HOW TO ADAPT TO EXTREME HEAT

India is vulnerable to extreme heat and yet unprepared. But various initiatives provide a glimpse of what is possible when collaboration and ingenuity come together

- TARUN KHANNA

VIRTUALY EVERYONE AGREES that the world is going to blow past its Paris Accord commitments regarding Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG). Most accept that world temperatures will rise more than 1.5° C above pre-industrial levels, and possibly much worse. More extreme weather will result, more often. Whether it is heat in Paris or New Delhi, or floods in Valencia or Karachi, climate change is hitting everyone.

In this maelstrom, most funding is going towards climate mitigation—that is, preventing the worsening of climate change, primarily through arresting how much carbon we continue to spew into the atmosphere. While the world learns to live within its limited remaining carbon-budget, we also have to invest in climate adaptation, learning to live with the extreme weather that is already here.

An article in The Economist a couple of years ago provided some ballpark numbers. Adaptation is clearly the stepchild of climate change response. The developing world is spending less than 20% of the $140-300 billion it needs to spend annually on adaptation; other estimates say it's as little as 5%. Rich countries reluctantly committed at COP to fund a Loss & Damages fund for the poorer countries. Even the insufficient annual $100 billion funds agreed to then have not been forthcoming, let alone more recent inflated promises. Nor is the private sector stepping up without line-of-sight to more proximate returns, providing less than 2% of climate adaptation funding. The policy conditions needed to crowd-in the private sector have to be created. Those reluctant to fund adaptation worry that doing so will reduce the urgency to mitigate.