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Climate adaptation is stuck in limbo

At the ‘Regional NAP (National Adaptation Plan) expo’ in Uganda last month, the UNFCCC and UNDP sought to facilitate climate change adaptation in least developed…

Climate adaptation is stuck in limbo

At the ‘Regional NAP (National Adaptation Plan) expo’ in Uganda last month, the UNFCCC and UNDP sought to facilitate climate change adaptation in least developed countries.

Although the NAP process was set up as far back as 2010, currently the supplementary efforts (in addition to the intergovernmental Conference of Parties meetings) being made by the UN and its development agencies have begun to
sound hollow.

The technocratic advocacy surrounding the extra-governmental adaptation initiatives, plans and programmes of the UN
have become over the years a mask for peddling solutions that never touch the real problem.

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The real problem facing developing and least developed countries, and small island states, is that climate change adaptation requires climate finance for a transition to better modes of resilience and adaptation under the state
oversight.

State oversight, in concert with a network of development organisations, is essential to streamline the diverse adaptation
initiatives being conducted on a micro-scale through decentralised, private groups (often securing competitive funding
from the UN or the national government).

The first disadvantage of relying solely on these disparate, private efforts (not the least of which is corruption and typical money management done by private groups once they have secured funding) is that the entire focus becomes premised on completion of set project targets, which later get buried with time, and of which the government may or may not
take cognizance.

The second disadvantage is that the local common sub-system that they target may or may not become a self-reliant, self-perpetuating entity. For instance, what is the guarantee that a particular local group ‘empowered’ and ‘trained’ to undertake certain adaptive practices will be able to sustain on its own without handholding from the involved development agency?

This links up to the third disadvantage, that is that most of these private efforts without any streamlining under the government will, at best, create only local ecosystems of sustainability which will be isolated from each other.
Such hills of isolation will not provide the overall capacity to deal with the costs of climate change that we will face as a country. Even if the solutions provided are ‘scalable’, they will remain so only on paper in the absence of any real
financial support from developed countries.

Even if financial support is provided by developed countries on a bilateral basis (for instance, India’s ‘green’ efforts are being funded by various countries like Netherlands, Japan etc.), most of it ends up getting fudged at the hands of local government officers and ends up diluting people’s rights to natural resources. These are the consequences we face in
the absence of a functional, legitimate regime for climate finance.

Given these realities, this latest adaptation expo evokes incredulity about how much longer will we continue to harbour
under delusions as a global community.

The ostensible purpose of the expo was ‘to enhance collaboration between government representatives and various partners and stakeholders’ and to promote ‘exchange of experiences and…to foster partnerships on how to
advance NAPs.’

This is a good platform for exchange of ideas, but most of these ideas invariably never highlight how to strengthen
the climate finance regime, which is critical for adaptation.

It is never sufficient to affirm to ‘design’ climate risk assessments or identify adaptation prioritiesor enhance capacities to
access the Green Climate Fund (GCF) – all this falls squarely within the domain of provision of technical expertise, and that too, in thepolicy planning domain (not scientific innovation).

Simply to advocate building  capacities of stakeholders and so forth will ensure that we remain where we were 10 years back,

stuck in a deadlock, and worse, perpetuating delusions that isolated building of capacities can work to make the NAPs truly actionable.

(The writer is a Researcher with the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies. The views are personal)

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