Lively. Informative. Hard hitting. ADB Insight is a webcast that looks at the key development issues facing Asia & the Pacific.
Episode 13
The Climate Emergency: A Call for Action at COP27
28 October 2022
Warren Evans
Asian Development Bank
Climate change is the critical issue of our lifetime and the past 12 months have rammed home that fact. In Asia and the Pacific, hundreds of millions of people have been impacted by large-scale flooding, drought, typhoons, and cyclones.
Now, world leaders are preparing to descend on Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt for COP27. It’s the most important event in the calendar in the battle against climate change, a chance for countries to show the world their resolve, their actions, and their commitments.
ADB Climate Envoy Warren Evans joins ADB Insight to discuss the growing importance of adaptation in Asia and the Pacific, what makes ADB Asia and the Pacific’s climate bank, and what needs to happen at COP27 to create momentum toward transformational action against climate change.
Nisha Pillai: Warren, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. Before we dive into the specifics of COP27, can you give me your assessment of the climate crisis facing Asia and the Pacific at the moment?
Warren Evans: Thanks, Nisha. It's a pleasure to have an opportunity to talk to you about this critically important issue. So just in the last year, we have seen concurrent devastating climate events—Pakistan floods and extreme drought in China, which dried up the Yangtze River, the first time in in memorable history that that's happened, along with the increased frequency and intensity of cyclones and typhoons in the region.
So, when you look across Asia and the Pacific, you can kind of imagine a geography of climate impacts. So, the Pacific island nations and Maldives, low-lying atolls, are going to be impacted, are already being impacted by sea level rise, by increasing storm surge from cyclones and so on. These are entire communities that might have to move, and in some cases, entire countries that are under threat.
Then when you go from that extreme to the high mountains, you look at the Hindu Kush Himalayas, you have glacial melt. You have melting permafrost. And then you look across the Central and South Asia areas that are highly vulnerable to drought and to flooding. And then finally, if you look at the coastal zones of Asia and the Pacific, there are about 100 million or so people who live about one meter, two meters above sea level in communities and in large cities all over Asia.
So, the reality is that all of the kinds of climate events caused by climate change will increase in frequency and intensity. And the most vulnerable communities across our region will suffer the consequences. These are communities and people who did not contribute to climate change. They are suffering the impacts of climate change.
Nisha Pillai: As you rightly say, Warren, these communities are entirely blameless victims of climate change. So, how do we go about building resilience so that they can survive the crisis?
Warren Evans: Well, the number one way to tackle adaptation, to have communities increase their resilience to climate impacts, is through the development process. So, we need to continue to focus on poverty reduction and economic development, social and economic development. That will, in and of itself, improve the resilience of these communities. But at the same time, we need to shift the way we do development.
We need to redesign sectoral interventions, whether it's agriculture or water, urban, all of the kind of sectoral work that we do, need to have a very strong climate focus to really pay attention to what can we do differently to lower the risks of climate impacts to the actual infrastructure or communities, but also to increase the resilience of those communities and infrastructure and businesses to the kinds of impacts that they will have as a result of climate change.
We cannot avoid all the impacts; they will happen. So, we have to focus on building resilience of the communities.
Nisha Pillai: So, of course, funding is required to foster the kind of resilience you've been discussing. How do we go about raising the substantial sums that will be needed?
Warren Evans: Well, there are a number of things we can do. As you know, President Masa increased our ambition to $100 billion from 2019 to 2030 for climate finance. That included an increase, almost doubling of the commitment for financing adaptation, up to $34 billion. And I think we can go higher than that by 2030. I think we'll need to.
But, the challenge for adaptation really is that it requires more concessional finance, more grant finance. And this is going to be a huge part of the discussion at the next COP in Egypt, is how do you find those resources? At ADB, we're working on an innovative financing facility for climate in Asia and the Pacific, or IFCAP. That is the first mechanism that is exploring the use of a guarantee that would allow us to, for every dollar that comes into this facility, we would be able to mobilize $4 in climate finance.
Most of the climate financing mechanisms that exist today are a dollar in and a dollar out. So, this is really groundbreaking if we can make this work. It’s in a pilot phase and we’re exploring how to do this, and hope to launch it early next year. We hope to mobilize about $2.5 billion in contributions to IFCAP and that would enable us to have about $9 billion of additional climate finance through ADB, for ADB operations and private sector and public sector investments. So, that is the kind of innovation that's required.
Nisha Pillai: So, you've just mentioned COP27. Let's turn to it specifically. What are the global development community's hopes and expectations for this year?
Warren Evans: Well, COP27 in Egypt is focused on adaptation, and it is the big challenge. Mitigation is quite a bit easier to mobilize financing as compared to adaptation. The problem with the COPs has been a level of incrementalism. There's been somewhat of a short-term focus rather than a long-term and large-scale focus. I'm somewhat optimistic because I think that the reality has hit that climate change is here. It is a political dialog. And we'll just have to wait and see where the politics take us this year.
Nisha Pillai: How can multilateral development banks, and ADB specifically, influence progress at the next COP?
Warren Evans: The negotiations at the COPs are political negotiations, and so the MDBs don't really have a role in the negotiations. So, what is our role? We bring to the table the experience that we generate through our operations. We are Asia and the Pacific's climate bank. We are mobilizing substantial new resources. We're building capacity internally to be able to accelerate and scale up support to developing countries in line with their demands. And we bring that experience and knowledge to the table when we go to the COP.
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Disasters triggered by natural hazards and escalating climate change impacts seriously threaten economic and social development in Asia and the Pacific.
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With Asia and the Pacific responsible for more than half of all global carbon emissions, transitioning to clean energy is key to tackling climate change.
Nisha Pillai: Finally, Warren, what is the single message that you would like to convey to the delegates at COP this year?
Warren Evans: Well, I hope that we can put politics aside. Time has run out. The impacts are happening now. It's going to get worse, faster. And unless the global community comes together and establishes an agreement that they will all stick to, then we are going to see more Pakistan events hit more hundreds of millions of people more and more frequently.
It's up to the global community to address this challenge, to decarbonize at scale quickly, such as through the Energy Transition Mechanism that we're working on, to mobilize climate finance at scale quickly, such as through the IFCAP that I mentioned, and to scale up in particular, to scale up concessional and grant resources available to developing countries that suffer the most, that are the most vulnerable to climate change and the least resilient.
Nisha Pillai: Warren Evans, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your thoughts and expectations of the upcoming COP27.
Warren Evans: Thank you, Nisha. It's been a real pleasure to chat with you.
Nisha Pillai: And indeed, thank you to all of you for joining us for this episode of ADB Insight. I'm Nisha Pillai. Until the next time, goodbye.
