Focus on Arts and Ecology

Following devastating floods that destroyed crops in the breadbasket region of India and Pakistan, food insecurity continues to loom large. 

By Alefia T Hussain, Cheena Kapoor, December 2, 2025

Sitting in his now ruined fields, Gurpreet Singh recalls how his five-year-old daughter searched for cheap toys at a Diwali fair in October, knowing her father could not afford much this festival season. “When I tried to buy her a toy from the festival fair, she refused. She knew there were difficult times ahead,” he says.

The child has faced circumstances far beyond anyone her age should have. The floods that wreaked havoc on the Punjab region in India and Pakistan in August submerged her family’s farm for over a month, destroying an entire season’s worth of crops and killing some of their livestock. Her only cow was not spared.

Singh is the elected head of four villages in the Kapurthala district of Punjab state in India. He lost the rice crop on his 2.6-hectare farm in the district’s Sultanpur Lodhi tehsil (local administrative division), which fed his family of eight.

Several hundred kilometres away, in the neighbouring Punjab province in Pakistan, 58-year-old Tariq Mahmood recalls how the floodwaters submerged his farmland, rice and sugarcane crops just as they were ready for harvesting. “We could only save 30% of our sugarcane” after returning to the village, he says.

Mahmood’s land is just 500 metres from the Sutlej River in the city of Chishtian, Bahawalnagar district, south-east Punjab. His 10-hectare farm, which he shares with his three brothers, will take at least six months to restore to a cultivable state, he says.

Punjab, the breadbasket for both India and Pakistan, has experienced several climate shocks in the last few years, including heatwaves and floods. But for India, the devastation this year has been reported as the worst since the severe 1988 floods.

This time, an estimated 175,000 hectares of agricultural land was washed away in India alone across all 23 districts in Punjab state, with at least 57 people dead.

In Pakistan’s Punjab, at least 304 people have died from the rains and floods, according to the country’s National Disaster Management Authority. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) notes that in the province, 1.12 million hectares of agricultural land were affected, or 9% of Punjab’s total agricultural land. Over 214,000 hectares of rice and 122,000 hectares of cotton were inundated, James Robert Okoth, officer-in-charge of the FAO in the country, told Dialogue Earth.

Now, as the region begins the process of rebuilding, farmers in Punjab lament the inadequate support given by their governments for recovery, leading to fears of food shortages in both countries.

What caused the severe flooding?

In India’s Punjab, the floods this year were caused by torrential rains and the rainwater being suddenly released from dams as a surge. “For days, we saw the waters in the canals swell, but the government did not do anything,” says Gurpreet Singh. Then one day in mid-August, “we woke up to waterlogged farms”, he notes.

In Pakistan, intense monsoon rains, exacerbated by impacts of climate change, swelled the Sutlej, Chenab and Ravi rivers in Punjab. This was compounded by India releasing water from its upstream dams, which it had informed Pakistan about. The combination of factors led to widespread destruction in a province where agricultural labour is a key source of income for rural households.

According to Pakistan’s latest Agriculture Census, published in August, Punjab province provides between 51-68% of wheat, rice, maize, cotton and sugarcane grown in the country, as well as 85% of fodder. The trade body Pakistan Business Forum told Arab News in September that its preliminary assessment of the damage in Punjab estimated crop losses of 60% of rice, 30% of sugarcane and 35% of cotton.

India’s Punjab, meanwhile, grows 15% of the country’s wheat and nearly 10% of its rice. Punjab accounted for over 40% of the country’s basmati rice exports, the Indian Rice Exporter’s Federation told UK-newspaper the Independent. The floods led to 20-25% losses in the rice variety, reported science journal Nature.

In Pakistan, food experts who spoke to Dialogue Earth say the floods’ impacts will increase small landholders’ reliance on credit as well as deepen debt cycles. The floods have meant reduced income and severe fodder shortages, says Okoth. “Many are resorting to distress sales of livestock.”

