Charmian, Dave, welcome. Charmian to you. First,
can you just give me an overview of the work that you've been doing with the
high-level climate champions recently?
Yeah, indeed. So HLC, as we call them,
have pulled together a set of outcomes,
which should be achieved by 2030 in the sort of topic of adaptation and
resilience, covering a range of systems that I'll come back to in a second.
I think what's really exciting about this is that these outcomes have now been
enshrined in the Sharm al-Sheikh agenda and outcomes,
which is actually the first example of adaptation and resilience being part of
global policy. And what we've done with them is pulled together some reports on,
for example, food and agriculture and human settlements,
on human settlements,
seven out of ten people will be living in a city by 2050.
So what do city governors need to do in order to create
resilience and add up and sort of adapt the cities for both the
people, so the social side of things, people living there, economics,
so what's it going to do to GDP. But also the natural ecosystems as well.
So that's part of what's in one report We've based that on what we've done in of
major international cities in the developing and the developed world in fact.
And then the second one that we've done is on food and agriculture,
as mentioned, and in order to make the world resilience,
looking forward given drought and climate events and so forth.
There's a whole lot of change that's needed from farmer through to consumer
and what we eat.
And we sort of looked at each of those and who are the actors who need to be
part of bringing about those changes.
We've also done another couple on some of the enablers.
Yeah, two critical enablers, Charmian, Georgie, on planning and finance.
On planning,
one of the key critical enablers is to enable cities
and national governments,
regional governments who have plans in place to understand what are the hazards,
what are the vulnerabilities, the risks that the communities and economies face.
And with that understanding, what are the options you have,
what are the responses you can take,
what are the tradeoffs in terms of deploying resources and so on,
which then feeds into the financing question because having visibility on this
allows you then to make the right choices on mobilizing resources and financing.
And today, the second point of financing, it's a critical gap.
So there's an estimate of 300 billion that is needed by 2030 to fund
adaptation efforts across the world,
which is likely underestimated given the frequency and severity of
climate risk that's manifesting now.
And today we're probably only a quarter of that financing level
on an annual basis. So much to be done.
And we address some of the critical barriers that need to be addressed both in
planning and in financing to UN office.
Charmian, what are the key challenges that leaders across all sectors face?
One of them is the fact that whilst there is a lot of data out there, you know,
can absolutely predict how many storms there will be or heat intensity,
what might happen.
But actually bringing that together to understand what the impact will be on the
people living in a particular city,
on the economics of that city and on that ecosystem of that city.
That's something that is quite hard to do. And then the solutions,
many of them are very costly. Not all of them, but many of them are.
So knowing which of those levers to pull on and so forth,
it is not a straightforward thing. There's another,
So there's the data and the capability to apply that data and do that sort of
analytics. That's definitely a challenge that they have.
Another challenge is that the responsibility for this often lies across many
different areas, whether it's across the agriculture ministry,
Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Finance,
Ministry of Economics and Planning, and so on.
So there's a horizontal complexity there.
There's another piece which is actually this can and should be done at a
national level in order to understand overall what resourcing may be required
and where the priorities are. But at the end of the day,
the solutions needs to be understood and implemented at a local level.
So there's a whole sort of vertical piece there that used to be
managed and so forth. And that is, that's not really happening yet today.
So what do business leaders need to do?
So business leaders in the private sector play a critical part in driving
adaptation action. So corporates,
particularly those that have critical supply chains, critical infrastructure,
provide essential goods and services to the economy.
They need to think about the adaptation plans and where they build resilience to
protect their assets and interest of their supply chains.
Investors need to think about this.
They need to incorporate physical climate risk in their investment decisions.
The insurance industry needs to think about how they re-tune their frameworks on
risk and time horizons, and what role they play in
enabling funding and adaptation. So multi-party action and importantly,
this needs to happen in close concert and collaboration with the public sector.
So you get the multiplier impact of private sector involvement,
building resilience, not just for their own interests,
but also for the broader economy and society.
Why is funding in particular so important?
So planning is really the starting point, right? To really understand,
you have multiple hazards like sea level rise, storms, extreme heats,
they're going to hit any given location.
So what's the impact it's going to have on lives, livelihoods,
the natural ecosystems?
What does it mean in terms of economic impact to productivity,
to output, the health care system, to food, to water.
So multiple impacts that come together at various frequencies and severity.
So planning is really the starting point to have an appreciation to understand
how these impacts then translate into socioeconomic outcomes.
And it allows you then to think about and consider the different
options you have to respond to manage the different tradeoffs and allocate
resources to responses that give you higher socioeconomic impact to protect your
region, your economy, your communities. So a critical starting point,
but one that is fraught with many constraints today. There is data,
but access to the data is important.
Having technical capacity to evaluate these things critical for local national
governments, for the private sector,
and being able to integrate this from national government to local
government across sectors is another key part that is much needed
to enable planning to have an impact.
Dave, Charmian thank you so much.