Page
COP29 - Our priorities for climate, nature and people
Fauna & Flora draws attention to the critical role of nature in mitigating and building resilience to climate change, an...
Another year packed with extreme weather-related disasters grabbing the headlines. Hurricane Beryl making almost everyone on Union Island homeless. Severe droughts scorching crops in Southern Africa. And, more recently, catastrophic flash floods in Spain’s Valencia region. The effects of climate change are confronting us here and now. Urgent action is vital to limit further temperature rise, but we also need to accelerate our abilities to adapt to our rapidly changing climate.
Fauna & Flora Senior Technical Specialist on Climate Change, Annamária Lehoczky, explains why nature-based and locally led solutions hold the key to effective climate adaptation.
2024 is on the way to become the hottest year on record. In almost every month, the rise of global average temperature has exceeded 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, constantly warning us that worse is to come if we don’t get our act together on tackling the climate crisis. Climate change is turbo-charging heatwaves, droughts, heavy rainfall and storms, and those who contributed the least to causing the problem are the ones suffering the most.
Integrating locally led, ecosystem-based approaches to adaptation
To build our resilience and help cope with these impacts, healthy, biodiverse ecosystems are fundamental. The shade of trees providing relief in the concrete and asphalt jungle of cities on a hot day, or the reduced flood damage thanks to restored rivers and floodplains, exemplify how ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) can effectively reduce climate change impacts while also providing essential benefits for people and biodiversity.
Crop rotation and diversification, forest protection and restoration, live fences, applying bio-inputs to improve soil health and avoidance of burning are all contributing to increasing productivity, generating year-round income and ultimately reducing vulnerabilities to economic- or climate-related shocks at Fauna & Flora’s project site in Ometepe Island, Nicaragua. We also documented that using agroforestry practices and living boundaries serving as windbreaks reduced crop losses here during Tropical Storm Nate in 2017.
Forest fire. © Rafael Nilton Pelizzeri
Rising temperatures are fuelling more frequent natural disasters and extreme weather patterns.
Local communities front and centre
For adaptation efforts to be effective, sustainable and just, local communities – including Indigenous and marginalised groups – must be meaningfully involved in every stage of planning and implementation. They are the best equipped to create transformative solutions tailored to their particular context and needs, addressing the root causes of poverty, inequality, climate vulnerability and environmental degradation.
Fauna & Flora endorsed the Principles for Locally Led Adaptation (LLA) at COP26 and we encourage governments, funding institutions and our peers actively supporting climate adaptation action to also embed them into their operations. The eight principles have been developed by a consortium led by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), the World Resources Institute and the Global Center on Adaptation to help ensure that local communities are empowered to lead sustainable and effective adaptation to climate change at the local level.
We believe that through the integration of ecosystem-based and locally led adaptation approaches, we can achieve exponentially more impact for people, climate and nature. This is why we are supporting our own projects and partners to embed these approaches in their conservation practice. Fauna & Flora has developed a holistic assessment tool combining environmental, social governance and climate dimensions that are key to effective adaptation measures, building on the well-recognised Ecosystem-based Adaptation Framework and the LLA principles.
Besides helping to design better ecosystem-based adaptation projects and improving current work, this assessment tool also helps to evidence progress and ensure we are delivering on the LLA principles. Indeed, there is a growing number of endorsers of these principles – including governments, financial institutions, international NGOs and grassroots organisations – but specific, contextualised metrics to operationalise and measure progress on these in different sectors and by different types of actors are still lacking. To ensure close alignment and mutually support the tailoring of metrics in a conservation context, we have harmonised the method with IIED’s ‘360-degree accountability approach’.
Evidencing impact
We piloted the tool in Ometepe in June 2024. To help the local team identify programme strengths, good practices and opportunities for improvement, we conducted interviews with staff from Fauna & Flora and our long-term partner Biometepe, and organised focus group discussions with farmers representing three local communities engaged in the agroecology-based climate adaptation work.
We evidenced that integrating local, traditional, generational and scientific knowledge into the design, implementation and monitoring & evaluation phases of the project is critical to ensuring acceptance and efficient implementation of agroecological practices by the farmers. The project is already championing the principle of ‘Building a robust understanding of climate risk and uncertainty’. The use of tools that enable joint diagnosis and co-design of farm plans between the farmer and the technician was deemed very useful and recommended as good practice, along with the annual learning event where farmers can share and discuss results with their peers, as well as with Fauna & Flora, Biometepe and the authorities.
To ensure adherence to the principles of ‘investing in local capabilities’ and ‘help to access funding more easily’, Fauna & Flora provides a wide range of capacity building on financial management. However, donor requirements still impose a heavy burden on those with limited capacity but huge need to access funding for adaptation. Trusted intermediary organisations like Fauna & Flora can play a key role in alleviating this burden, but it’s also clear that funding institutions need to reform their operating ways to simplify access to funding, improve flexibility and enable longer project lifetimes and streamlined reporting.
Overall, the assessment was deemed very useful in informing further scaling-up of activities on the ground and it underlined the importance of bringing together the two frameworks. We will be sharing lessons learnt and resources for wider use soon.
Based on this learning, we suggest creating an additional principle focusing on the efficiency of the adaptation measure itself and integrating nature at its core. At the same time, we suggest strengthening the locally led lens in the EbA framework, and look forward to advancing this thinking with our peers at COP29 and beyond.
FEV nursery, Ometepe, Nicaragua. © Karina Berg / Fauna & Flora
FEV nursery, Ometepe, Nicaragua.
Far more adaptation finance needed
The finance to build resilience and help people and nature cope with climate impacts is still woefully inadequate; the latest Adaptation Gap Report highlights a yawning gulf of US$215-387 billion per year between the currently available adaptation finance and the increasing needs, and the pledge of developed countries to double adaptation finance from 2019 levels by 2025 would reduce this gap by only about 5%.
The new climate finance goal negotiated at COP29 must establish a subgoal to place finance for adaptation on a par with mitigation, establish clear linkages to the means of implementation of the Global Goal on Adaptation framework, and ensure easier access for local actors, improved predictability and transparency, while also recognising the evolving needs.
With new national climate plans – the Nationally Determined Contributions and National Adaptation Plans – due in 2025, countries must urgently and significantly enhance ambition in line with the 1.5°C goal. Every fraction of warming causes dangerous impacts to escalate further. We urgently need to prepare for those impacts, with nature and local people at the heart of action.
© Jeremy Holden / Fauna & Flora
Members of a local community plant trees at a reforestation site in Cambodia.
Donate now to prevent wildfires
Every year, wildfires sweep through Belize. Each year they get worse, with rising global temperatures causing hotter, drier summers. In spring, the wildfires will come back.
This will be nothing short of a catastrophe for the countless species living there – jaguars, spider and howler monkeys, ocelots, tapirs, harpy eagles and more.
But you can help us to change that.
Donate todayWildfires blazing in Belize, 2024. © Ya'axché Conservation Trust
Senior Technical Specialist, Climate Change
Related Content
Publication
Fauna & Flora’s Position on High Integrity Implementation of Nature-based Solutions and Use of NbS Carbon Credits
Fauna & Flora sees that, when developed and used with integrity, nature-based carbon credits can play a very important r...
Opinion
Curbing climate chaos - Why nature is the unsung hero in our quest for net zero
In order for a range of ecosystems to play their crucial climate regulation role, we need to prevent further degradation...