In October, inflation in the country rose from 5.6% to 6.24%, reported Dawn, with 23% and 16% increases in the price of wheat and wheat flour respectively. The Ministry of Finance’s Economic Outlook for that month said inflation remained “affected by food-supply pressures” due to flood-related disruptions.

Post-disaster recovery

Recovery in the Punjab region has been a struggle for those who relied on farming for their income.

Normally, the summer harvest funds winter sowing. This year, however, that cycle collapsed with the floods destroying the harvest, leaving farmers with no liquidity to invest in the next season. “Even those with modest landholding like us will be forced to take loans,” says Mahmood.

In late September, the Pakistani government announced that farmers who suffered losses would receive compensation of around PKR 49,500 (USD 175) per hectare. But this “barely scratches the surface of the real cost of making land cultivable again”, says Mian M. Umair Masood, who represents Kissan Ittehad, a farmers’ association in Pakistan.

He explains that affected farmers must first clear the debris using machinery such as heavy-duty tractors, at a cost of PKR 20,000-25,000 (USD 71-88) per hectare. Subsequently, they have to buy fresh wheat seed, since most stored stocks of the seed were washed away in the floods. This costs another PKR 12,000-20,000 (USD 42-71) per hectare. “These restoration costs nearly consume the entire relief amount, leaving farmers with little to spend on irrigation water, fertilisers, herbicides – all of which will now be required in greater quantities, at inflationary rates,” Masood adds.

Meanwhile, the Indian government has announced INR 49,400 (USD 553) per hectare in compensation, which Gurpreet Singh says is far too low to break even. This means he would receive USD 1,386 from the government. Singh was expecting to earn at least INR 2,390 (USD 27) per 100 kilograms of rice. Since each hectare of land produces at least 8,650 kgs, his total earnings would have been around INR 538,000 (USD 6,000) for the season.

He adds that farmers have no cash left to buy and clean seeds for impurities that impact yield, or hire workers to sow seeds for the next season.

The crop losses may lead to food shortages in India as farmers now suffer from the post-flood challenges of silting and land erosion, wrote Indra Shekhar Singh, an independent agri-policy analyst and former director of policy and outreach at the National Seed Association of India.

In the aftermath of the floods, Okoth says the FAO recommends immediate cash transfers for farmers, as well as provision of seed, livestock feed and fertiliser “to safeguard the Rabi [winter agricultural] season”.

Both Punjabs unprepared for disaster

Experts and local community leaders stress that before focusing on compensation or climate mitigation, the region’s governments should focus on disaster preparedness and climate adaptation, which they say is lacking.

“There have been floods every two years, but despite that, there is no readiness. Climate adaptation, despite huge losses [incurred], is still poor due to misgovernance,” says Devinder Sharma, an Indian food and trade policy analyst.

In India, he says there should be an inquiry into the timing of the release of water from the country’s dams, “and the fact that only 1,600 crore rupees [INR 1.6 billion, or USD 178 million] has been released for the billions of dollars’ worth of losses [faced by flood-affected families]” in the state.

In Pakistan’s Punjab, Nighat Dad, a lawyer from the town of Ratta Matta in Jhang district, says the Chenab River has widened so much as a result of the recent floods that entire villages are now being forced to relocate.

Dad, who also runs the non-profit Digital Rights Foundation, says the Pakistani government took weeks to reach many affected communities, with private citizens and local organisations stepping up first.

She assembled a team of volunteers leading relief efforts in their area that worked to provide rations, as well as raise funds to rebuild homes and help farmers prepare for the next agricultural season in Jhang and neighbouring Chiniot district. Dad says such endeavours filled the gap between the state’s response and private charity that should never have existed in the first place. “The government’s response was reactive [rather] than preventive,” she adds.

Looking to the future, Okoth says that for longer-term resilience, the Pakistani government should invest in disaster-risk financing mechanisms to protect farmers from future shocks. It should also strengthen early-warning systems and geospatial monitoring for preparedness, as well as ensure there is subsidised support for farmers to buy next year’s inputs for the monsoon planting season, such as seeds, fertiliser and machinery.

