'Adapt or perish': Why is climate action so important?

• Nations have committed to significantly increasing financial resources to combat climate change.
  
• Climate action must begin immediately and be effective, according to two experts.
• Local initiatives should not be overlooked because they have the potential to be crucial in combating climate change.

Wanjira Mathai is the World Resources Institute's vice president and regional director for Africa. Sheela Patel is the founder and previous chair of Slum Dwellers International and the Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC).

The United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP26) witnessed a long-overdue awareness of the need to prioritise climate change adaptation, with governments pledging to double current levels of adaptation investment by 2025, the first-ever globally agreed adaptation finance goal.

These commitments must now be turned into serious and immediate action, with the UK Environment Agency's harsh warning that we must "adapt or die" resonating around the world.

The necessity of adaptation efforts in the climate issue is likely to be emphasised in the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.

This adds to the growing momentum behind the adaptation work required to protect the lives of millions of people affected by climate change. Last year, 40 countries joined the Adaptation Action Alliance (AAC), a government-led coalition co-chaired by the United Kingdom and Egypt with the goal of making the globe climate resilient by 2030.

Despite this success, considerable work remains to be done to channel funds into locally led action and leadership, which is becoming increasingly important as the climate issue worsens. Storm Ana, the deadliest weather event of 2022 so far, impacted 21,000 people throughout Southern Africa just a few weeks ago.

With climate change threatening to push 130 million more people into poverty by 2030, and only a fraction of global climate financing getting to local-level action, the urgency to combat climate injustice has never been greater.

Only 22 of 374 community-based programmes studied by the World Resources Institute had features associated with locally directed adaptation, accounting for around 6% of all examples. However, well-designed, locally led solutions can produce remarkable benefits.

There are excellent examples of work all throughout the world that we could scale up. For example, India is frequently referred to as a "graveyard of pilots." Local communities have a lot of smart answers and unique ideas, but they tend to be limited to pilots.

The reasons for this are numerous: power inequalities, complex processes, and a preference for Western ideas.

In Kenya, government and foreign organisations support county-level climate change subsidies that enable rainwater gathering and sand dam development, providing communities with a reliable source of water during droughts.

Flood prevention systems complemented by crowdsourcing early warning systems in South America's Gran Chaco region guaranteed that millions of people remained safe in the face of severe flooding.

This region has a network of local organisations, particularly women-led and Indigenous groups, that are involved in climate resilience decision-making, voicing their goals and solutions, and collaborating with local governments and international funders.

Now is the time to recognise the importance of local expertise in informing future climate adaption ideas, and to support this with financial resources.

To encourage financing devolution, the Global Commission on Adaptation issued eight Principles for Locally Led Adaptation in 2021. The principles have been signed by influential donors, local civil society organisations, and government agencies such as USAID, IrishAid, Canada's Sida, and the Danish and Dutch foreign ministries, in addition to the UK government.

The AAC, in particular its locally led adaptation workstream, has adopted these concepts. They offer a roadmap for moving away from top-down approaches and toward a model that redresses power imbalances and ensures that people, communities, and organisations closest to climate impacts have a say in how climate money is spent.

The next problem is figuring out how to use these principles to secure more money, with changes to funding and decision-making methods, as well as modifications in climate finance to reach local actors and support local priorities.

Without precise delivery plans, commitments may end up being nothing more than hollow words. To meet our goals – and guarantee that money reaches the front lines – we need procedures to assure transparency and accountability, as well as the monitoring and visibility of climate finance flows.

Countries and organisations who have previously committed to the LLA principles should implement systemic adjustments right now to decentralise power and provide money to frontline areas.

Climate finance and development policies must enable locally led adaptation, which is urgently needed to establish a climate resilient world by 2030. Multilateral development banks, climate funds, and other financing providers must be willing to adjust their structures and policies.

Organizations dedicated to LLA will keep one another accountable for taking action that ensures local actors have power and resources.

As the world's attention turns to COP27 in Africa, now is the time to join a growing coalition of countries, multilateral organisations, and social movements that have endorsed the principles for locally led adaptation, to demonstrate commitment to such efforts, and to put words into action in the policies and financing that will be unveiled in the coming year.