Adaptation

Reporting from Copenhagen

It is clear that one of the major sticking points in any agreement at Copenhagen will be adaptation and mitigation finance.

So emotional are the positions behind this particular issue that Lumumba Di-Aping, chief of the Sudanese delegation and chairman of G77 plus China group, told reporters this week:

“The question of adequacy is really a question of what is the finance necessary to carry out actions or to implement programs commensurate with the risk we face.”

Those risks are “condemning” developing countries to non-development, he said. “Ten billion dollars will not buy developing countries enough coffins."

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• Ann Danylkiw's blog
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“We talk about climate change as if it’s going to happen. It has happened.”

Those words from British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell opened today's session of the Governors' Global Climate Summit. It was a message echoed by regional and national leaders from around the world throughout the day: Climate change isn't just about mitigation anymore, it's about adaptation now as well.

When the G20 ministers gather in Pittsburgh next month, one of their missions is to come up with a plan to pay for climate change adaptation in developing countries. They'll now be doing that without a clear picture of how much it will cost.

The UN climate change secretariat’s 2007 estimates for the global cost of adaptation measures have been widely used as benchmarks in discussions, but a new study finds those numbers are way off.

The UNFCCC estimated global adaptation costs at between $40 billion and $170 billion a year through 2030, but it didn’t take the full range of impacts into account, say researchers from the International Institute for Environment and Development and Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London.

"Just looking in depth at the sectors the UNFCCC did study, we estimate adaptation costs to be two-three times higher, and when you include the sectors the UNFCCC left out, the true cost is probably much greater," said author Martin Parry, a researcher at Grantham Institute and former co-chair of the IPCC working group on adaptation.

For example, the UNFCCC’s disease assessment of $5 billion only took into account malaria, diarrhea diseases and malnutrition in low- to middle-income countries, but that’s likely to be less than half the actual impact when other diseases and high-income countries are considered, the new study says.