In this new CDKN technical report, Xolisa Ngwadla and Samah El-Bakri explore in detail the task ahead to transform the Global Adaptation Goal in the Paris climate agreement: from warm words into real action that will save lives and livelihoods on the ground.

“The comprehensive scope of the Paris Agreement, which includes not only mitigation, but also specific provisions on adaptation and support - particularly finance - provides a renewed sense of hope for African countries,” says Ambassador Hussein Seyni Nafo, Climate Change Envoy for the Republic of Mali and  Chair of the African Group of Negotiators – a negotiating bloc in the United Nations climate talks.

In his special Foreword to the report, Ambassador Nafo notes that  adaptation commitments by the international community have tended to take a back seat to climate mitigation in the past. However, the establishment of the Global Goal on Adaptation marks “a significant step…towards achieving material parity between mitigation and adaptation,” he says. “However, it requires a significant amount of technical work and political will to achieve such parity, and the work presented in this paper helps us forge the way ahead.”

Ngwadla and El-Bakri argue that a great deal of elaboration is needed to “fully operationalise the adaptation provisions of the Paris Agreement, including achievement of the Global Goal on Adaptation”. Some of these elaborations will be technical in nature and can be addressed by intergovernmental science bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and specialised bodies established under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). However, other tasks will be political in nature.

The authors call for the Ad hoc Working Group on the Paris Agreement to create a standing agenda item to provide further guidance to those bodies in undertaking their work. This would not only help to ensure that the Paris Agreement’s adaptation measures are put into action – but would also help to ensure that adaptation action was coherent – helping the most climate-vulnerable countries and people to benefit most from these new commitments.