The 29th Conference of Parties (COP29) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), adopted the Baku Adaptation Road to facilitate the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA). Climate negotiations have historically centered on mitigation and finance, often sidelining adaptation. A critical agenda item of COP29 was to facilitate adaptation through forwarding GGA. However, the anticipated progress on the GGA was slow and sluggish. A major issue of contestation was the debate around contrasting approaches to adaptation: incremental versus transformational. The parties remained deadlocked over this issue, among others, for much of the conference.
Transformational adaptation (TA) is an approach to adaptation that calls for a larger systemic change to cope with the impacts of climate change. It advocates for a change in the status quo of the social, economic, political, and environmental systems/structures along with values and worldviews, undertaking radical reforms to cope with climate impacts. The literature typically contrasts this with incremental adaptation (IA) where technological and managerial alterations are undertaken step by step to cope with climate impacts considering the respective capabilities of the countries.
Ardent advocates of TA include developed countries like the US, Canada, and Europe, which are among the highest historical emitters of greenhouse gases (GHG). These countries have done little to address climate change despite being financially, infrastructurally and technologically in a much better position to do so. Developing countries on the other hand have conveyed serious reservations about these qualifiers being applied to adaptation before any serious progress on adaptation has even begun. In Baku, the UNFCCC secretariat tabled a technical paper on TA. Developed countries including the US, Canada, Australia and Japan called for a discussion of this technical paper. However, the Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDC), the Arab Group, the Africa Group, and the Least Developed Countries (LDC) opposed any discussion. Eventually, the official GGA text recognised that “both” incremental and transformational adaptation approaches are essential to implement the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience. The discussion on the paper was scheduled for a later meeting of the Subsidiary Bodies in 2025.
In the guise of “transformational adaptation”, developed countries expect systemic and radical changes from developing countries without changing any of their own domestic policy trajectories. There is 30 years of evidence of how developed countries have continually tried to shift the burden of climate change mitigation on developing countries while dragging their feet on any support for adaptation efforts. The US still staunchly believes that the “American way of life is not up for negotiations,” refusing to change consumption patterns at home; Europe has resorted to coal to address the energy crisis in the backdrop of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, taking a step back from its commitment to green energy. Yet, these countries expect the least developed and developing countries to undertake systemic changes in their social, economic and political structures as part of TA, and overhaul not just their existing systems, but also their values and worldviews! It is in fact the developed world that should alter its “values and worldviews” given its historical GHG emissions.
The technical paper elaborates on the pathways for transformations “to meet GHG reduction goals”, but essentially uses TA as a tool to shift the burden of emissions cuts to developing countries. Transformational adaptation prioritises mitigation over adaptation measures, terming adaptation measures that do not simultaneously lead to mitigation as “maladaptation”. This rules out the building of essential infrastructure such as schools and hospitals that are critical to developing countries. TA is rather presented as a filter to decide what is acceptable as adaptation, undermining the efforts of developing countries to adapt. A specific example is that the technical paper associates early warning systems with a moderate to high risk of maladaptation. Given that Early Warnings for All is a target programme of the World Meteorological Organization, this devaluation of its importance to countries with very high ongoing impacts of climate change is problematic.
The paper does not critically evaluate whether TA could further exacerbate socio-economic inequalities in developing countries that are structurally constrained in undertaking such massive system transformations. It does not discuss how marginalised groups, such as Indigenous communities and women will benefit from it. In fact, one of the options for TA is proposed to be relocating vulnerable communities to adapt to the risk of extreme weather events (e.g. floods), which could be counterproductive, and compound existing socio-economic inequalities.
Transformational adaptation is a reformist and power-laden approach to addressing climate change, and is unsuitable for developing countries with pre-existing fragile systems and inequities. They need adaptive measures within their constraints that can protect their people, ensuring increasing resilience, incremental as it may be. The developed world, through its experts, seeks to dictate knowledge production and paradigms on global climate action by defining what is transformational and what is not. While a global approach to adaptation should aim at bridging the adaptation gaps that arise due to a lack of finance and resources, through promoting frameworks such as transformational adaptation, developed countries seek to shift the burden of action onto those who have contributed the least to climate change.
COP30 at Belém will be pivotal in stocktaking the progress in development of indicators to measure advancements towards GGA under the UAE-Belém Framework. As the discussion on the technical paper on transformational adaptation furthers, developing countries should collectively resist prescriptive approaches and advocate for adaptation strategies more suitable to their socio-economic realities and developmental needs. Equity-driven adaptation should remain the key priority of the Global South at Belém, ensuring a more inclusive and just Global Goal on Adaptation.
(Akriti Sharma is a doctoral scholar at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru)