Last year, the Global Center on Adaptation (GCA) published its State and Trends in Adaptation 2021 report (STA21). The report described the urgent need to adapt to climate change, as rising temperatures cause more extreme storms and floods, rising sea levels, more intense heatwaves, and longer and more severe droughts.
As the report documented, Africa is particularly vulnerable to these extreme impacts of climate change. It faces exponential collateral damage, posing systemic risks to its economies, infrastructure investments, water, and food systems, public health, agriculture, and livelihoods, threatening to undo its hard-won development and reverse decades of economic progress.

This year, the impacts of the conflict in Ukraine on agricultural exports and fertilizers, the resulting food price hikes, inflationary pressures, unsustainable debt levels for many countries, and the possible global economic recession are severely impacting African economies and communities.

Though the risks are great, so too are the opportunities that successful adaptation can bring. The 2021 report presented a comprehensive blueprint for how individuals and institutions in the African and international policy space can finance, design, and implement adaptation plans to best protect the lives and livelihoods of millions of African people from such disruptive change.

Moreover, the report showed, these adaptation measures are enormously cost-effective, working hand in hand with development to put Africa on a more resilient path to growth and to create a virtuous cycle. Even as adaptation measures protect people and communities from the impacts of climate change, they can also help lift people out of poverty, reduce hunger and undernourishment, raise incomes and living standards, fight diseases like cholera and dysentery, create jobs, reduce inequities, reduce the tensions that lead to conflicts, and empower women.
Those gains, in turn, further increase resilience, enabling communities to better cope with future extreme weather events or other climate change impacts. Most of the adaptation measures reviewed in this report have important climate mitigation, biodiversity, and sustainability benefits.