Africa needs almost $70 billion (R1.2 trillion) a year to protect people, livelihoods and economies from the impacts of climate change but receives only about $14bn in international funding for this work, a new report has found.
Power Shift Africa’s report, titled A Just Transition for Adaptation: A Framework and Vision for Africa, extends the just transition agenda beyond its traditional focus on energy and emissions to confront the challenge of how people can live safely in a warming world.
It finds that Africa’s vulnerability has been shaped by centuries of colonial extraction, unequal trade, debt dependency and the exclusion of African communities and governments from many of the decisions that determine how climate finance and adaptation are designed and delivered.
The report defines a just transition for adaptation as “a systemic, justice-centred transformation of how adaptation is planned, governed, financed and implemented” and “one that tackles the drivers of vulnerability, not only its symptoms”.
It finds a stark imbalance at the heart of the global climate response. Finance for protection and resilience remains slow, inadequate and debt-based, while finance for infrastructure and extraction continues to move at speed, including into places highly exposed to climate risks.
With the world off track to limit warming to 1.5°C under the Paris Agreement, the report argues that adaptation is no longer a peripheral issue of climate policy but a question of whether people can continue to live safely where they are.
Africa, it says, has contributed little to the climate crisis but is experiencing severe consequences, with climate impacts threatening food and water security, livelihoods, health, infrastructure and ecosystems.
The continent contributes a negligible share of global emissions yet accounted for 35% of climate-related deaths globally between 1970 and 2021.
Africa needs almost $70bn a year to prepare for and respond to these climate impacts but international adaptation finance was only about $14bn in 2021 and 2022.
African governments are spending more from their own budgets on adaptation than they receive internationally “effectively subsidising a global failure” to finance climate action.
Africa carries roughly $746 billion in debt, with average interest rates of about 9.8%, compared with 2.5% in the US. Nearly 60% of Africans live in countries that spend more on debt service than on health and education.
International public adaptation finance to developing countries fell from $28bn in 2022 to $26bn in 2023, according to the report, even as estimated adaptation needs are projected to reach $310bn to $365bn a year by 2035.
According to Power Shift Africa, current adaptation systems are failing to deliver equitable outcomes and are underfunded, externally imposed, donor-driven and unevenly implemented.
Its report says climate finance provided through loans, donor conditionalities and increasingly private capital can deepen debt burdens and structural dependencies.
It argues that international adaptation support should be understood as an obligation under the Paris Agreement, not charity, and that the obligation grows as warming increases.
The report calls for adaptation finance to be predictable, additional, accessible and grant-based, with a balance between adaptation and mitigation and country-led and regionally owned mechanisms.
It also calls for debt cancellation and debt relief to be recognised as adaptation measures.
Indigenous and local knowledge remains systematically excluded from adaptation science and policymaking, according to the report, despite communities having detailed, place-based knowledge of climate risks and responses.
Climate science and policy have systematically excluded Indigenous and local knowledge and that this exclusion is unjust and weakens policy. “Closing the knowledge gap is as urgent as closing the finance gap.”
The report calls for Indigenous and local knowledge to be recognised, incorporated and valued equally with mainstream climate science.
It also argues that Africa must define and lead its own adaptation pathway, rather than being viewed simply as climate-vulnerable and in need of assistance.
The Sasol Synfuels Plant. Secunda, Mpumalanga. (Daylin Paul)
Adaptation governance should be inclusive, democratic, rights-based, locally led, accountable and equitable, with free, prior and informed consent forming the basis of governance.
The report’s approach calls for justice to be embedded across adaptation policies, finance systems, design and implementation at local, national, regional and global levels.
It identifies four dimensions of justice for adaptation: recognitional justice, which concerns whose needs and knowledge are recognised; procedural justice, concerning participation in decisions; distributive justice, concerning how resources and burdens are shared; and restorative justice, addressing historical harm.
For Mohamed Adow, the executive director of Power Shift Africa, the situation amounts to “failed adaptation”.
“What our communities are living through is not simply loss and damage but failed adaptation. The world has failed on the 1.5°C goal and the protection that was promised in its place never arrived. Now we are staring at impacts that test whether people can go on living in the places they call home. Human habitability is at stake,” he said.
Adow said the report showed that Africa’s vulnerability was produced by human decisions.
“ which means different decisions can undo it. That is where hope lies and that is how we bring people with us”.
The report comes before the COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye, in November, where negotiations will include the Global Goal on Adaptation and the Just Transition Work Programme, as well as pressure to clarify the adaptation finance tripling pledge made at COP30 in Belém.
The report identifies COP32 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 2027 as an opportunity to put adaptation more firmly at the centre of the global agenda and shape it around justice, development and African leadership.
It says that if COP32 is to be an adaptation COP, it must deliver finance, technology and capacity and advance African-led adaptation addressing structural vulnerability and building long-term resilience.
Its final question is not only how Africa adapts but “on whose terms, with whose resources and towards what future”.