The southeast African island of Madagascar was hit by six tropical storms in the first four months of this year, killing more than 200 people and affecting nearly 600,000 across the country, while the south simultaneously suffered from drought.
“We are not doing well,” Jeremiah Fenitra of SAF-FJKM, a Malagasy development organisation, said at this week’s UN climate talks in Bonn, noting 80% of the country’s population are farmers and thus highly exposed to climate change impacts.
“Humanitarian actions are insufficient to address the losses — additional support, especially finance, is needed,” she added.
From storms wrecking homes and crops in unprepared island communities to as many as 20mn people facing hunger in the Horn of Africa after four failed rainy seasons, the world’s poorest are suffering the fallout of a heating planet.
Yet they are still not receiving anything like the amount of financial help they need to protect them from a problem they did not cause, UN and government officials from those nations say.
The Pacific island state of Vanuatu, which was hit by an out-of-season cyclone in late May, declared a climate emergency soon after, reflecting the toll of storm damage and drought over the past decade on its people, who also face rising seas.
“We are finding more and more of our country is simply not safe enough to live in — so simply finding a safe place to live is the new objective for many communities,” said Vanuatu opposition leader Ralph Regenvanu before the Bonn talks began.
He called for more international funding for purchasing land and building stronger infrastructure and services that will not be destroyed by heavy rains and storm surges.
Aid experts say growing climate vulnerability around the world is due, in part, to a lack of financial support to help societies adapt to the impacts of global warming — a deficit that persists despite increasingly urgent appeals.
“You only need to look at heatwaves in India and Pakistan (and) flooding in South Africa and Bangladesh threatening the lives of millions to see that providing the means for developing countries to adapt to the now-inevitable changes in climate is absolutely vital,” said Clare Shakya, director of climate change research at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).
International finance for adaptation, at little more than $20bn a year, remains far below the annual $70bn developing countries are estimated to need — an amount that could rise to $300bn by 2030, the UN has said.
In the 2015 Paris Agreement, donor governments said they would aim for a balance between international funding for emissions reductions and adaptation in vulnerable countries.
But only about a quarter of their annual climate finance is going to programmes to boost resilience through things like installing early warning systems for storms and floods, planting coast-protecting mangroves and adopting drought-tolerant crops.
At last November’s UN climate summit in Glasgow, governments responded to the glaring gap by urging rich countries to at least double the climate finance provided for developing nations to adapt, from its 2019 level to about $40bn per year by 2025.
But new analysis released by the IIED this week — aimed at untangling opaque figures — showed wealthy countries and multilateral development banks are on track to provide little more than half of that amount — only $21.8bn — by mid-decade.
IIED’s analysis of countries’ pledges and climate finance figures so far suggests rich countries will stump up $10.8bn in annual climate finance for adaptation by 2025, with multilateral institutions like the World Bank providing a further $11bn. – Thomson Reuters Foundation