Assessing transboundary climate risks under the UNFCCC Global Stocktake
This brief distils relevant insights from this year’s assessment, The Global Transboundary Climate Risk Report and complements them with perceptions from expert interviews with international scientific and climate policy experts, to reveal the scientific, technical, political and procedural barriers to including transboundary climate risks into the the UNFCCC Global Stocktake (GST). It presents proposals to overcome these barriers and lay the foundations for redressing the “transboundary gap” in the second GST in five years’ time, as well as to enhance international cooperation for climate action in the crucial intervening years.
Key conclusions and reccomendations include:
- The outputs of the first GST should call for the creation of an evidence base on transboundary climate risks, ideally through existing platforms (e.g. weADAPT and Adaptation Without Borders), to collect case studies from different world regions and sectors.
- The outputs of the first GST should encourage Parties to discuss the most relevant instrument(s) to enhance reporting of transboundary risks to the GST.
- The outputs of the first GST should call for the preparation of guidelines to drive the inclusion of transboundary climate risks in the second cycle. The guidelines should also clarify who should carry out this reporting.
- The outputs of the first GST should encourage greater cooperation on transboundary climate risks and related adaptation at bilateral, regional and international scales and call for mechanisms to ensure that adaptation is just and does not enhance the resilience of some at the expense of others.