Leaders push for climate adaptation funding in the face of escalating risks

Summary

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This Week in Global Development

Episode: Leaders Push for Climate Adaptation Funding in the Face of Escalating Risks
Date: November 16, 2024

Overview:

In this special "Climate Plus" episode recorded onsite at COP 29 in Baku, hosts from Devex bring exclusive interviews and analysis on the global policy struggle to secure adequate funding for climate adaptation. Key leaders and advocates—including Kulthum Omari Motsumi (Africa Adaptation Initiative), Patrick Verkoyen (Global Center on Adaptation), and Tangaloa Cooper (South Pacific Regional Environment Program)—share on-the-ground perspectives on why adaptation remains underfunded, the urgency of reforming climate finance, and the distinct priorities of vulnerable regions, especially Africa and Pacific Island nations.

Main Theme:
While catastrophic climate impacts accelerate, adaptation finance remains insufficient compared to mitigation. Leaders debate why, discuss the consequences, and call for immediate action to improve and scale up support for communities most at risk.

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Key Segments, Insights & Quotes

1. The Complex Landscape of Adaptation Funding

Interview: Kulthum Omari Motsumi, Special Advisor, Africa Adaptation Initiative
Timestamps: [02:41]–[12:26]

• Fragmentation of Funds:
  Multiple specialized funds (e.g., GCF, Adaptation Fund, Loss and Damage Fund) create confusion and competition for limited resources.

  "We have lots of different bodies popping up all the time ... Is that making it harder to get money into adaptation? Is it pulling away from that and going instead to loss and damage?" — Jesse Chase Lubitz, [01:44]

• Slow Processes Leave Vulnerable Populations Exposed:

  "The accreditation process for us African countries to even be able to access funds from the GCF takes years ... By then people are dead." — Kulthum Omari Motsumi, [04:33]

• Distinct Needs for Loss & Damage vs. Adaptation:
  Loss and damage funding must be rapid for acute disasters, while adaptation needs are broader and more systemic.

What Adaptation Really Means

• Beyond Traditional Sectors:
  Adaptation involves rethinking all areas of development—water, health, food, even cultural heritage—to integrate climate risk.

  "We need to do that differently. We need to adjust because climate change is here ... That adjustment of doing things so you're able to cater or integrate climate into the way you do planning is, in my view, adaptation." — Kulthum Omari Motsumi, [05:55]

• Health as an Adaptation Issue:
  Rising mortality from heatstroke and disease is now part of the adaptation discussion, not just infrastructure.

Risks of Maladaptation

• Inadvertent Harm:
  Large projects (e.g., land reclamation) must undergo multi-dimensional impact assessments to avoid unintended social or environmental harm.

  "I know there is the word maladaptation ... We need to think about these. What is the impact of some of these adaptation actions, even in the long term?" — Kulthum Omari Motsumi, [09:52]

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2. Bridging the Adaptation Finance Gap

Interview: Patrick Verkoyen, CEO, Global Center on Adaptation
Timestamps: [13:13]–[24:33]

• Adaptation is Chronically Underfunded:

  "Three years ago ... the international community agreed ... to double adaptation finance from $20 billion a year to $40 billion a year. And where are we today? We're far off that doubling." — Patrick Verkoyen, [15:58]

• Reasons for the Gap:
  • 90–95% of climate finance goes to mitigation because it is easier to measure; adaptation's impacts are "less defined."
  • ROI for adaptation is less direct for business, so governments must lead.

  "Adaptation at the end of the day is about development ... but through a human-centered lens." — Patrick Verkoyen, [16:59]

• People's Adaptation Plans:
  Effective solutions start with communities identifying what resilience means for them—then connecting those priorities to major finance institutions.

  "[In Bangladesh,] we sit with local communities and ask ... What are your needs? ... They know exactly what the climatic impact [is] because you're living it." — Patrick Verkoyen, [18:34]

• The Need for Speed and Scale:

  "We are running out of time. The climate impact is spinning out of control ... We're sitting in this race car which basically doesn't have any brakes, we forgot to put our seat belts on and we don't have the guardrails in place." — Patrick Verkoyen, [21:11]

Geopolitical Concerns & US Leadership

• With shifting US politics (i.e., a potential Trump administration), there is fear of backsliding on commitments.

