COP28: The Global Goal on Adaptation Gets Real

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The most intense negotiations I followed in Dubai at COP28 were those around the GGA or global goal on adaptation. My standard phrase from 11 days at COP referred to the GGA as the most important and least reported part of the climate negotiations.

The importance of the GGA is hard to underestimate. Diplomats from dozens of countries argued for more than a week, often intensely and passionately, sometimes with non-governmental advisors on the margins. Like many colleagues, I eagerly awaited the occasional drafts that would emerge out of those discussions. With a few diplomats, I exchanged papers and suggestions, always humble of my role as an outsider. I wish I just could have bought them coffee and pizza. They were working for all of us, and for those are responsible and humble people, that was a heavy burden.

Outcome text can be found here. The short version is that water language and references run throughout, but the document is also unfinished. The negotiators have created a useful framework, and now the process will go to a technical team that will report out the final guidance in two years, at COP30 in Brazil.

This is a good outcome. What it means is that now the nerds will dig deep into the literature — the published outcomes, lessons, and science. I am hoping that practitioners will be well represented. You can contribute to this process as well — and I hope you do at this link.

I ask as a colleague that you also try to frame your contributions into their framework — how is your work relevant, how does it deepen our decision making. And that you also focus on the difference of resilience — what is new, what helps us prepare for the big changes to come, what helps us measure who and how we are adaptation, how resilient we are now and how resilient we need to come.

My intuition tells me that this is about a lot more than preserving and conserving, or measuring the area of parks or the length of currently undammed rivers. These measures need to be insights into forward-looking resilient development and resource management, and we need to be drawing on new reservoirs of insights and lessons.

John Matthews

Corvallis, Oregon, USA