North star for climate change adaptation: Making progress on the Global Goal on Adaptation

TEN years after the Paris Agreement, 2025 is set to render a key part of it operational: the Global Goal on Adaptation, or GGA for short. Agreed in Paris, the GGA aims to enhance adaptive capacity, strengthen resilience, and reduce vulnerability to climate change in the context of the temperature goal. So far, it has advanced through two work programs (from 2022-2023 and 2024-2025) and is now defined through the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience, which lists seven thematic and four dimensional targets. The current work program—the UAE-Belém work program—was launched in Dubai and is mandated to deliver a set of indicators for these targets at the end of this year, when countries from across the world will convene at COP30 in Belém, Brazil.

- By Dennis Mombauer

Why the GGA matters

The GGA was established by the Paris Agreement as a north star and compass for climate change adaptation, meant to assess collective progress and guide countries towards climate-resilient development and progress across key sectors, such as water, food, health, ecosystems, infrastructure and human settlements, livelihoods, and cultural heritage. Through its targets and the upcoming indicators, the GGA will help to create a shared language for adaptation, allowing countries to track trends while respecting their respective national contexts and capacities. It also links technical work to political processes: the indicator package will feed into future Global Stocktakes and could contribute to adaptation reporting and alignment across processes. Furthermore, the GGA has the potential to strengthen the connection between action and support, as means of implementation—finance, technology, and capacity-building—have been recognised as essential enablers and are expected to be reflected in the final set of indicators.

The state of play