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Are you interested in how global efforts changed to address climate change in the last 30 years?
Our debate today works with the UN report titled 30 years of adaptation under the Convention and the Paris Agreement from 2024, by the United Nations Climate Change Adaptation Committee.
This is a great preparation to our next panel conversation with Hudson Worsley, Matt Gijselman and Allan Savory in episode 400 talking about the change and potential additional road needed to be covered by public discourse.
Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how the conversations have changed regarding climate change. This report serves as a roadmap to assess collective progress through initiatives.
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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today we will introduce a research by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original investigation, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole documentation. This conversation was produced and generated with Notebook LM as two hosts dissecting the whole research.
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Speaker 1: 2024 is a year that really demands some reflection. It marks exactly 30 years since the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The U-N-F-C-C entered into force that is three decades of multilateralism, three decades of trying to figure out how a fractured world responds to a warming planet. But today, specifically, we are looking at the evolution of one word in that discourse adaptation,
Speaker 2: or as I see it, 30 years of watching this ship take on water while the crew argues about the font size on the life raft instructions.
Speaker 1: That is exactly the tension we’re here to explore. In 1994, adaptation, the whole idea of adjusting our systems to cope with climate impacts was seen as almost a distraction. It was a taboo subject because policy makers feared that if we talked about adapting, we were admitting defeat on stopping emissions today. It is a central pillar of climate policy codified in the Paris Agreement, supported by this massive, sophisticated infrastructure of planning and reporting.
Speaker 2: And yet the central question, the one that actually matters, remains unanswered, has this huge shift in discourse from seeking legitimacy to comprehensive planning, actually created a machine for survival. Or has it just created a bureaucratic labyrinth. I look at the last 30 years and I see US trading action for reporting. We are mistaking the production of paper plans, communications reports for actual progress, while the finance and implementation gaps just widen into a chasm,
Speaker 1: I get this skepticism toward bureaucracy. It’s easy to mock the paperwork. My position is that this evolution represents a genuine triumph of international cooperation. We have moved from, frankly, total ignorance to a sophisticated iterative infrastructure. I’m talking about national adaptation plans, naps, the global stock take. This isn’t just paper. It’s the necessary architecture for managing these huge, complex risks. You can’t solve a planetary crisis without a planetary plan.
Speaker 2: I’m here to argue that the discourse has just mutated into paralysis by analysis. We are managing the decline through paperwork. When you look at the hard data, the widening finance gap, the fact that implementation is plateauing, it becomes pretty clear that the discourse is now functioning as a shield for inaction. We’ve built a library while the world burns.
Speaker 1: Let’s start at the beginning because to understand the library, you have to understand the void that existed before it. I wanna articulate why I believe the last 30 years represent a success, at least in terms of framework. If you go back to 1994, the focus was almost exclusively on mitigation. On stopping carbon, the very idea of adapting to climate change. It struggled to gain any legitimacy at all. There was this genuine, pervasive fear that adaptation was a moral hazard,
Speaker 2: which in hindsight was just a catastrophic strategic error. It assumed we even had a choice.
Speaker 1: It was a different time, and the science was less certain about the timeline of impacts. But look at the trajectory since then. The discourse successfully matured through what the adaptation committee calls a scientific awakening. By the time we hit the IPCCs third assessment report in 2001, the question shifted. Fundamentally, we stopped asking, do we need to adapt? And started asking how we do adapt. That is a massive intellectual pivot. It paved the way for the Cancun Adaptation Framework in 2010 and eventually Article VII of the Paris Agreement, which placed adaptation legally on par with mitigation and. That legal parody is not just symbolic. It compels action.
Speaker 2: I don’t dispute the history. I live through it, but I do dispute the utility of that evolution. You call it an intellectual pivot. I call it a 20 year delay,
Speaker 1: but we arrived at the right place,
Speaker 2: did we? This victory of the Cancun framework and the Paris Agreement. Essentially just admitted what was already obvious to every farmer in the global south. The weather had already changed. You say the discourse legitimized midterm planning. I say that victory came far too late. By the time parody was reached, the climate had already shifted. The discourse spent two decades arguing about if we should adapt. That delay forced the current discourse to be about loss and damage, which is just an admission. That adaptation failed because we missed the window for prevention. We are celebrating the construction of a fire station while the house is already ash.
Speaker 1: That’s a powerful image, but it ignores the complexity of building global consensus. You can’t just snap your fingers and have 190 countries agree on how to manage water resources or coastal retreat. The discourse had to evolve to create the mechanisms we use now, consider the iterative adaptation cycle. We’re not just throwing money at sea walls anymore. We have a four step process. Assessment, planning, implementation. And finally, MEL monitoring, evaluation and learning. This proves the world is finally treating adaptation. With the technical rigor. It requires we’re moving from reactive disaster relief to proactive resilience building systems.
