Washington, D.C. — The Paris climate agreement has been a major boost to the international community’s organizational and financial efforts to support resilience and adaptation to climate change in the world’s low-income and developing nations. Unfortunately, those efforts have, so far, inadequately addressed the effects that climate change will have on ecosystems and biodiversity, even though the economic toll from those impacts could rival the magnitude of those in other better-studied sectors such as infrastructure and agriculture.
A new brief released today by the Center for American Progress explores this gap in the current approach to climate change resilience and adaptation finance and offers recommendations to improve investment planning and better sustain the trillions of dollars in ecosystem services that nature provides to the global economy.
“Without significant, targeted investments to build the resilience of the planet’s ecosystems to the impacts of climate change, international efforts to help developing countries adapt to climate change will be structurally flawed,” said Shiva Polefka, CAP Policy Analyst and co-author of the brief.
The brief provides three recommendations for action that the multilateral climate and environment funds—such as the Green Climate Fund and the Global Environment Facility—and major donor countries—such as the United States, Japan, and members of the European Union—could take to strategically address the gap in ecosystem finance.
These include:
- Increasing demand for scientific research on how climate change will affect biodiversity and ecosystem services to help improve global understanding of the specific needs and opportunities for sustaining them in the face of major climate impacts
- Initiating coordination among major climate finance institutions and major donor countries around ecosystem protection and restoration for the purpose of climate adaptation because the scarcity of resources and urgency of need leaves little room for redundancy
- Fostering international collaboration with existing conservation-oriented initiatives, such as actively supporting and collaborating with governments, nongovernmental organizations, and other parties in habitat and watershed conservation; providing frameworks to pay for ecosystem services such as REDD+; and promoting infrastructure development that integrates nature and nature-based features
Click here to read the brief.
For more information on this topic or to speak with an expert, contact Tom Caiazza at [email protected] or 202.481.7141.
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