One of the most important long-term climate adaptation challenges is how to motivate - and sustain – appropriate capital investments and adapted practices across all systems and at all scales. Although advocates make compelling arguments for climate adaptation funding and policies and public and charitable programs deploy considerable technical and financial support for adaptation, this motivational challenge persists. In some cases, how these programs operate exacerbate the problem, and, worse, can introduce new disincentives to sustainable adaptation – or even encourage maladaptation - that puts climatically vulnerable people at greater peril.
This blog series and video accepted as an official side event at the 2021 Climate Adaptation Summit discusses six problems with the climate adaptation (dis)incentive regime and forward ideas on how to overcome these problems, in particular considering how the Higher Ground Foundation’s climate Vulnerability ReductioN Credit (VRC™) to make effective and sustainable climate change investment attractive and, in so doing, help create a future where the best responses to climate change are those the world wants to make.
In the follow-on blog series we’ll go into more depth on each of these six key challenges and the opportunities and approaches to overcome them.