Adaptation will fail without emissions cuts, funding insufficient - UN climate chief

Laurie Goering at the Thomson Reuters Foundation: The funds available to help poorer countries adapt to the impacts of climate change are “pathetically insufficient”, and adaptation efforts risk failing altogether if countries that produce most of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions don’t agree to “very rapid” cuts, the United Nations’ climate chief warned on Wednesday.

Global emissions, which are still growing, need to peak within the next 10 years, with the world rapidly moving to become “carbon neutral” in the second half of the century, said Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The alternative is that “the costs of adaptation will exponentially rise to the point where adaptation is not only extremely difficult but virtually impossible,” she said at the close of a week-long conference in Nepal on financing community-based climate adaptation.

The price of that failure could be a surge in poverty, hunger, migration and extreme weather, which would hit those least equipped to cope hardest, experts said. “It is absolutely urgent we mitigate (climate-changing emissions) rapidly at the same time (as) we invest in adaptation or we are entering a world of much more instability,” warned Atiq Rahman, executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies.

And it is not just the world’s poorest who will pay the price, as British families affected by flooding this year have discovered, noted Camilla Toulmin, director of the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED)...

"Pątnów" power plant in Konin, Poland. Shot by Flyz1, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license