  "The big elephant in the room here in Baku is the Trump administration, right? ... What will be the implication of a potential pullout of the US from the Paris Accord?" — Patrick Verkoyen, [22:44]

• Reframing the Conversation:
  To protect progress, climate adaptation must be discussed as a matter of resilience, jobs, and economic security—not just environmental or moral imperatives.

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3. Adaptation at the Front Line: The Pacific Island Perspective

Interview: Tangaloa Cooper, Director, Climate Change Resilience Program, SPREP
Timestamps: [24:33]–[34:24]

• An Existential Reality:
  Pacific nations are losing land, species, and culture now—not in a distant future.

  "We are on the front lines. I don't think the Global North realizes what the front line looks like, what the impacts look like." — Tangaloa Cooper, [25:14]

• The Scale of Required Funding:

  "We really shouldn't be talking about 100 billion anymore. We should be talking about trillions of dollars in support ... The world mobilized and came up with trillions for COVID-19 and climate change is not urgent enough? That baffles me." — Tangaloa Cooper, [27:18]

• The Window for Adaptation is Closing:
  When funding lags, critical chances to protect food systems, species, and livelihoods are lost—sometimes permanently.

  "For some ... the adaptation window has already closed. For some species that we have lost due to climate change, we have lost the opportunity to allow those species to adapt because we have missed funding windows." — Tangaloa Cooper, [29:05]

• Access Barriers:
  Complex, bureaucratic application processes (e.g., for GCF funds) block small island states from securing adaptation finance, even as needs become more urgent.

  "The irony is they were set up for developing countries, but the processes are so bureaucratic ... Most of the smaller countries ... don't have spare capacity to be dedicated to developing projects." — Tangaloa Cooper, [32:23]

• Actionable National Plans Risk Going Nowhere Without Funding:

  "What we don't want ... is for those [national adaptation] plans ... to have gone through two to three years of developing ... and then sit on a shelf because there's no money and the cupboard is bare." — Tangaloa Cooper, [31:18]

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Notable Quotes

• Kulthum Omari Motsumi:

  "You have to now adjust how you distribute your water or how you manage your water at the national level ... that adjustment ... is in my view adaptation." [05:55]

• Patrick Verkoyen:

  "It is about development but through a human-centered lens ... It’s complex and super simple. It’s smart development and hence resilient development." [16:59]
  "We're sitting in this race car which basically doesn't have any brakes, ... Is that a smart way to run our economies? Probably not." [21:11]

• Tangaloa Cooper:

  "We really shouldn’t be talking about 100 billion anymore. We should be talking about trillions of dollars in support." [27:18]
  "For some ... the adaptation window has already closed. For some species that we have lost due to climate change, we have lost the opportunity to allow those species to adapt because we have missed funding windows." [29:05]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:41] Kulthum Omari Motsumi on fragmented funding and urgent needs for Africa
• [05:55] Defining adaptation and its cross-sectoral impact
• [09:52] Risks of maladaptation – the need for holistic decision-making
• [13:49] Patrick Verkoyen on why adaptation finance lags and economic framing
• [16:59] Challenges in measuring adaptation ROI & example from Bangladesh
• [21:11] Verkoyen’s "race car" analogy and accelerating climate impacts
• [22:44] US political risks and reframing adaptation in economic terms
• [25:14] Tangaloa Cooper on Pacific adaptation realities
• [27:18] The demand for trillions, not billions, for effective adaptation
• [29:05] Closed adaptation windows for Pacific species and communities
• [32:23] Barriers to finance access for small island states

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Conclusion

This episode provides sobering testimony that climate adaptation remains the "poor cousin" in global climate finance—and that, for many vulnerable nations, the cost of delay is measured in lost lives, livelihoods, and ecosystems. As COP 29 negotiations intensify, leaders are calling not just for more money, but for faster, easier, and more equitable access to funds. Without urgent action, the adaptation window may close for the world’s most at-risk communities.

Call to Action:
Adaptation must take center stage in global priorities—with streamlined funding processes and massive increases in resources, else the opportunity to protect the most vulnerable will be irrevocably lost.