Speaker 2: You call it technical rigor. I call it the trap of process. You’re celebrating the complexity of the discourse, the acronyms, the cycles, but I’m looking at the output. The 2023 UNEP adaptation gap report is, it’s devastating. It shows that progress and adaptation implementation is plateauing. We’ve spent 30 years building this iterative adaptation cycle, yet the actual work on the ground is stalling.
Speaker 1: Stalling is a strong word.
Speaker 2: It’s the data’s word. The discourse has shifted toward these complex reporting instruments, naps, ad comms, BTRs. It creates an illusion of activity, and the ultimate symbol of this is the global stock. Take the first stock take involved 170,000 pages of written inputs. 170,000 pages. We’ve turned the discourse into an exercise in documenting failure rather than funding success. We are literally drowning in documents while the reservoirs dry up.
Speaker 1: I think you’re conflating the diagnosis with the disease. Those 170,000 pages represent the first time in human history. We have a comprehensive picture of where we stand, but I wanna go back to your point about the trap of process. You mentioned the alphabet soup, naps, ad comms, BTRs, and to a lay person, I get it. It sounds like bureaucratic noise, but there is a reason for this granularity. The discourse has evolved to differentiate between a domestic strategy and international signaling.
Speaker 2: It just feels like bureaucratic splitting of hairs. Why do we need three different documents to say we need a flood wall
Speaker 1: because the audience is different? Let’s break it down. Take the National Adaptation Plan the nap. That is a strategic domestic planning document. It’s deep, it’s technical, it’s detailed. It is for the country itself to identify risks and coordinate between say, the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Finance. That’s the blueprint. Without it, you’re just guessing. That’s the blueprint. What about the rest? So then you have the adaptation communication, the ADCOM. That is not a blueprint, that’s a high level external reporting tool for visibility. It’s the executive summary. You show the world to say, here is our priority, here is what we are doing. It’s about signaling to donors and peers. And then the BTR, the Biennial transparency report. Is the audit, it’s the checkup. This differentiation is crucial. You can’t have a one size fits all document. The discourse now allows countries to tailor their actions while still feeding into the global picture.
Speaker 2: That’s a compelling argument in a lecture hall, but have you looked at the submission rates? If these documents are so vital, why aren’t they being done? As of September 20, 24, only 58 developing countries have submitted naps 58. That’s after more than a decade of this process being in place. Yet, despite this, we are introducing more layers like the BTRs
Speaker 1: capacity building takes time. Writing a nap is not like writing a blog post. It requires hydrological studies, economic forecasting,
Speaker 2: but we don’t have time. That is the entire point. The discourse focuses on how to report rather than how to build. The UN report says one out of six countries still has no planning instrument at all. If the discourse was working, if this iterative cycle was so effective, every nation would have a blueprint by now. Instead, we have a system where the sophistication of the reporting actually acts as a barrier for the poorest nations. They’re spending their limited adaptation budgets on consultants to write reports. To satisfy the cycle rather than on irrigation or flood defenses.
Speaker 1: I’m not convinced by that because it assumes that planning and doing are mutually exclusive. You can’t build effective flood defenses without the studies that go into a nap. If you build without the plan, you build wrong. You end up wasting millions. The planning is part of the action, but let’s address the elephant in the room. You keep suggesting this paperwork is hiding a lack of resources.
Speaker 2: I’m not suggesting it. I’m shouting it. Let’s look at the finance gap. This is where the rubber meets the road and the road is washed out. The discourse claims, we are mobilizing finance, but the map doesn’t add up. The UN NEV report shows the adaptation finance gap is between 194 and 366 billion US dollars
Speaker 1: per year. The needs are high. No one disputes that.
Speaker 2: They’re astronomical compared to the flows. The doubling of finance promised in Glasgow, which was hailed as this great victory, would only close that gap by maybe five to 10%. Think about that. We are cheering for a doubling that leaves 90% of the problem unsolved. The discourse talks about billions, but the costs are estimated at up to $387 billion per year. We’re sitting here debating the nuance of an ADCOM versus an app. While the financial reality is we are funding a fraction of what’s required,
Speaker 1: I understand the frustration with the numbers. They are stark, but look at the trend line. Track finance flows did increase by 28% in the 20 21, 20 22 biennium. Reaching an average of $63 billion. Is it enough? No. But the discourse is working to identify the needs so we can target that money. The standing Committee on Finance found that developing countries now identify adaptation needs more often than mitigation needs in their reports.
