Understanding the Paris Agreement’s ‘Global Goal on Adaptation’

This piece was originally published on the World Resources Institute website. It was written by members of the ACT2025 consortium, a group of experts from climate-vulnerable countries working to drive greater climate ambition on the international stage. Learn more about ACT2025 and its work here.

A staggering 3.6 billion people — nearly half of the global population — are currently considered highly vulnerable to climate change impacts, ranging from droughts, floods and storms to heat stress and food insecurity. This number will only continue to rise as long as global temperatures keep climbing.

While the world must act swiftly to curb greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and halt climate change, action is also needed to build the resilience of people already feeling its impacts — and those who inevitably will soon. Climate adaptation efforts must be quickly scaled up to safeguard vulnerable communities, from building sea walls for flood protection to restoring forests that maintain water supplies and planting more resilient crops.

Yet global progress on climate adaptation has been small-scale, slow and fragmented to date, coming up woefully short of the world’s need.

The Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) aims to address this shortfall by providing a clear framework and targets for measuring progress on adaptation. A well-crafted and widely supported GGA will guide global adaptation efforts by highlighting where and how adaptation plans and policies are being implemented, and which areas are falling behind.

Although the GGA was included in the Paris Agreement in 2015, the eight years that followed saw limited progress on developing it. However, countries finally agreed to an overarching framework at the 2023 UN climate summit (COP28). The frameworkprovides a strong foundation, laying out key areas for global adaptation action. But it still lacks quantified, measurable adaptation targets as well as measures to mobilize finance, technology and capacity building (known as “means of implementation”) — all of which are critical to driving real-world outcomes.

Negotiators are tasked with resolving these issues in 2025. They’ll work to enhance the GGA framework so that it truly drives action at the scale needed, and so countries will have a useful set of indicators by which to measure and track its progress.

What is the Global Goal on Adaptation?

The Global Goal on Adaptation is a collective commitment under Article 7.1 of the Paris Agreement aimed at “enhancing [the world’s] adaptive capacity, strengthening resilience and reducing vulnerability to climate change.” Proposed by the African Group of Negotiators (AGN) in 2013 and established in 2015, the GGA is meant to serve as a unifying framework to drive political action and finance for adaptation on the same scale as mitigation. This means setting specific, measurable targets and guidelines for global adaptation action, as well as enhancing adaptation finance and other types of support for developing countries.

The GGA is meant to enable adaptation actions that are timely, scalable and specific. Because countries are experiencing climate change impacts to different degrees and are vulnerable to them in different ways, it is also meant to encourage solutions that consider local contexts and the particular needs of specific groups of vulnerable people.

How can countries achieve the Global Goal on Adaptation and its targets?

The needs of all countries — especially those most vulnerable to climate change — must be fully included and addressed as countries work to enhance and implement the GGA. This means ensuring that the framework and its tracking mechanisms uphold four key principles:

Focus on equity and justice

Equity and justice must be core considerations when operationalizing the GGA so that adaptation measures do not worsen existing inequalities. For instance, finance mechanisms should be designed to avoid increasing debt levels for developing countries — many of which are already heavily burdened by debt, limiting their ability to pay for climate action.

Support for locally led adaptation

Individual nations, states, provinces and communities must be able to tailor adaptation strategies to their unique contexts. To this end, the GGA should ensure that local populations, especially those most susceptible to the effects of climate change, are meaningfully involved. They should have true decision-making authority — including budgetary decisions — over which adaptation interventions are implemented in their communities, by whom and in what ways.

Compared to top-down approaches, locally led adaptation strategies can encourage ownership and effectiveness, reinforce social cohesion, and allow more flexibility in adaptation responses given the dynamic nature of climate change. However, they should still be aligned with national adaptation priorities.

The Principles for Locally Led Adaptation provide a useful framework to redistribute decision-making authority to the lowest appropriate level, including marginalized and particularly vulnerable groups such as Indigenous peoples, women, youth and others.

Inclusive, science-based decision making

Adaptation actions should be based on the best available science as well as traditional and Indigenous knowledge to ensure effective and context-relevant strategies. The GGA must recognize the importance of integrating Indigenous peoples’ wisdom into adaptation strategies, respecting their rights and knowledge systems, and promoting their active involvement in decision-making and designing solutions. Facilitating technology and knowledge transfer to developing countries will also be important to enhance local capacity for advancing adaptation efforts.

Alignment with other global sustainability goals

Adaptation efforts should complement and be integrated into other national and international development initiatives. This includes, for example, aligning with the broader Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

What’s included in the current GGA framework, and what’s missing?

The GGA framework put forth at COP28, named the “UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience” (UAE FGCR), highlights key areas in which all countries need to build resilience, such as food, water and health. These globally relevant themes can help bridge the gap between national and global adaptation priorities and ensure ambitious and unified messaging and outcomes.

