Finding finance for climate change adaptation

Environmental Expert: Additional funding mechanisms are required to finance adaptation to climate change in developing countries, according to a new study. The study predicts how relationships between costs associated with adapting to and mitigating against climate change, and costs associated with damages caused by climate change, will progress over the next century.

Even if policy measures designed to mitigate climate change successfully reduce global emissions and limit global temperature rises, damages caused by climate change - including sea level rise and extreme weather events - will still have an important impact and the global community will have to pay the cost of these damages. Therefore, in addition to mitigation measures aimed at reducing emissions, governments must consider how to design policies that, through adaptation to the changing climate, will reduce the damage caused by emissions. So far, few studies have tried to understand the balance between these different costs.

The Adaptation Fund, established under the Kyoto Protocol of the UN Climate Change Convention, currently finances climate change adaptation projects in developing countries via a 2 per cent levy on proceeds from the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which enables countries to earn carbon credits through projects that reduce carbon emissions. In the new study, conducted under the EU ADAM project1, Dutch researchers adapted existing models to gauge whether the current method of finance is sufficient and to better understand the relationships between the different costs involved.

According to the study, adaptation measures will be crucial to reducing the costs caused by damages as a result of climate change, particularly in developing countries where the impact of climate change is expected to be greater. The authors estimate that roughly US$4 in damages could be saved by every $1 invested in adaptation….

Some Ukrainian currency, shot by Viktor Korienko (Корниенко Виктор), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license