COP29 failed to accelerate the sluggish pace of post-Paris adaptation negotiations, despite the IPCC’s urgent call in its 6th Assessment Report for greater ambition and faster action on adaptation.

Even with the potential for increased adaptation finance, the impact of funding will remain limited as long NAPs are incoherent and unambitious, offering wish lists of desired actions rather than integrated, programmatic approaches.

Discussions in Baku centred on the need for finance to support the implementation of NAPs and on the importance of considering gender, age, Indigenous Peoples and local communities in NAP preparation and implementation. However, a decision could not be reached; a draft text including some 159 pairs of square brackets (indicating unresolved wording) will be revisited in Bonn in June 2025.

The fragmented nature of adaptation negotiations in Baku yielded little more than paper progress, perpetuating cycles of negotiation that delay implementation. The Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) exemplifies this pattern of stagnation.

When initial efforts to operationalize the GGA proved fruitless, the Glasgow–Sharm el-Sheikh Work Programme was launched in 2021. Two years and eight workshops later, it resulted in the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience, which in turn launched the two-year UAE–Belém Work Programme to develop indicators for measuring adaptation progress.

COP29 continued this pattern of procedural diversion from action, reflecting a tendency to maintain the appearance of progress by deferring difficult decisions on technical issues where countries disagree. Parties established the Baku High-Level Dialogue on Adaptation to identify ways of enhancing the UAE Framework’s implementation and launched the Baku Adaptation Road Map to advance progress towards the GGA. The modalities for work under this road map will be negotiated further in 2025.

Meanwhile, the adaptation action needed to cope with our rapidly changing climate grows further from our reach.