The Gathering Storm Adapting to climate change in a post-pandemic world published by UNEP (2021).
The sixth edition of the UNEP Adaptation Gap Report (AGR2021) has been produced in the second year of the global COVID-19 pandemic. While encouraging trends in tackling the pandemic are emerging, including the unprecedented development and roll-out of highly effective vaccines in many industrialized countries, the COVID-19 crisis continues to create severe human health challenges, economic turmoil and recurring restrictions on daily life in most parts of the world. The pandemic’s impact on global climate change adaptation processes is increasingly visible through direct effects on adaptation planning and constraints on available finance. Climate impacts also tend to be more severe in vulnerable developing economies, many of which are also among the worst affected by COVID-19. At the same time, rescue and recovery initiatives designed to kick start economies in the wake of the pandemic offer a unique opportunity to secure a green recovery by mainstreaming adaptation into public financing streams worth trillions of dollars, dwarfing the sums otherwise dedicated to adaptation. Furthermore, climate change and the pandemic share some striking similarities: like the pandemic, the climate change crisis is a systemic problem that requires coordinated global, national and local responses. Many of the lessons learned from handling the pandemic have the potential to serve as examples of how to improve climate adaptation planning and financing.
