For the general public, discussions at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COPs) mainly concern the measures that countries need to adopt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which cause global warming. The central debate revolves around reducing emissions in order to limit the increase in global temperature to 1.5°C. This is the main point of the Paris Agreement and is called climate mitigation.

However, another less visible but equally important issue is climate adaptation, i.e., the actions that need to be taken to adjust both human and natural systems to the effects of climate change, which are already a reality around the world. The goal is to reduce vulnerabilities and increase the capacity of communities, ecosystems, and economies to deal with these effects with less impact.

Since the Paris Agreement was signed during COP 21 in 2015, there has been talk of defining the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), which should specify adaptation targets and indicators to be followed by countries. After eight years of negotiations, a framework for the GGA was finally defined at COP 28 in Dubai in 2023. On that occasion, seven thematic targets for action were agreed upon: water supply and sanitation; food and agriculture; health impacts and health services; ecosystems and biodiversity; infrastructure and human settlements; poverty eradication and livelihoods; and cultural heritage and traditional knowledge.

CONCEPTS

Although they are terms with similar meanings, climate adaptation and climate resilience do not mean the same thing. It is as if adaptation were the path and resilience were the result.

According to Flávia Martinelli, a climate change specialist at the environmental organization WWF Brazil, climate adaptation refers to measures taken to help cities or other environments prepare for increasingly extreme weather conditions. "It involves, for example, preparing cities for floods, inundations, or heat waves. Resilience, on the other hand, is a way of measuring how well environments are adapted. The more adapted to climate scenarios, the more resilient they are," explains the biologist.

Inamara Mélo, director of the Department for Adaptation and Resilience to Climate Change at the Ministry of the Environment (MMA), reinforces this idea. "If you adapt, if you adopt measures to prevent or reduce climate impacts, you make communities or infrastructure more resilient. We need to expand adaptation measures in order to increase the resilience of populations, territories, and infrastructure," she says.
Ima Vieira, PhD in Ecology and researcher at the Emílio Goeldi Museum of Pará (MPEG), points out some practical examples of adaptation: “You can change the agricultural calendar to adapt to new rainy seasons or develop agricultural crops that are resistant to drought.”

Letter from the COP 30 Presidency

The COP edition in Belém used an unprecedented resource to address the most relevant issues of the Conference: letters from the presidency. Ten letters have been released to the international community since March this year, signed by the president of COP 30, Ambassador André Corrêa do Lago. The eighth letter, dated October 23, dealt precisely with the theme of adaptation.

In the document, the diplomat stated that COP 30 should be the COP of adaptation, with advances in the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) and National Adaptation Plans (NAPs).

Corrêa do Lago also emphasized the underfunding of the area. “Funding for adaptation still represents less than a third of total climate finance, far short of what is needed. The chronic lack of investment leaves countries vulnerable. Many communities are already undertaking local and experimental adaptation initiatives, but these efforts are often under-recognized, underfunded, and poorly connected to national planning,” he said.

GLOBAL SCENARIO

A few days before the start of COP 30, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) released the “Adaptation Gap Report 2025: Running on Reserve,” precisely to support the Conference negotiations. According to the document, developing countries need more than US$310 billion per year in adaptation financing until 2035, which is twelve times more than current flows to the area. In 2023, for example, only US$26 billion was contributed in public adaptation financing.

“Until very recently, the data we had showed that 95% of climate finance was allocated to mitigation and only 5% to the adaptation agenda. So, we need to value this agenda,” emphasizes Inamara Mélo, from the MMA

GGA

For Inamara Mélo, climate adaptation brings a complex debate to the COPs. "The adaptation agenda involves many different local contexts, although we managed, at COP 28 in Dubai, to approve the thematic goals, making it very clear what the global objectives on the adaptation agenda should be. We are talking about the search for food security, the resilience of cities, the protection of cultural heritage, and the conservation of ecosystems. We have made progress in the discussions, but we need to move more quickly in implementing measures," she points out.

According to the director of the MMA, a commitment has been made to define indicators for the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), to be agreed upon at COP 30. "We need this to move forward with the agenda and hold countries accountable for how each one is progressing in implementing adaptation measures. This list of indicators is complex because it deals with global goals based on national circumstances. Predicting a set of indicators that applies to all countries is not a simple task. We managed to reduce the list from over 4,000 indicators to 100. But, in a way, it is important to say that we already know what needs to be done and we need a political decision and resources to implement these measures," he explains.