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Transcript

[A]

Hello and welcome to another episode of this week in Global Development. I'm Rajkumar, the President and Editor in Chief here at devex, and you're listening to a special edition of our podcast that we're calling Climate Plus. I'm on the ground in Baku along with my colleagues Jesse Chase Lubitz and Ayanat Merci to bring you behind the scenes coverage of the key issues and debates at this critical climate conference. You're going to get to listen in as we talk to some of the leaders that are shaping climate finance and its impact on health, food and much more. If you're in Baku, we hope you'll reach out to us. Listen as we talk to the leaders that are shaping this space and tell us what you'd like to hear.

[B]

Hi, I'm Jesse Chase Lubitz and I'm coming to you from COP 29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. In this episode, I talk to leading voices in the adaptation finance debate. First, you'll hear from Kulthum Omari Motsumi, Special Advisor to the Africa Adaptation Initiative. Next you'll hear from Patrick Verkoyen, CEO of the Global center on Adaptation. Finally, you'll learn about the Pacific islands priorities at COP 29 with Tangaloa Cooper, Director of the Climate Change Resilience Program at the South Pacific Regional Environment Program, or sprep. They explore why climate adaptation is underfunded. They talk about their hopes for COP 29, and they discuss how financing can protect vulnerable communities. Let's start with Kulthum. She spoke openly about the slow pace of financing for adaptation since the Africa Adaptation Initiative was launched back in 2015. Ghulthum calls on institutions like the Green Climate Fund, or gcf, to offer streamlined access to funds. We have lots of different bodies popping up all the time in these types of meetings. So obviously we have the Loss and Damage Fund, we have the Adaptation Fund. Do you think that the gcf, the gcf, we've got hundreds of them, a lot. Do you feel like the creation of these new funds or organizations, whatever, is that making it harder to get money into adaptation? Is it pulling away funding from that and going instead to loss and damage? Because some of these things have a lot of overlap. Right. It can be hard to really understand what the difference is between adaptation and resilience and loss and damage. So is there has less attention been put on adaptation ever since loss and damage came up?

[C]

Yes and no. Yes, because we are beginning to see more of these extreme events that are linked to loss and damage. So even if you don't want to talk about loss and damage. It's staring at you in your face. And we're beginning to see a lot more of these events, droughts, a lot more extreme droughts, floods and so on and so forth. So it's becoming more a reality, loss and damage and these sort of events and extreme events. And so the push towards the establishment of the Loss and Damage Fund was necessary, given all these developments, what that will mean in the landscape of climate finance. I think we still maintain that as Africa, we still maintain that we need to treat adaptation mitigation in a balanced manner, but significantly increase financing for loss and damage. Why? I'm saying that because loss and damage is completely different. There will be a completely different modality for loss and damage. Right? So loss and damage will have financing. Has to be fast. I mean, when you have a flood, you can't wait for a process to get accredited and all of that. Processes that then will allow you to get the funding from a particular institution which, as we know it can take up to three years, right, to get the funds. By then people are dead. You know, there's quite significant impacts happening on the ground. So the modality within which loss and damage financing will have to be accessed will have to be completely reformed or completely different from what we have currently. So I think that's a conversation to be had. I don't think that the current institutions that are funding adaptation are set up in that manner. So I'm not. They're, you know, take the GCF for example. The accreditation process for US African countries to even be able to access funds from the GCF takes years, you know, and I mean, it's designed that way. It's designed, of course, to increase access to developing countries, but all those requirements make it really cumbersome for particularly poorer countries or countries that don't have the capacities to be able to access or to develop proposals and so on and so forth. So it's very difficult and challenging to get financing from the gcf. But compare that to loss and damage, things have to change. Obviously. You have to access the plants very quickly.

[B]

I just want to go back to the basics, a little bit of what adaptation really means. I know that it can be anything from education to drought resistant crops to massive infrastructure projects that involve, you know, moving land around. Essentially. My first question is, which, which of these are you working on personally? What do you actually see going on mainly? What does adaptation mean in your experience?

