Climate Vulnerability and Adaptation Finance Alignment

Part of the Resilient Development project

Adaptation finance is intended to reach the world’s most vulnerable countries as they try to adapt to current and future climate challenges. Measuring vulnerability is a challenge: there is no consensus on what constitutes vulnerability or how to develop a consistent vulnerability metric. The Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative (ND-GAIN) provides one of the most comprehensive rankings of global climate vulnerability. Using this metric, our research seeks to understand whether climate finance is reaching the world’s most vulnerable countries, what barriers are present for finance deployment, what the enabling conditions are for countries that are successfully attracting climate finance, and how different conceptions of vulnerability can motivate climate action. For example, of the ten countries listed as most vulnerable on the ND-GAIN ranking over the past decade, not a single one was among the top ten recipients of public adaptation finance over that same time period. This indicates a misalignment between vulnerability and aid allocation that we hope to explore further in our research.

Our analysis will cover not only what countries have received adaptation finance but will investigate whether that finance has been effective in altering the vulnerability of recipient countries as measured by vulnerability indexes such as ND-GAIN. While research suggests that vulnerability rankings are not suitable for determining funding allocation on their own, they can be powerful tools for determining need if used in combination with targeted analysis. Particular attention will be paid to changes in the ND-GAIN sectoral scores, which are broken down into categories including agricultural capacity and water availability that can be used to better understand the impact of past adaptation projects on vulnerability and readiness across different sectors.

Using publicly available climate finance data as well as the yearly ND-GAIN scores, we will use a mixed methods approach to explore the landscape of adaptation finance and its effectiveness. We will also evaluate the policies and practices that determine funding allocation using the climate finance policy evaluation framework developed by CPL researchers (Bhandary et al. 2021).

This research will have direct policy implications for climate finance providers and recipients worldwide.