Minister Barbara Creecy: Adaptation – prioritising people, lives and livelihoods | UNFCCC pre-CoP 28 Ministerial Meeting, 30 – 31 October 2023

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Emirates Palace

30 October 2023

The adaptation architecture that exists in the Paris Agreement has yet to be activated, mainly because adaptation is treated primarily as a national problem, with only sharing of best practices occurring at the international level. 

This is despite the wealth of scientific literature on adaptation, and the UNFCCC and its Paris Agreement clearly recognising adaptation as a global responsibility. African and other developing regions rank adaptation as their priority issue because they are already confronted with the reality of a changing climate. 

We cannot go backwards on this. It is important to reiterate that the multilateral climate change regime’s global goal on adaptation (GGA) is to lower the risk of adverse impacts due to climate change globally. This includes providing financial and technical support to developing countries to adapt and sharing practices and experiences. We have agreed now that we will have a framework to assess progress against the GGA, which will consist of key adaptation targets and associated indicators. The focus will be on how the multilateral system supports the reduction of impacts in individual countries, and where key gaps are which need addressing by the multilateral system. The legal context for this is the UNFCCC and its Paris Agreement. 

We are not in the business of telling countries how to adapt, but we are in the business of agreeing multilaterally what financial and technical support needs to be provided by the international community to developing countries, based on national needs, to meet these. It is thus critical that the GGA is concretised into a framework consisting of ambitious, specific, measurable, verifiable, and time-bound outcomes, and associated indicators to track this. 

I have to again stress, because the message seems to be getting lost, that this is of paramount importance to us as South Africa, and as a vulnerable African country, vulnerability we share with many other developing countries. We do not see how COP28 can be said to have an ambitious package outcome, without a strong outcome on the GGA, supported by a credible and dedicated funding stream.

I thank you