The Climate Adaptation Summit (CAS) took place online during 25 and 26 January 2021. Hosted by the Netherlands, the summit convened high-level government officials, organisations, youth representatives and local stakeholders to discuss with 15,000 registered participants how societies and economies can adapt to a changing climate and build a climate-resilient future.
COVID-19 pandemic: Non-state climate actions on adaptation lag behind
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Right before the summit, the Global Center on Adaptation (GCA) launched the 2020 State and Trends in Adaptation Report. It presents the first in a series of reports that will assess progress on climate adaptation and provide guidance and recommendations on best practice in adapting to the effects of a changing climate and building resilience to climate shocks. In the section State of Adaptation, Sander Chan, senior researcher at GCA and associate researcher at the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE), Johannes Brehm and Andrew Deneault (both DIE) contributed insights from their work on cooperative non-state climate action. While cooperative climate action has grown, initiatives focusing on adaptation have lagged behind. This trend increased during the COVID-19 pandemic: initiatives focusing on adaptation or both adaptation and mitigation degraded in performance. Initiatives focusing mainly on mitigation, however, reported less negative impacts due to COVID-19 pandemic.
Learn more about the tremendous potential of non-state and subnational actors to contribute to both: a low-carbon future, and a future that is sustainable and beneficial for all
Tool to assess 300 cooperative non-state climate initiatives
Additionally, the State and Trends Adaptation Knowledge Exchange (STAKE) web platform has been launched during CAS. This web platform provides data, analysis, and knowledge sharing on adaptation. Within STAKE the Climate Initiative Tracker gives access to selected data and analysis from the Cooperative Initiatives Database (C-CID).
C-CID is a tool to assess the performance of nearly 300 climate initiatives by non-state and subnational actors. It was created in 2017 as part of the ClimateSouth project, involving collaboration between DIE, Blavatnik School of Government (BSG) at the University of Oxford, the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS), The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) and the GCA. Major contributions to C-CID’s design, update, and maintenance come from funding and expertise of the project Klimalog at DIE, which conducts research and dialogue for a just and SDG-compatible implementation of the Paris Agreement. The Klimalog project is funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).