[C]

So adaptation for us means the way we have been, the way We've been doing development the way we've been doing things, the way we've been. We need to do that differently. We need to adjust because climate change is here. We cannot say do water supply in the same manner that we did because climate change will impact your water. We'll get less water, for example, water scarcity. Do we need to do water reuse, water recycling and so on and so forth? Because we know that in 5, 10 years time the water that we are expecting from surface water is going to decrease, say by 30%. Right. You have to now adjust how you distribute your water or how you manage your water at the national level so that you don't disrupt water supply, portable water supply systems, but you put in measures in place so that you still are able to deliver water to your people despite the impacts of climate change. That to me, that adjustment of doing things so that you're able to cater or integrate climate into the way you do planning is in my view adaptation. And adaptation cuts across all sectors. From not just food, like he talks about, drought resistant crops, but it's water, like I said, its health. We're beginning to see that more sectors that are sort of your non traditional climate sensitive sectors being brought into this discussion. For example, we're actually seeing increased rate of mortality, increased rate of mortality, right. As a result of heat strokes, as a result of vector borne diseases, as a result of all of these. Because these are all climate sensitive sort of health related issues. So we actually even bringing those non traditional sectors into this discussion of adaptation because it cuts across everything and even within the global goal adaptation, we are also even talking about cultural heritage. So for example, many parts of Africa, they've got these heritage sites. Even for example the Zambezi water for example, which is a beautiful water source or water body that attracts lots of animals and so on and so forth, they're beginning to shrink and it's impacting downstream, even tourism and so on and so forth. So even cultural heritage heritage sites and so on. So it's impacting that. So adaptation is what measures you put in place in order to ensure that those impacts are minimized.

[B]

Okay. Do you feel like there is the potential for adaptation to go wrong? And I'm specifically talking about the big infrastructure types of adaptations. So land reclamation, for example, when you dig up some sand from the ocean floor, put it, you know, to make a new island or add land to an existing island, that's a mechanism. I mean, I think they're doing that in Lagos and Dakar and a ton of Pacific Islands. But we don't really know what the impact of moving land around is going to be in 30 years time. And there are other examples like that this is such an unprecedented time that like our reaction could create other consequences. Is this something you're thinking about?

[C]

I mean from, from. I'm also a scientist and an IPCC author in AR6, the sixth assessment report of the IPCCI contributed to that. So that's a very useful. It's a good question in the sense that we need to think about these. What is, what is the impact of some of these adaptation sort of action that we do and even in the long term, what is the impact of that? You know, I know there is the word maladaptation that many people have been able to use and that is correct. It is possible and we do. From my perspective, I think the framing or the lens that I like to use is looking at these three sort of pillars of sustainable development, you know, so we look at the environmental aspects, we look at the social aspects and the economic aspects because I think once you. It's a very crude way of looking at it, but I think it's something that helps when you are thinking about some of the interventions or adaptation options that one may implement or may consider. Because the example that you gave, one needs to consider what is the impact on, what is the social impact of this initiative or this adaptation option? What is the environmental impact? So not just considering one and leaving out the others, I particularly like the social aspect. How are people going to be impacted in not just now, but 10 years, 20 years, 30 years from now? How is the entire ecosystem going to be impacted because of these kinds of activities that we're doing, not just now, 10, 20 years from now. So I like to think of at least having that lens when we analyze adaptation options. And we tend to see that there are some adaptation options that are maladaptive and they do exist. But we hope that through this process, through the global goal and adaptation process, we can begin to sort of work with or at least support countries in ensuring that these adaptation options are sort of. They build resilience, they build of communities, they build resilience of ecosystems and they build resilience of our economies.

[B]

Are you interested in the intersection of business and social impact? Do you want to know how corporate sustainability, esg, impact investing and more can.

[D]

Contribute to development finance?

[B]

My name is Advaah Saldinger. I'm a senior reporter at devex and I've been reporting on these issues for nearly a decade. I'm the author of devex Invested, our free weekly newsletter dedicated to development finance. Every Tuesday, we explore how companies, investors and market mechanisms are reshaping the world of development finance.

[D]

Visit devex.com newsletters and join us on Tuesdays.

[B]

I also sat down with Patrick Verkoyan to get his perspective on the global financing landscape for adaptation. Patrick stressed the urgency of increasing adaptation finance and raised concerns about maintaining climate commitments. With the changing global political dynamics, especially the recent election of President Donald Trump in the United States, his call to action for COP 29 was clear. We need to reimagine the Paris Agreement's focus on resilient economies as climate impacts accelerate worldwide. Let's just start with your job. What do you focus on? What do you do every day and what do you care about here in Baku?