The framework also lays out overarching (but not yet quantified) global targets which will help guide countries in developing and implementing National Adaptation Plans and other relevant policies. These include:

• Impact, vulnerability and risk assessment: By 2030, all Parties have conducted assessments of climate hazards, climate change impacts and exposure to risks and vulnerabilities, and have used the outcomes to inform their National Adaptation Plans, policy instruments, and planning processes and/or strategies. Furthermore, by 2027, all Parties have established systemic observation to gather climate data, as well as multi-hazard early warning systems and climate information services to support risk reduction.
• Planning: By 2030, all Parties have country-driven, gender-responsive, participatory and fully transparent National Adaptation Plans, policy instruments and planning processes, and have mainstreamed adaptation in all relevant strategies and plans.
• Implementation: By 2030, all Parties have progressed in implementing their National Adaptation Plans, policies and strategies, and have reduced the social and economic impacts of key climate hazards.
• Monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL): By 2030, all Parties have designed, established and operationalized systems for monitoring, evaluation and learning for their national adaptation efforts and have built institutional capacity to fully implement their systems.

These broad targets offer a good starting point to guide adaptation efforts. But there are important gaps in the framework, too. For example, it lacks specific, measurable indicators to track on-the-ground action and measure progress toward achieving global adaptation goals.

The GGA framework also reiterates that international climate finance for adaptationshould be on par with finance for mitigation in developing countries, recognizing that current levels are far too low to respond to worsening climate change impacts. However, it is silent on how countries should mobilize this finance. Ambitious finance targets are necessary to ensure that adaptation efforts, especially in climate vulnerable countries and communities, can be implemented.

Also missing are references to “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities” (CBDR-RC). This concept acknowledges that different countries have different levels of responsibility in addressing climate change according to their wealth and development levels.

What progress has been made recently, and what comes next?

Developing the Global Goal on Adaptation has been a complex challenge — in part because adaptation interventions are often hyper-local and context-specific, and in part because negotiators have struggled to reach agreement on key political issues (such who should pay for adaptation in developing countries, which are the least responsible for climate change but often bear its heaviest burden).

With a framework in place, negotiators are now working to resolve thorny questions about the GGA which were not answered in its initial text, such as how to track progress toward its overarching targets. They have already made some progress: At COP29 in 2024, for example, countries agreed to track means of implementation (finance, technology transfer and development, and capacity building). This will help measure how well countries are adapting to climate change and whether they are receiving the financial and technical support they need to do so.

But unanswered questions remain. Addressing the following issues will be critical to delivering adaptation action that truly meets the needs of developing countries:

• Financing adaptation action: Ensuring adequate and accessible funding for adaptation remains a formidable challenge in implementing the GGA. Closing the adaptation finance gap requires not only mobilizing highly concessional finance in a timely manner, but also developing innovative financing solutions to address current and future climate impacts. Adaptation methodologies and metrics should be set up to effectively track the quantity and quality of climate finance for adaptation to ensure these targets are not underfunded and poorly implemented. Attention must also be paid to ensuring that finance is accessible to communities and not bottlenecked in national capitals. Recent estimates indicate that only around 17% of adaptation finance ever makes it to the local level.
• Indicators and measurements: Negotiators are tasked with finalizing a set of indicators for tracking adaptation action and support. Eight groups of technical experts are now in the process of narrowing down thousands of proposed indicators to a final list of no more than 100 by COP30 in November 2025. The final set of indicators must be comprehensive, yet manageable and globally applicable. These indicators should effectively capture progress toward adaptation goals by encompassing a wide range of information, including environmental and social considerations as well as enabling factors (which was a key focus of discussion at COP29).
• Limited data and knowledge: Effective adaptation planning requires accurate and adequate data and knowledge about local climate impacts and vulnerabilities. Many countries, particularly those with limited resources, may lack the necessary scientific expertise, technical capacity and data to develop robust adaptation strategies, which can impact progress and tracking. Parties should consider measures to help develop and streamline data collection and analysis while pushing for improvements in data and knowledge sharing as part of GGA processes.
• Linking bottom-up metrics and solutions with top-down indicators: Metrics also need to be adaptable to different scales so they may be tailored to specific contexts but also aggregated at higher levels. Creating locally appropriate and context-specific indicator frameworks means defining metrics and solutions from the bottom up. However, these must be linked to national adaptation goals to ensure progress can be tracked systematically. In other words, a one-size-fits-all-approach is not an effective way to address adaptation issues, and the framework should not assume that. For countries to develop robust adaptation monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) systems, the GGA must help them take stock of local initiatives and systematically integrate this data into national and subnational-level MEL processes.

In addition, parties launched two processes — the Baku Adaptation Roadmap and the Baku High-level Dialogue on Adaptation, meant to foster implementation of the GGA — yet how they will do so remains unclear. As the scope of the roadmap and dialogue are developed, Parties must consider how indicators will be measured and tracked in practice; how adaptation finance links to the New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance; how they can catalyze and strengthen regional and international cooperation to scale up adaptation action and support; and how other stakeholders can support its implementation.

Protecting the most vulnerable through the GGA

The UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience adopted in 2023 marked a major achievement after nearly a decade of lagging progress. COP29 also made important strides in advancing the process to refine the goal’s tracking indicators and establishing new mechanisms to support implementation.

However, for communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis, these advancements must swiftly translate into tangible action on the ground.

In the months and years ahead, negotiators must work to ensure that the GGA framework accelerates action towards strengthening resilience globally — such as through stronger protections for farmers facing drought, better infrastructure for coastal communities, and funding that reaches those who need it most — providing real support for the world’s most vulnerable communities. Only then can the GGA truly drive adaptation action at the pace and scale necessary to meet the climate crisis head on.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in November 2023. It was updated in February 2024 to reflect progress made on the Global Goal on Adaptation at COP28 and in March 2025 to reflect progress made at COP29.