Flávia Martinelli agrees that, more important than reaching a consensus on indicators, is defining the financing for implementation. "The main justification that countries give for not moving forward with adaptation is that they do not have the money to implement these actions. Indeed, these are expensive measures, such as changing city structures or preparing agriculture to be more resilient, for example. These are measures that require investment. Poorer countries, for example, do not always have these resources. Developed countries have the money for this and take adaptation measures. So, there is this imbalance. This is also a subject of dispute, whether or not developed countries will finance these adaptation solutions in developing countries," she explains.

Brazilian plan covers 16 areas

For Inamara Mélo, it is important to make it clear that adaptation is not just about disaster risk management. "Today, we have to understand adaptation in the design of every public policy. Adaptation in the health agenda, looking at the context of extreme heat, diseases resulting from climate change, housing, basic sanitation, and more resilient food production. If we have more public services, more policies that meet people's basic rights, we will already have greatly reduced vulnerabilities, and therefore, these people will be better prepared to deal with the climate context," she says.

In this regard, the federal government has developed, in a participatory manner, the Climate Adaptation Plan, which involves the National Adaptation Strategy and Sectoral Adaptation Plans in 16 areas, including agriculture and livestock, biodiversity, cities and mobility, risk and disaster management, energy, water resources, and health.

"We are pleased to announce that we have finalized the Climate Adaptation Plan and presented the results of two years of work at COP 30, with the participation of 25 ministries and the production of 300 targets and more than 800 measures to reduce climate impacts in 16 sectors and themes. But these are the Federal Government's targets. We understand that national adaptation goals also need to be incorporated by states and municipalities. That is why we launched the AdaptaCidades tool, to empower these federal entities and support them in developing their local adaptation strategies," highlights Inamara.

For Flávia Martinelli, the challenge of the Climate Adaptation Plan is, once again, financing. "It's a good plan, it has good goals, but the implementation and financing aspects are lacking. And there is the challenge that adaptation is very much related to the local level. States and municipalities also need to invest. So, it's another level of dispute, between how the federal government will finance this adaptation at the local level and how it will reach the end users, the indigenous peoples, the cities, the suburbs," the expert analyzes.

Ima Vieira, from MPEG, agrees on the difficulty of financing. “Brazil would need a lot of resources to implement this strategy. And there is also the difficulty of technical complexity. The adaptation agenda is very dense in terms of training and knowledge and requires massive capacity on the part of public managers. There are 16 different sectors, each with its own governance and priorities, with the risk of fragmentation of actions. But I am optimistic. And one of the positive highlights is that it was a very participatory, transparent process with a solid scientific basis," she says.

HEALTH

During COP 30, Brazil launched the first international climate adaptation document dedicated to health, the “Belém Health Action Plan for the adaptation of the health sector to climate change.” The text proposes actions for countries to deal with the effects of climate change on health. According to a study conducted by more than 100 scientists, extreme heat already kills around 550,000 people per year.

The plan proposed by Brazil consists of three lines of action linked by cross-cutting concepts of health equity, climate justice, and participatory governance. The operation will be coordinated in collaboration with the “Aliança para Ação Transformadora em Clima e Saúde” (Atach) [Alliance for Transformative Action on Climate and Health], under the supervision of the World Health Organization (WHO). The Climate and Health Finance Coalition has announced an initial investment of US$300 million for the initiative.

URGENCY

According to Flávia Martinelli, adaptation, which was not previously treated with the same importance as mitigation, is gaining more attention. "But it needs to address more difficult topics, such as financing and structuring adaptation measures. COP 30 was like the beginning of greater emphasis on adaptation at the political level, but we need urgent implementation because we are already suffering the impacts. The increasingly intense heat here in Belém is one example," she comments.

“We need the GGA to be a priority so that tools are available to monitor the progress of adaptation in countries as soon as possible. Taking action on adaptation means saving lives and resources,” says the expert.
 

INSTITUTIONAL PARTNERSHIP
The production of Liberal Amazon is one of the initiatives of the Technical Cooperation Agreement between the Liberal Group and the Federal University of Pará. The articles involving research from UFPA are revised by professionals from the academy. The translation of the content is also provided by the agreement, through the research project ET-Multi: Translation Studies: multifaces and multisemiotics.