About Global Goal on Adaptation

• Objective: To enhance adaptive capacity, strengthen resilience, and reduce vulnerability to the impacts of climate change.
• Context: Established under the Paris Agreement to parallel the global mitigation goal.
• Complexity: Adaptation is local in nature, making a single, global target challenging.
  • Progress is tracked through a combination of global and local indicators, with a focus on both scientific data and local realities.
• Implementation: The work is being advanced through the Glasgow-Sharm el-Sheikh (GlaSS) Work Programme and the UAE-Belém work programme, which are focused on developing the methodologies, indicators, and data sources to assess progress.

About Green Climate Fund (GCF)

It’s an institutional mechanism that has been at work since 2015, to fund projects in developing countries to adapt to unfolding climate change as well as to invest in clean energy.

• Established under the UNFCCC to channel global climate finance into mitigation and adaptation projects in developing countries, ensuring a balanced distribution between both categories.
• Scale: Holds around $19 billion in global commitments, making it the world’s largest climate finance institution focused exclusively on supporting climate action in vulnerable and developing nations.
  • Gap – Adaptation Finance Shortfall: India highlighted that adaptation finance needs to increase by nearly 15× current flows and that developed countries’ pledge to double adaptation finance by 2025 remains severely off-track.
• Allocation Issue: Despite its large pool of committed funds, only about a quarter had been effectively allocated by 2024 due to slow approval cycles, complex application requirements, and procedural bottlenecks.
• Criticism: Developing countries frequently report obstacles including burdensome compliance requirements, lengthy review windows, insufficient handholding, and limited technical guidance making it hard to convert project proposals into funded projects.
• Demand – Climate Finance Definition: India called for a clear, universally accepted definition of climate finance to avoid manipulation, inflation, or misreporting by developed countries.
  • India demanded scaled-up, predictable, public climate finance flows, with strengthened commitments specifically for adaptation.
  • Obligation – Article 9.1: India insisted that developed nations must meet their legal responsibility under Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement to provide finance for mitigation and adaptation in developing countries.
• India Engagement: India has received commitments worth $782 million across 11 projects, covering areas like clean energy, coastal resilience, water systems, MSME climate preparedness, low-carbon transport, and climate-focused start-ups, with much of the funding structured as concessional loans.
• National Access Point: India’s Environment Ministry functions as the designated national authority responsible for coordinating all GCF-linked proposals, approvals, stakeholder engagement, and compliance, while also supporting states and private entities in navigating GCF systems.