The Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), as established in the Paris Agreement, has three strands: enhancing adaptive capacity, strengthening resilience and reducing vulnerability to climate change.  It aims to contribute to sustainable development and ensure an adequate adaptation response in the context of the temperature goal agreed in parallel – limiting global temperature increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius, while pursuing efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees. 

COP29 will leave a very small legacy in the pursuit of an adequate adaptation response. While a scattering of concessions agreed in the final days of the negotiations avoided a total abdication of responsibility in this regard – giving those in the adaptation community some tangible developments with which to engage and some direction for the year ahead – the institutionalization and advancement of adaptation under the UNFCCC continues to be weak. Meanwhile the gulf between global agreements reached and the global action required continues to widen.  

The good news for adaptation

COP29 launched the Baku Adaptation Road Map. While the potential significance of the Road Map remains to be seen (with modalities for work yet to be agreed), it at least offers a vehicle through which fostering implementation of adaptation could be supported and advanced.  

Parties also established the Baku high-level dialogue on adaptation, to be convened on the margins of each COP session, with the aim of identifying ways of enhancing the implementation of the United Arab Emirates Framework for Global Climate Resilience. With adaptation languishing behind mitigation in the political priorities of governments the world over, a high-level dialogue – if it lives up to its name – could be instrumental in ratcheting up adaptation ambition. 

Parties also affirmed that the agenda item on matters relating to the global goal on adaptation is a standing agenda item (a much-debated point) that will continue post COP30. This doesn’t solve the issue of the dispersed nature of adaptation negotiations under the UNFCCC, but it does send a signal that an institutionalized home – for GGA discussions, at least – is here to stay.  

Encouraging progress was also made in agreeing the modalities and outputs of the UAE–Belém work programme, and in providing direction to the work of the technical experts up to COP30. Eight groups of technical experts are tasked with producing a set of no more than 100 indicators that are globally applicable and constitute a menu of nationally applicable options. No mean feat when considering the 5000+ indicators mapped to date. 

It was also significant that Parties agreed that this set should include indicators that assess the ‘means of implementation’ as part of a broader set of enabling factors for the implementation of adaptation action. Developing countries had to fight hard for this specific reference, despite the fact that Parties recall, in the same decision, their previous decision to note with concern that the adaptation finance gap is widening. 

What gives cause for concern?

For much of the negotiations, Parties argued semantics – namely around the definition of transformational adaptation and the implications of measuring progress towards transformational adaptation under the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience. 

Terminology does matter (and arguably nowhere more so than within the context of a global treaty). But debates were once again drawn along traditional divides, mired by a lack of conceptual clarity. Arguably this was exacerbated rather than eased by the recent technical paper on transformational adaptation prepared by the UNFCCC Secretariat (see Figure 9). When combined with insufficient assurances from developed countries that the pursuit of transformational adaptation would be in the interest of developing countries, we were left with a compromise text that – in simply recognizing the importance of both incremental and transformational adaptation – advances us very little. 

More ambitious proposals on adaptation were also thwarted from becoming decisive decisions. The prospects of establishing an IPCC task force on adaptation, for example, at one point seemed tantalizingly close. But Parties instead chose to merely recognize the importance of collaboration with the IPCC, welcome its decision to update its 1994 guidelines for assessing climate change impacts and adaptation, and invite the Chair of the UNFCCC Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice to organize a special event in collaboration with the IPCC at the 62nd session of the Subsidiary Bodies to provide an update on its ongoing work.  

Backsliding was also in play. At COP28, in Decision 2/CMA.5 (paras 18–19), Parties recognized that “climate change impacts are often transboundary in nature and may involve complex, cascading risks that can benefit from collective consideration and knowledge-sharing, climate-informed transboundary management and cooperation on global adaptation solutions”. They also emphasized that “the United Arab Emirates Framework for Global Climate Resilience should catalyse and strengthen regional and international cooperation on the scaling up of adaptation action and support among Parties, international organizations and nongovernmental organizations”.  

And yet, while Parties agreed to develop indicators that “reflect overarching trends and common challenges related to adaptation efforts across countries”, the reference to transboundary climate risks was stripped from the text early on in the negotiations at COP29. In light of the growing evidence base on these cross-continental risks, and explicit calls for action by negotiators at COP29, this should be of global concern. 

Ultimately, however, the biggest concern about the adaptation negotiations at COP29 is that they lacked courage, imagination and ambition – three attributes we desperately need if we’re to tackle this greatest of global challenges. If the benchmark of progress on adaptation negotiations continues to be so narrowly defined – to technocratic, procedural and incremental developments rather than substantive agreements that clearly and compellingly advance adaptation ambition and action – the Global Goal on Adaptation will only ever exist on paper. Belem must represent a turning point from Baku in this regard.