Five insights from COP28

After nearly two weeks of COP28 that saw over 70,000 delegates fly into Dubai to wrangle over the world’s response to climate change, what have we learned?

There were of course headline stories about the Loss and Damage Fund, as well as serious arguments over the future of fossil fuels, but beyond these were thousands of smaller but no less important stories about vulnerable communities at the forefront of the climate crisis. AKDN leaders were at the conference to bring attention to such people, especially around the themes of education, health, finance and resilience, and to mobilise resources to help them adapt to our changing world. Here we summarise their insights.

1. The world must get serious about adaptation

For much of its history, the global discussion about how to respond to climate change has focused almost exclusively on mitigation – reducing man-made emissions. “Net zero” has become a global norm, with almost every national government and thousands of companies rushing to pledge themselves to the goal of eliminating harmful emissions by 2050. To be sure, that goal remains critical: to the surprise of many, the COP28 declaration included a pledge to phase down the use of fossil fuels. Though not as strong a commitment as many hoped, this is nonetheless the first international pledge to reduce the full range of fossil fuel production and use, not just coal.

Adaptation, however, has had a lower profile. The idea of adapting to climate change’s effects has even been suppressed as defeatism in some quarters, since it tacitly accepts the inevitability of those effects. In many of the countries where AKDN works, however, the time for such debates is over; climate change is already a lived reality that demands an urgent response.

Such efforts must be led from the bottom up, since the impacts of climate change on the ground are highly local and specific and cannot be meaningfully discussed at the global level where the mitigation conversation generally takes place. Of course, saying such things is easier than doing them, and there is still far to go to make adaptation the priority it needs to be, with many observers expressing disappointment at COP28’s progress on adaptation funding. Nonetheless, the intense conversation around a Global Goal on Adaptation marks an important – if insufficient – step forward.

2. NASA is helping mountain communities adapt to climate change

Small island states, beloved of holidaymakers and highly photogenic, have garnered significant attention in recent years for their vulnerability to climate change. Such habitats are indeed seriously threatened, but they are far from the only ones.

In the countries AKDN works in, we see many people grappling with the everyday reality of a rapidly changing climate. Of these, none face a more precarious future than those living in mountains, who must navigate extreme weather events, landslides, vanishing water resources and unstable glacial lakes.

For such communities, adaptation is urgent, but complicated. The more knowledge they have available of where and how climate change will manifest, the better. Even within a single mountain range, microclimates abound, and the parameters that can make or break a village’s habitability are legion, including snowfall, ice density, soil erosion, rainfall, landslide risks and others. Adaptation for one village may not look the same as for another only a matter of miles away, and for others will not be possible at all.

Researchers from around the world are working to forecast this complicated future. With help from NASA scientists and others, the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat is using rich datasets derived from mountain communities to predict hazards 30 and even 80 years from now in the mountains of Central and South Asia. These can help inform the difficult decisions such communities face about how to adapt to an uncertain future, whether by planting trees to reduce landslide risks, regenerating degraded land, constructing greenhouses to extend growing seasons, or even, in some cases, by relocating altogether to places of greater safety.

3. Teachers are enlisting in the fight against climate change

Globally, around 70 percent of students report not being taught anything about how to address climate change in their formal schooling, according to the UN. COP28 illustrated how fast this is going to change.

In the next three years, more than 80 countries plan to add climate change to their national school curricula, meaning that around a billion students globally are set to be taught about climate change as part of their formal education in the coming decade, promising a generational revolution in environmental literacy.

Encouragingly, 95 percent of teachers worldwide say they want to teach about climate change, according to a recent UNESCO survey. But only a third report having the competence to do so, meaning tens of millions of teachers require new tools and knowledge to empower them in this task. COP28 supercharged efforts to make this a reality, hosting a dedicated education day for the first time to centre teachers in the debate about how to design exciting and inclusive climate education. AKF’s teachersfortheplanet.org, an online portal of over 100 teacher-led climate action solutions for education from more than 60 countries, is just one of many initiatives contributing to this goal. If successful, such efforts can make teaching the green job on which all others are built.

4. Banks are accelerating the transition

Whether the climate conversation is about mitigation or adaptation, there’s generally an upfront cost to pay. McKinsey has estimated the total cost of achieving net zero globally to be around $275 trillion, while climate adaptation costs are estimated to run to hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

Whether a business is switching from fossil fuels to renewables or from plastic to seaweed, it needs to finance the change, and this puts lenders in a critical position. Increasingly, they are using that position to accelerate change.

Recent years have seen an explosion in environmental, social and governance initiatives and standards across financial services, meaning that the environment is looming larger in banks’ decisions about what they will finance, and what they won’t. Pakistan’s HBL, for instance, the country’s largest private lender, is one of many banks worldwide to have decided not to finance new coal projects, back in 2020. Three years later, such announcements are now having real-world impact. In just one example, a major industrial customer of HBL, currently constructing a soda ash plant, will now power that facility with renewable instead of coal-fired electricity – a tangible change that will save both them and the planet many tonnes of harmful emissions. While green priorities are still far from universal in big finance, changes such as these may yet see banks play a starring role in the race to net zero.

5. Mitigation isn’t just for rich countries

A tendency of climate change discourse in recent years has been to assume that mitigation is mainly the job of the rich world to do, since rich countries are primarily responsible for historic emissions. While this is true, the reality is that poor countries are those that can least afford to neglect such measures.

Whether it is installing renewable capacity, greening the supply chain, or pursuing energy efficiency, countries that don’t take these steps may avoid costs in the present, but will find themselves lumbered with more expensive operations in the future as a result, making them less competitive and less resilient to inevitable shocks. Therefore, if mitigation is only practised by rich countries and the rest are left to focus on adaptation, it is likely to entrench and widen existing developmental gaps.

It is critical that low- and middle-income countries get the tools and resources to pursue mitigation as well as adaptation. An example is the AKDN’s homegrown carbon accounting tool, a simple means for any large organisation to understand and cut emissions anywhere in the world, without the need for expensive third-party assistance. The tool is easy to implement across sectors and has already been widely shared, free of charge. Innovations of this kind can play a huge part in making mitigation as accessible as possible, and ensuring that all countries, not merely rich ones, can make the net-zero transition.