Sharma says the governments must document the impacts faced by disaster-hit regions and share that data with experts and farmers.

They should also begin treating such calamities as national disasters rather than isolated events, he adds. Categorising these events as disasters “will help the governments to ensure a proactive and long-term approach to disaster management, rather than a reactive and post-event response”, says Sharma.

Alefia T Hussain

Alefia Hussain is a Lahore-based journalist. Follow her on X (formerly Twitter): @alefiathussain

Cheena Kapoor

Cheena Kapoor is a Delhi-based independent journalist and photographer focusing on health and social issues. Her work has been published by The Guardian, The Telegraph, Reuters, the BBC, Al Jazeera, among many others. Her long-term project “forgotten daughters” about abandoned women in Indian mental asylums has been widely published and exhibited across Europe.
Follow Cheena on Twitter and Instagram.

(Sources: Dialogue Earth)

A decision to drill at the mouth of the Amazon drew criticism at the UN summit. But Brazil’s oil production still soars, as it hopes to consolidate its role as an exporter. 

By Amanda Magnani, December 5, 2025

A decision to approve oil exploration off the coast of Brazil weeks before the country hosted the COP30 climate conference signals the country’s intention to increasingly target the international market, despite criticism from environmentalists.

At the close of the conference in Belém, Brazil committed to continuing to pursue a plan to eliminate fossil fuels from global economies. However, activists have claimed that its decision to award the exploration licence to state-owned Petrobras threatens the country’s position as a climate leader, suggesting that it intends to expand its oil frontiers.

Brazilian crude oil exports have grown 132% in the last decade, reaching almost 90 million tonnes in 2024, according to foreign trade data. During this period, China dominated demand: alone, it imported more Brazilian oil than all the other countries in the top 10 combined, according to an analysis by Dialogue Earth.

In October, Ibama, the federal environmental licensing agency, awarded the licence to explore for oil in Block 59, an area off Brazil’s northern coast, just weeks before COP30 opened. The approval process has dragged on for several years due to concerns about the environmental impact of exploration in the Foz do Amazonas basin, at the mouth of the Amazon River and one of the most biodiverse regions in the country.

The licence authorises the drilling of an offshore well in Block 59 to assess the presence of oil. If there are commercially viable reserves, Petrobras would have to apply for a new licence to begin production. If none are found, new authorisations would be required for additional drilling. However, the company included three other potential wells in its original application.

According to Petrobras CEO Magda Chambriard, its work should unlock the sector’s progress towards a “new global energy frontier” and could expedite licensing for other wells. The area is close to the region where major oil discoveries in neighbouring Guyana have been reshaping the country’s economy over the past decade.

Government officials say exploration is necessary to ensure Brazil’s energy sovereignty, but some observers see it as a signal to foreign investors that oil expansion will continue, even in the face of the country’s campaign to slow down the use of fossil fuels.

“This expansion is much more focused on the foreign market than on achieving self-sufficiency in production,” said Mahatma Ramos, technical director of the Institute for Strategic Studies on Oil, Natural Gas and Biofuels (Ineep), a research entity linked to the Single Federation of Oil Workers, a union.

Days after it was approved, eight Brazilian civil society organisations, including environmental network the Climate Observatory, took legal action alleging illegalities and technical flaws in the licensing process. The organisations claimed the process had failed to consult local communities, had used outdated data on the threats to biodiversity, and failed to assess its climate impacts. Both the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, to which Ibama is linked, and Petrobras stated that the awarding of the licence is the result of a rigorous, five-year environmental analysis. The company has complied with all the established requirements, the organisations said.

Ibama has also imposed 28 conditions on Petrobras’ activities in the area, including conducting a further oil spill simulation during the drilling of Block 59, the results of which should be published within a year.

“In the oil spill simulation carried out in August, Petrobras used outdated modelling from 2013, even though modelling from 2024 was already available,” said Suely Araújo, public policy coordinator at the Climate Observatory and former president of Ibama. “If Ibama itself considers that there is a need for a new model, it should not have granted this licence.”

