International Finance for Adaptation to Climate Change
Part of the Adaptation and Resilience project
There is a widening gap between needs and available finance for adaptation to climate change in developing countries. This is because of three related policy challenges. Firstly, adaptation lacks simple, rigorous, globally recognized definitions and metrics comparable to those used to finance mitigation. Secondly, actors financing adaptation act on different and often contradictory theories of impact. Thirdly, adaptation interventions are difficult to define in terms distinct from development interventions.
This project proposes an idealized framework for financeable adaptation and uses it to analyze the practice of key institutions engaged in funding adaptation solutions. It will answer the following questions:
How could adaptation interventions ideally integrate multiple theories of scalable impact?
How do funding institutions define adaptation success, failure, potential and impact?
How large is the gap between the theoretically ideal and practical definitions of adaptation impact and how can these inform each other?
The project is structured as four chapters or papers. The first proposes an idealized framework for financeable adaptation drawing from literature on adaptation, development, investment and innovation. Two subsequent papers use this basis to comparatively analyze the practice of selected institutions within two categories – multilateral development and climate finance institutions and bilateral aid agencies. A comparative analysis across the two categories of funding institutions is then conducted in the fourth chapter. The practice of these institutions offers under-researched evidence of the operational reality of defining financeable adaptation.
For each set of institutions, the project uses three sources of evidence of practice - strategy and policy documents, project proposal and evaluation documents, and interviews with institutional employees and experts familiar with their operations. The research will conclude with recommendations to modify operational definitions and project design as well as a refined framework for financeable adaptation.