[E]

So what we do as a global center on adaptation is to make the case, but particularly not from an environmental perspective per se, or from a moral perspective per se, but mainly from the economic side of things. If you invest in this, your return on adaptation is much higher than if you don't invest in this. So we work in agriculture, we work in infrastructure, obviously, and energy systems and our niche. So we provide the analytics for that. So our niche is just to connect these local solutions with financing from the international finance institutions. If you work at the World bank and you develop say, a large transport project in say, Senegal, we work then with the World bank team and the Senegalese government to make sure that that transport project is resilient, that is will not be washed away, washed away by the next flood. So it's a very practical agenda. So back to your opening question. Why am I here in Baku? Obviously, the key agenda item at this particular climate summit is about financing. I mean, the international community is now negotiating on this new collective quantifier. So the goal of financing from rich countries to basically poor countries, and it should be much more than what was committed to in 2009, which was obviously $100 billion a year. So is it $500 billion? Is it a trillion dollars? And then who will pay? My preoccupation, or perhaps even me, more self critical, my obsession is how much money of the new goal will be spent on adaptation and how much money will be coming through in the coming years. Final point, 2021. If we were to have this conversation three years ago and we were sitting at a similar climate summit setup, three years ago, the international community agreed in Glasgow to double adaptation finance from rich countries to the Global south from $20 billion a year to $40 billion a year. And where are we today? We're far off that doubling. So my, my sort of, I have sort of a mixed perspective of what we're doing here today. On the one hand, we're negotiating the new climate finance commitment, but I fear that we also may look folks lose focus on the original commitment. Right. It's, there's sort of a tendency in the international community to have one goal, another aspiration followed by another aspiration. I think it's far more effective. First deliver what you promised before and then scale from that.

[B]

When you talk about adaptation and what the point is, it seems very obvious why wouldn't we put money into this? And yet it is perennially underfunded. Right. We have 187 to 359 billion dollar gap right now annually. Why is it so difficult to get money to adaptation?

[E]

Well, first and foremost, if you just look at the climate finance envelope, the money which is flowing Today, it's indeed 90, 95% which goes to mitigation. Right. Reducing our carbon footprint. Why is that easier to invest in? Because it is easier to measure. It's a carbon, a ton of carbon being reduced. It's very tangible what you do with adaptation. It's much less sort of defined on what adaptation finance exactly is. Because adaptation at the end of the day is about development. It is about a young mother in Bangladesh who flees the southern part of the country with an incoming SO cyclone because of the early warning system which is being in place. It is about the drought tolerance seeds being used by smallholder farmers. It is about building our infrastructure differently. So it is development but through a human centered lens. And so the sort of, the co benefits of adaptation in development is very clear. But how to measure that I think that is slightly more difficult. That's one thing. The second piece which makes it slightly more complicated to investigate in is the return on investment for business. Right. If you invest in say energy efficiency, basically your energy bill at the end of the day will be less at the end of the month. And you as a consumer know exactly what sort of where your benefits are in case of adaptation benefits. The dike which is being built obviously has as clear economic and sort of security benefits, but the financial sort of return on that particular investment is much less clear. That is why it's very important that governments across the globe invest in adaptation because basically it is about securing the well being of their societies in which they would like to thrive. So it is sort of a complex agenda. But for me it's at the same time it's complex and super simple. It's about development, is about smart development and hence resilient development. And the good thing is we see lots of examples across the globe where local communities are investing in adaptation. Let me give you an example. Very recently I was in Mongla. Mongla is a secondary city in Bangladesh. So the Bangladesh government has this objective to reduce migration from secondary cities to Dhaka. And that secondary city migration to Dhaka is largely driven by climatic events. When the cyclones come in, when the floods come, people leave sort of these areas and come to Dhaka to reduce the pressure on Dhaka as a mega city. What now the idea is, is to invest in climate adaptation in these secondary cities. So what happens in Monglao? We have a program together with the Asian Development bank and the World bank where we sit with local communities and we ask them a very simple question. What are the adaptation priorities which you have, meaning what are your needs in terms of, of water, sanitation, infrastructure? They know really well if you live in a sort of informal settlement in Mongolia, you know exactly what the climatic impact because you're living it. So what we're developing with these local communities are so called people's adaptation plans. So it's a bottom up economic transformation where they come forward and say, okay, my priorities are 1, 2, 3, 4. But it is no use of obviously to have a people's adaptation plan if it's not funded. So our role as global center on adaptation is in essence we're a transmission belt. You have a people's adaptation plan and we link that up with large scale financing, in this instance the Asian Development bank or the World bank, so that they invest in these local communities, but based on their priorities. I think these are very exciting sort of examples. But what they need, they need scale. They need to be replicated across the country, across the continent, in fact, across the world, and they need speed. We are running out of time. The climate impact is spinning out of control. So basically I feel at times even now here in Baku, that we sitting in this race car which basically doesn't have any brakes, we forgot to put our seat belts on and we don't have the guardrails in place. Is that a smart way of driving? Probably not. Equivalently, is that a smart way to run our economies? Probably not. So my sense is what we need to do in Baku or at these climate events is to rephrase basically and reimagine the Paris agreement. It should be much less focused on the argument of pollution control, important as it is, but it should be much More about resilient economies. I think in this day and age, particularly against this sort of geo economic reality. I think the adaptation agenda, given that we're way off track on the mitigation side, given that the impacts already being felt across the globe, we now have to massively double down on adaptation. And I think in Baku we need to send that signal that we're ready to do so.

