This WASP brief looks at the Global Goal on Adaptation. The Science for Adaptation Policy Brief Series targets researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to help them bridge the science-policy-action interface.
Key messages
•Article 7.1 of the Paris Agreement established the Global Goal for Adaptation (GGA) to “enhance adaptive capacity, strengthen resilience, and reduce vulnerability to climate change, with a view to contributing to sustainable development and ensuring an adequate adaptation response in the context of the temperature goal”.
• The GGA aims at adequacy of adaptive response commensurate with the temperature goal of Article 2 of the Paris Agreement.
• Operationalizing the GGA requires a collective effort from global to sub-national levels of governance to identify qualitative and/or quantitative indicators of adaptive capacity, resilience and vulnerability that can be monitored to assess progress in achieving the GGA. The Global Stocktake (GST) referred to in Article 14 of the Paris Agreement will report on this progress.
• There are no agreed frameworks, methods, indicators, or metrics to assess progress towards the GGA. Periodic national vulnerability self-assessments, National Adaptation Plans (NAPs), and other processes at local to national scales can be synthesized to monitor the extent to which adaptive capacity and resilience are facilitated.