The following is an excerpt from a guest blog post by our CEO Renat Heuberger on the Telegraph website.
Five years after the Paris agreement was reached, the need for global action on climate change is clearer than ever. Calls for mitigation and a green economic recovery continue to catch headlines, even if in the margins of the Covid-19 newsreel.
Yet the natural corollary, climate adaptation, remains underreported and underfinanced, even when extreme weather events ravage the world. Cyclone Amphan, the strongest storm ever recorded in the Bay of Bengal, wreaked havoc in India and Bangladesh last month, while on the other side of the planet the 2020 hurricane season has started well ahead of schedule, with Atlantic sea surface temperatures way above average. Floods and landslides have affected hundreds of thousands of rural people in Kenya and Uganda.
The most vulnerable people – many of them already weakened by illness, lockdowns, unemployment and shortages of essential supplies – are particularly ill-protected in the face of extreme weather events. The world needs to adapt to climate change, and it must do so quickly for the sake of the global commons that human life depends on. But can we finance large-scale adaptation efforts in an economic downturn and amid a pandemic?
Check out the full guest blog post by our CEO Renat Heuberger on the Telegraph website.
Also while you're here, take a look at Renat's other recent blog posts on our own South Pole blog.
