How to increase adaptation effectiveness to reduce loss and damage: Insights from the UNEP Adaptation Gap Report 2023

UNEP’s annual Adaptation Gap Report is indicating the need for increased action to reduce vulnerability and build resilience. However, progress in adaptation is slowing. Hence, the planning, implementation, and finance gaps in adaptation keep widening and leading to more losses and damages.

This UNFCCC mandated UNEP event features high-level opening remarks from UNEP’s Executive Director and UNFCCC’s Executive Secretary and a presentation of the key findings of the UNEP Adaptation Gap Report 2023.

This is followed by a panel discussion focusing on the importance of increasing adaptation effectiveness, while assessing progress in global adaptation efforts, reducing loss and damage, and evaluating the current adaptation finance gap.

An increase in adaptation effectiveness and adaptation finance is at the heart of the discussions necessary to bridge the science-policy-action gap, particularly with a need to inform the Global Stocktake, the Global Goal on Adaptation, and the deliberations on the loss and damage fund and funding arrangements.

Agenda:

Panel I: High-level remarks and presentation of the key findings of the Adaptation Gap Report

• Ms. Inger Andersen, Executive Director, United Nations Environment Programme
• Mr. Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
• Mr. Henry Neufeldt, Chief Scientific Editor of the Adaptation Gap Report 2023, UNEP Copenhagen Climate Centre

Panel II: Discussion and Q&A

• Ms. Inger Andersen, Executive Director, United Nations Environment Programme
• Mr. Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
• Ms. María del Pilar Bueno Rubial, Universidad Nacional de Rosario
• Ms. Anne Hammill, International Institute for Sustainable Development
• Mr. Timo Leiter, London School of Economics and Political Sciences
• Mr. Pieter Pauw, Eindhoven University of Technology
• Ms. Emily Boyd, Lund University

Moderator: Edith Ofwona Adera, Adaptation Gap Report Steering Committee Member and Regional Principal Officer at the African Development Bank

Additional Adaptation Gap Report authors will participate from the floor and be available for Q&A