’s largest indigenous groups, the Ngäbe.

Each morning in Addis Ababa, the bustling capital of Ethiopia, the same scene plays out.

As the sun rises, thousands of commuters jostle for space on public minibuses. Others hop on the city’s light rail line, the first network of its kind in Africa. Notably absent are bicycles; cyclists are not something seen regularly on these streets.

African leaders will gather in Nairobi, Kenya next week for Africa Climate Week, an annual get-together where they are expected to discuss ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while adapting to the mounting fallout from the climate crisis.

The rhythmic sound of voices singing in harmony floats across Mozambique’s Limpopo River as several women stand ankle deep in the sticky mud along its banks.

In a well-rehearsed routine, one woman scoops up sediment with a hoe while another buries a fragile mangrove sapling in the void.

The joyous songs of the women obscure the difficulty of their job.

The monsoon season, which runs from June through September, has become a nervous time for the people of Nepal.

The climate crisis has supercharged the fallout from the annual rains, which are triggering an increasing number of floods and landslides, disasters that are especially devastating in a nation defined by its vertigo-inducing slopes.

Timor-Leste has a rich ecosystem of marine biodiversity coral reefs and mangroves. But this island nation in South East Asia is also one of the most vulnerable to extreme weather and slow-onset climatic events, like sea level rise. 

The territory of the Wet’suwet’en Indigenous Peoples sits in the shadows of Canada’s snow-capped western Coast Mountains. Dotted by pine trees and laced with glacier-fed lakes, much of it is a vast wilderness that has supported the Wet’suwet’en for centuries.

But the climate crisis is threatening to change that.

It was an ecological time bomb.

In mid-2022, a toxic algal bloom began to quickly spread through the Oder River, which in part straddles the border between Germany and Poland.

A United Nations summit on the state of the world’s food systems opens today in Rome, Italy, a gathering that comes amid mounting concerns about the planet’s long-term ability to feed a fast-growing human population.

In recent weeks, temperatures have soared around the globe, with a string of heatwaves baking cities from the United States to China.

When it came time to water her rice fields, farmer Im Heng used to have to lug a diesel-powered water pump across her property in Cambodia’s southern Takeo province.

Along with being heavy, the machine was expensive to operate and spewed climate-altering greenhouse gases.

But the generator is now a thing of the past.