Scale up funding for climate adaptation programmes, Guterres urges

Though countries have made progress in planning for climate change adaptation, significant gaps remain in financing such initiatives and bringing them the stage where they bring real protection against climate change impacts such as droughts, floods and sea-level rise, a new United Nations environment report has found. 

The world needs “a major breakthrough” to slow the pace of climate change and build resilience to protect the most vulnerable from increasingly severe and frequent climate impacts, the deputy UN chief told a crucial high-level meeting on Wednesday, looking ahead to November’s COP26. 

Although sea level rise could put more than 800 million people in coastal cities at direct risk by 2050, less than 10 per cent of climate finance for urban areas goes to adaptation and resilience, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres has said.