[B]

So you mentioned, as far as this COP goes, you mentioned the ncq, you're keeping an eye on that. Is there anything else you're looking at closely in the negotiations specifically, you know, the adaptation fund. Is that something that you're.

[E]

Yes. So as I said, where I'm particularly focused on is indeed is about this large goal for climate finance in sort of for. For the future and the delivery of the previous goal on adaptation finance from 2020, 21. The doubling and the third piece, which is front and center, which we haven't discussed yet, is basically the big elephant in the room here in Baku is the Trump administration, right? The incoming Trump administration. And then the question is, what will be the implication of a potential pullout of the US from the Paris Accord, perhaps even the whole climate convention? My take is this. Whether you are from a blue state or a red state, I mean the climate impacts are really there already. I think climate resilience is being felt by sort of by Main Street American citizens and is also being felt by, by Wall street given the financial implications they're already experiencing. But if we should reframe the debate again, my working assumption is that under a Trump administration speaking of climate adaptation may not necessarily lead to productive outcome in collaboration with the United States federal government. But speaking about resilient economies, speaking about jobs, speaking about growth, might be a different way of framing which leads to productive outcomes. And that is my at least conviction where we should go from Baku going forward. We cannot give up on adaptation. In fact, given we're so far off track on lowering our carbon footprint, there's no other way to go than invest and double down on that.

[B]

Tangaloa Cooper traveled to COP 29 from Samoa where she serves as Director of the Climate Change Resilience Program at the South Pacific Regional Environment Program or sprep. She offered powerful insights into the urgent need for increased adaptation funding for Pacific island nations. In particular, she emphasized the vital role of nature based solutions, called for a shift from traditional aid to grant based support, and highlighted the importance of more coordination and commitment from donors. This COP is really important. Every COP is really important to Pacific island nations. You're really at the front lines of climate change. What are you seeing as kind of the most pressing issues for island nations and adaptation today?

[D]

Adaptation. I'll start first with your comment on this cop and every cop being important for the Pacific because we are on the front lines. I don't think the Global north realized what the front line looks like, what the impacts look like. And yesterday President Hilda Heine from the Marshall Islands in her statement did reference that nobody's immune. So what the the front line looks like for us now that maybe a lot of people in the Global north don't realize or don't see to understand is the reason why we have a pavilion here so that Pacific people can tell their stories about living on the front line, about living with the impacts of climate change. And of course, adaptation is important to us. So I want to say loss and damage is important to the Pacific as well. But adaptation right now is critical because as you know, there will come a point where we can't adapt anymore. So we are pleased that there is the Loss and Damage Fund that can address needs in loss and damage that are already happening in the Pacific. But for us, the investment has, it's critical that the right investment is made in adaptation now because now and before now, leading up to the now, adaptation needs have been, you know, underfunded for the Pacific. And so when you talk about the 100 billion ceiling, we really shouldn't be talking about 100 billion anymore. We should be talking about trillions of dollars in support. And look at what happened when Covid happened. The world mobilized and came up with trillions of dollars to address COVID 19 and climate change is not urgent enough. That baffles me. But you know, I know as a person living, living on the front line, it's not something that a lot of people and a lot of developed countries can see and touch, like COVID 19. They could see with their eyes the impacts in their own countries. But this is like a problem that's so far away. But we are here, our countries are here to say the problem is here and it's now and it's not going away. And it's not going to go away until there is global commitment to increase funding, simplified access to ensure that money flows, finance flows, so that small island states can benefit from it.

