Columbia International Affairs Online: Policy Briefs

CIAO DATE: 10/2008

Financing adaptation: Why the UN’s Bali Climate Conference must mandate the search for new funds

November 2007

Oxfam Publishing

Abstract

Oxfam estimates that adapting to climate change in developing countries is likely to cost at least $50bn each year, and far more if global greenhouse-gas emissions are not cut fast enough. Yet international funding efforts to date have been woeful. In the year that the world's scientists made the science irrefutable, the world's policitians must now deliver the finance needed so that the most vulnerable countries can cope with the new reality that they face.