Andy Revkin has a piece in today’s New York Times on the challenges facing climate adaptation. He reports that money being spent on human-caused climate change in developing countries under the Framework Convention on Climate Change is biased in favor of mitigation over adaptation by a factor of 25 to 1:

But for now, the actual spending in adaptation projects in the world’s most vulnerable spots, totaling around $40 million a year, “borders on the derisory,” said Kevin Watkins, the director of the United Nations Human Development Report Office, which tracks factors affecting the quality of life around the world.

The lack of climate aid persists even though nearly all the world’s industrialized nations, including the United States under the first President Bush, pledged to help when they signed the first global warming treaty, the Framework Convention on Climate Change, in 1992. Under that treaty, industrialized countries promised to assist others “that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change in meeting costs of adaptation.” It did not specify how much they would pay.

A $3 billion Global Environmental Facility fund maintained by contributions from developed countries has nearly $1 billion set aside for projects in poorer countries that limit emissions of greenhouse gases. But critics say those projects often do not have direct local benefits, and many are happening in the large fast-industrializing developing countries — not the poorest ones.

This situation exists despite the following consensus view from the IPCC:

In its most recent report, in February, the [IPCC] panel said that decades of warming and rising seas were inevitable with the existing greenhouse-gas buildup, no matter what was done about cutting future greenhouse gas emissions.

My former colleague (and boss) at NCAR, Mickey Glantz aptly sums up where this leaves climate policy:

Michael H. Glantz, an expert on climate hazards at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who has spent two decades pressing for more work on adaptation to warming, has called for wealthy countries to help establish a center for climate and water monitoring in Africa, run by Africans. But for now, he says he is doubtful that much will be done.

“The third world has been on its own,” he said, “and I think it pretty much will remain on its own.”