Oil for the international market

Petrobras has claimed that if Brazil maintains its current demand for oil and does not incorporate new reserves, the country “could lose self-sufficiency” and would need to import more oil, as early as the beginning of the next decade. Brazil’s crude oil production has now passed more than 4 million barrels a day, technically sufficient to cover domestic consumption, though the country lacks the refinery capacity to process all of this, relying on imports to cover some demand for oil products. However, analysis by the news website InfoAmazonia suggests that this scenario would only materialise if the country failed to meet its climate target of reducing carbon emissions.

A report by the International Institute for Sustainable Development highlighted that 85% of Petrobras’ projects would be economically unviable in a scenario aligned with the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C compared to pre-industrial levels, as established by the Paris Agreement.

In 2024, the year with the second-highest production ever recorded, Brazil exported 52% of all oil extracted. Some of those exports are refined abroad and then re-imported, but according to Ramos, the recent expansion of Brazilian production is not focused on meeting domestic demand.

“Brazil has greatly expanded its crude oil production, which has allowed it to become an important country in the export market,” said Ramos.

Brazil already ranks sixth among the world’s largest oil producers, and exploration of the equatorial margin – which includes the Foz do Amazonas – could propel the country to fourth place in the next decade, analysts say.

At the same time, foreign companies are ramping up investment in Brazilian oil production. At a July auction, 19 blocks near the mouth of the Amazon River were awarded, all with the participation of foreign companies, including local subsidiaries of the American companies Chevron – responsible for one of the largest oil spills in the history of the Ecuadorian Amazon – and ExxonMobil, the main operator in Guyana, as well as the Chinese company CNPC.

This will lead to more oil money flowing out of the country, Ramos said. “Much of the technology, employment and income generated from this exploration will not remain in Brazilian territory,” he said.

Some experts believe that companies are failing to account for the risk of the post-2030 fall in demand for oil projected by the International Energy Agency. Even if commercially viable oil reserves are found in Foz do Amazonas, the earliest production would begin is in seven years.

“The world is at a point where the new frontiers of the fossil fuel industry are advancing into increasingly difficult-to-access deposits,” said Andrés Gómez, Latin America coordinator for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. “This means that large investments will be made that will not necessarily bring economic returns, and there is a high risk that companies will end up with stranded assets.”

Exploration in these hard-to-reach areas of the Foz do Amazonas basin would be costly. In its strategic plan, Petrobras said it plans to invest USD 3.1 billion in the equatorial margin by 2028, drilling 16 wells in deep and ultra-deep waters.

Oil: an economic and political asset

Activists claim Ibama’s decision to award the licence was made after pressure from high-ranking allies of Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The timing of the decision, on the eve of Brazil hosting COP30, was also criticised, with activists branding it a blow to Brazil’s climate leadership.

Ibama president Rodrigo Agostinho said the decision was not made as a result of political pressure and that it would have been “hypocritical” to wait until after the conference to award the licence.

Despite being a voice in favour of ending the use of fossil fuels in Belém, Lula’s administration has allocated 100 billion reais (USD 18.8 billion) more in budgets towards oil and natural gas than the government of his more vocally pro-extraction predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.

The dispute highlights the contradiction between phasing out oil and gas and the economic realities the country faces. Lula has stated that “no country is ready” to give up oil. This year, Brazil accepted an invitation, first made in 2023, to join OPEC+, a group that brings together allies of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

Clarissa Lins, founding partner of Catavento, a strategy and sustainability consultancy, said that Brazil’s move is guided primarily by economic interests, not energy security.

“It is very difficult to ask a country considered by the World Bank to be middle-income to give up this economic resource,” she said. “The oil produced here is highly competitive, and the industry has a relevance that cannot be ignored.”

The issue is likely to crop up in next year’s presidential election. “President Lula still strongly associates oil with development,” said Ilan Zugman, director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the environmental organisation 350.org. “In his quest for re-election, he is likely to bring up this issue when talking about jobs, income generation and improving quality of life.”