Speaker 2: Identifying a need is not the same as meeting. I can identify that I need a Ferrari. It doesn’t mean I’m getting one,
Speaker 1: but it’s the prerequisite. We can’t fund what we haven’t costed. This is where the planning discourse you criticize becomes vital investors, the green climate fund, they need certainty. They need to see the iterative adaptation cycle in action to know their money isn’t going into a black hole. The planning discourse is the prerequisite for the funding. The fact that we can even quantify the gap so precisely that 1 94 to three 66 billion figure is a triumph of the discourse. It gives us a specific target. Without these frameworks, we wouldn’t even know how much we were missing.
Speaker 2: Knowing you are starving, doesn’t put food on the table. And this brings me to the quality of the adaptation itself. The discourse is feeling not just on quantity, the money, but on quality. We have more science now than ever. I’m referencing the IPCC working group two findings. The current discourse encourages what they call incremental adaptation, small tweaks, raising a levy by a foot. Changing a ponting date by a week, it maintains the status quo. It’s comfortable for bureaucrats because it’s measurable and low risk. But the IPCC warns this reduces the opportunity for transformational adaptation.
Speaker 1: Can you define that distinction?
Speaker 2: Incremental is building a higher wall around a city that is sink. Transformational is moving the city, the current discourse, because it’s so risk averse, it favors safe, fundable, short-term pilot projects, the incremental stuff. This locks us into maladaptation. We spend money to secure an area which encourages people to stay making the eventual inevitable disaster. Even worse, the bureaucracy demands measurable short-term results, which disincentivizes the deep structural change that is actually necessary. We are optimizing for the report card, not for survival.
Speaker 1: I would frame that differently. The discourse has actually moved specifically to address that risk. That is why we shifted the acronym from m and e, monitoring and evaluation to MEL monitoring, evaluation and learning.
Speaker 2: Adding a letter doesn’t change the reality on the ground.
Speaker 1: It changes the mindset and mindset drives policy. The discourse now emphasizes learning from the process to improve resilience over time. The iterative cycle is designed specifically to move from incremental to transformational by constantly updating risk assessments. We are seeing long-term strategies where 97% of submissions now include adaptation. The system is designed to evolve. We are moving from protecting the status quo. To building resilience, and that is a transformational shift in how governments think. You can’t expect the government to move a city before they’ve tried the wall. The cycle allows them to learn that the wall isn’t enough, document it, and then justify the transformation.
Speaker 2: But is it fast enough? That is the crux of my argument. The cycle is iterative, yes, but the climate is exponential. While the government is learning that the wall isn’t enough, the storm comes and destroys the city. We are applying a linear bureaucratic process to an exponential physical threat.
Speaker 1: Let’s pause there and look at the bigger picture. You see a trap of process. I see a maturation of governance when we look at the history from the Nairobi work program in 2005 to the global goal on adaptation. In Paris, we see a world learning to speak a common language about survival. Before this adaptation was every nation for itself. Now it is a collective responsibility,
Speaker 2: a common language. Sure. But let’s look at the result. We mentioned the global stock take 170,000 pages. They had to build a Special Explorer tool just to search through it all. We have created a magnificent library. We have the adaptation knowledge portal. We have technical examination processes. It’s an intellectual marvel, but outside that library, the world is on fire. The discourse has become a mechanism for delay. It allows leaders to point to a national adaptation plan and say, look, we are acting while the finance gap widens to hundreds of billions.
Speaker 1: But imagine the alternative. Imagine a world facing these risks without this library, without the data, without the shared definitions, without the legal parody of Article seven, we would be flying blind. We’d be throwing money at projects without knowing if they work. This complex? Yes. Frustrating. Bureaucratic discourse is the only thing. Keeping the global response tethered to reality. We now have a global goal on adaptation. We have a shared roadmap. The framework is not the barrier. The framework is the map.
Speaker 2: A map is useless if you don’t have the fuel to drive the car.
Speaker 1: Without the map, the fuel is wasted. We would be spending billions on maladaptation on projects that fail on disconnected efforts. The fact that we can measure the gap, the fact that we can critique the plateauing of implementation, this is proof that the transparency mechanisms are working. The alarm bells are ringing because we built the alarm system.
Speaker 2: The alarm is ringing, but the fire department, the finance, the implementation isn’t coming. That’s the tragedy of the last 30 years. We perfected the alarm and forgot to build the pumps,
Speaker 1: and I would argue that building the alarm was the necessary first step to getting the pump funded. You cannot get the politics right until the science is undeniable. The last 30 years have been about building that foundation. The next 30 must be about building the house.
Speaker 2: On that. Perhaps we can agree The machinery is sophisticated. Yes, but it is idling and every day it idles the cost of starting it goes up. The discourse needs to shift again from planning to payment.
Speaker 1: It is a machine for survival waiting to be fully powered. The challenge now isn’t to tear up the plans, but to fund them.
Speaker 2: Let’s hope the check clears before the water rises any higher.
Speaker 1: This is a tension that will define the next decade of climate policy. The shift from planning to action, from discourse to delivery.
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