A Transformative Global Goal on Adaptation: Scope, Science and Policy
The establishment of GGA fills a much needed, and urgent, gap in global climate policy by placing adaptation at equal footing to mitigation, if not at the centre stage. From a developing country perspective, it is extremely significant platform of negotiation. While the agenda of GGA has made slow progress, the direction it has taken builds on aggregating national adaptation goals and strategies. In this paper, we have tried to illustrate the limitations of such an approach even though it is important in its own right. The emerging governance of GGA falls short of doing justice to the complexities involved in building adaptive capacity and climate resilience for vulnerable communities at global scale. By ignoring the embeddedness of poor adaptive capacities in the global economic systems as well as limited capacities of countries to generate necessary scientific data, manage and analysis it, the emerging governance structure of GGA leaves much to be desired. This paper proposes to initiate a discussion to rethink about and expand the scope of GGA at least on three accounts: need for robust scientific capabilities, an adaptation friendly global financial system, and scale of various adaptation thematic areas in terms of their global linkages.