Petrobras ‘discreet’ at COP30

Despite its manoeuvres in the weeks leading up to the conference, Petrobras was described as playing a “discreet” role at COP30 – despite a record number of fossil fuel lobbyists and representatives attending. Petrobras only sent second-tier employees to the event. “Petrobras has clear influence within the government, with direct access to President Lula and other relevant politicians, but during COP, they behaved very discreetly,” said Zugman.

Petrobras told Dialogue Earth that it “was present at COP30, as it has been at recent editions, because it recognises the opportunity to discuss sustainable models”.

It held two events in Brazil’s official pavilion, in the restricted area where negotiations take place. One of them coincided with the Climate March, which brought around 70,000 people to the streets of Belém demanding, among other things, that there be no oil exploration in the Amazon. One expert said this alignment was a “tactical choice”. “The event took place just as organised civil society was occupying the streets, focusing media attention,” said Renata Prata, environmental analyst at the Arayara International Institute.

China is starting to proactively adapt but its climate-finance systems remain focused on cutting emissions. 

By Lin Zi, December 4, 2025

At the recent COP30 climate conference in Brazil, 160 diesel generators were positioned outside the Amazonian venue, rumbling night and day, ladening the tropical air with fumes. Inside, huge ventilation units lowered the temperature but added to the noise.

Adaptations like these aren’t just taking place temporarily and on a small scale. One priority of the Belém conference was how to ensure countries adapt to climate change impacts in the long term. Debate over funding this process, and how to track its progress, was particularly fierce. Would developing countries secure more money to take action on the ground? Could a common framework be created for measuring national progress to inform funding decisions?

China’s role in all this has drawn particular attention. The largest developing country is shifting from reacting to climate impacts to proactively adapting to them. How does China’s adaptation strategy differ from those in the west? With its need for funding rising rapidly as climate change bites, how can China mobilise the necessary financing?

Dialogue Earth asked experts from China and elsewhere these questions, exploring the choices and challenges the country faces on adaptation, financing methods and evaluating progress.

Adaptation with Chinese characteristics

A week before COP30 began, China submitted its latest climate action plan, known as a Nationally Determined Contribution, under the Paris Agreement. For the first time, it included language on climate adaptation, with a “climate-adapted society” to be mostly in place by 2035. Behind this lies a shift from reactive adaptation to a dual focus on proactive adaptation and mitigation (meaning efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions), creating a path to adaptation with Chinese characteristics.

Rebecca Nadin is director of global risks and resilience at the think-tank ODI Global and advised on the adaptation priorities mentioned in China’s five-year economic plan for 2016-2020.

She says both China’s latest adaptation strategy, published in 2022 and covering actions up to 2035, and the EU’s latest adaptation strategy, published in 2021, stress data-driven risk assessment and regional adaptation, but they differ regarding governance and to some extent focus.

The EU, she says, takes a decentralised approach. Its priorities include local empowerment, mainstreaming adaptation across sectors, and nature-based solutions. China’s strategy, by contrast, is highly centralised, with adaptation integrated in the five-year economic plans and a focus on hard adaptation measures. For instance, it emphasises early-warning and disaster-preventions systems, such as flood control and other major infrastructure. This aligns with China’s national development priorities, she said.

“China allocates significant resources, especially for large-scale infrastructure, but EU adaptation finance is more diversified, supporting a wider range of sectors – health, urban resilience, agriculture – and cross-border cooperation,” she said.

Industries key to China’s adaptation process will require over CNY 2 trillion (USD 280 billion) in funding every year between 2026 and 2030, according to the non-profit Huzhou Green Finance Institute. That is more than 1.2% of the country’s GDP, with more than half of it (57%, or CNY 1.16 trillion) needed for infrastructure.

China will need to invest more in adaptation for traditional infrastructure like buildings and water management, says Huzhou Green Finance Institute researcher Chen Yingjie. But there is also still not enough support for adaptation in other fields, including electricity, transportation, finance, education, health and social work, according to her team’s research.