[B]

You know, loss and damage is great. But right now we need adaptation funding. What do you see as the window for that?

[D]

First of all, there has to be conclusion, an ambitious conclusion to the new collective quantified goal. There has to. And it has to be enough funding. The operationalization of it needs to be real and simplified. Right. And so that needs to happen now. There needs to be global agreement that, one, it's important and two, that we are going to commit to a much higher threshold of funding.

[B]

Do you see that? Do we have a period of time, a number of years, before adaptation is no longer possible?

[D]

In some cases, adaptation is no longer possible. Now, for some of our species and species, biodiversity, marine species that we have lost, that our countries depend on for food sources, against also their traditional knowledge and practices, for some of, some of the adaptation of those elements, we've lost that opportunity. It depends on how you view what is adaptation.

[B]

What about four Pacific island nations? I know they're all different.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

For some, has the window already closed?

[D]

For most.

[B]

Okay, but.

[D]

But it's the context and the question. Yeah, we can't. I won't. I'm not here to say the windows close for adaptation. No, it's not. We need funding for adaptation. Now. What I'm saying is for some things that we have lost, we have lost the opportunity to adapt. For some, some species that we have lost due to climate change, we have lost the opportunity to allow those species to adapt because we have missed funding windows. What we have now is an opportunity for funding, I mean, an opportunity still for adaptation, to address adaptation. And I can tell you, every country in the country Pacific has adaptation priorities. We're working with six countries right now who are developing their national adaptation plans. So when they are done with those national adaptation plans, that will be a collective with a collection of priorities that chart a way forward for each of those countries that will require finance. What we don't want those adaptation plans or any of the priorities of the Pacific countries in adaptation is for those to have gone through two to three years of developing full consultation in country to develop those priorities agreed to at the highest level, and then sit on a shelf because there's no money and the cupboard is bare to implement those priorities. And that's why the NDCs are so important as well, because those show the priorities of countries moving, you know, regularly and being updated. So. But for the Pacific, you know, we have the multilateral funds at GCF and the adaptation fund, but you will hear Pacific countries talk about how difficult they are to access. And then the irony is they were set up for developing countries, but the processes involved are so bureaucratic and so cumbersome that most of the smaller, smaller countries where people wear five hats don't have the spare capacity to be dedicated to developing projects, proposals to reach a bankable stage. And that's where our countries also need the help of our organizations to assist and fill that gap. The gap that remains is finance. The challenge we still face is accessing that finance so it can in real terms flow into countries so that they can implement their work. The Pacific haven't come here to talk about adaptation needs without knowing what they're talking about. They've got their plans, they've got their priorities, they know what they need. And some of them have started developing project proposals only to come up against a wall where you need funding to develop those projects, the next steps and even in the first stage of so you can get from the GCF project preparation funds. But to get to that point, there needs to be an investment first. And small land developing states don't have that luxury. Right.

[B]

Going back to the finance gap a bit between mitigation and adaptation, Pacific island countries still get mitigation funding. Right. How is that used in comparison? I mean adaptation covers a lot of different things. Right. So what's the use of mitigation?

[D]

Some of our countries have actually quite a Most of our countries have invested in renewable energy, clean energy, to support the national grid. So that's happening in most countries and in the Pacific. And a lot of our countries also are looking at clean energy, clean transportation. This one of our countries has developed a project proposal for cleaner shipping, you know, between islands. Yeah. So mitigation is important to the Pacific, but it has to happen hand in hand.

[A]

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