“As climate change worsens, water management, agriculture and infrastructure face the most direct and obvious physical risks. Those sectors are very vulnerable and risks there will be transmitted onwards, to key sectors such as manufacturing and services, creating systemic impacts on the real economy,” she said.

The priorities for adaptation funding identified by her team were agriculture, forestry, fishing, health, electricity, heat, and gas and water management, along with transportation, warehousing and postal services.

The funding gap

The UN Environment Programme’s Adaptation Gap Report 2025 puts developing nations’ funding requirements for 2035 at USD 310-365 billion. This is a giant leap from the USD 26 billion that was transferred from developed to developing nations for adaptation in 2023.

At COP30, it was agreed that developed nations would raise adaptation support to USD 120 billion by 2035.

For China, meanwhile, financial support from developed nations and preferential loans from multilateral development banks are both falling.

Between 2020 and 2022, China received only USD 530 million in international funding for climate adaptation, all for reconstruction after the 2021 Henan floods.

The Chinese government has pointed out that climate funding flowing into China for those three years totalled USD 2.6 billion – only 0.6% of the country’s own spending on climate mitigation and adaptation.

In other words, China has spent USD 436.7 billion on climate measures over those three years, at an annual average of USD 145.6 billion. There isn’t yet any data on China’s climate adaptation spend, but internationally adaptation accounts for less than 10% of total climate spending, according to a study published by the Climate Policy Initiative in 2024.

Shao Danqing is a researcher at the Macro and Green Finance Lab, a think-tank based at Peking University’s National School of Development. She told Dialogue Earth that China’s adaptation work is mostly funded by public money, but limited government budgets and a lack of enthusiasm from private investors means a severe shortfall.

“So why is there more of a gap for adaptation than for mitigation? It’s because adaptation, when compared with mitigation, is less likely to be commercially sustainable and therefore investable,” she explained.

Closing the funding gap

China will need an average of CNY 1.6 trillion (USD 226 billion) a year for climate adaptation between 2021 and 2060, according to a 2024 government document. That will mean mobilising climate and green finance on an unprecedented scale.

The country’s climate financing system has two strands. The first is led by the People’s Bank of China, which is creating a system of green finance and transition finance. The second is a set of city-level climate finance trials run by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment.

Each has a different emphasis, says Shao Danqing. The bank’s effort is focused on the supply side of investment. It aims to make investments greener by creating standards, regulatory frameworks and supporting policies for green and climate finance. The ministry, meanwhile, is looking more at the demand side, at actual practice on the ground. It is using city-level pilots to encourage local governments to set up project databases and related investment and financing mechanisms.

The 2025 revision of the Green Finance Taxonomy, led by the bank, labelled some project categories as contributing to emissions reduction for the first time, but did not indicate if any contribute to adaptation.

According to the bank, green loans worth CNY 36.6 trillion were issued in China in 2024. Of that, CNY 12.25 trillion went to projects with direct emissions reductions and CNY 12.44 trillion to projects with indirect reductions. Totalled, that accounts for 67.5% of all green loans. It’s hard to say, though, how much is going to adaptation work.

The ministry’s 2022 taxonomy for its climate-financing trials did cover both mitigation and adaptation but, overall, climate-finance systems in China remain focused on mitigation.

According to Shao Danqing: “Most projects are mainly about mitigation. Some might also have adaptation benefits, but that isn’t highlighted.” In agriculture, she gives the examples of reusing rather than burning straw, techniques to conserve water when irrigating, and smart agriculture.

How to evaluate adaptation?

Coming up with effective indicators to chart progress on adaptation is a global challenge. There was progress at COP30 where the first global set of indicators on adaptation – 59 of them – was adopted.

Xi Wenyi is a research associate with the World Resources Institute’s Climate and Energy Program. She told Dialogue Earth that quantitative targets in China’s adaptation strategy are mainly related to ecosystems, such as area of protected land, forest coverage and length of restored coastline.

More work on those targets is urgently needed. Another issue, though, is how to evaluate the benefits of adaptation work. Climate adaptation measures reduce climate vulnerability, making society and the economy more resilient. A typical example is an early-warning system. If the government can issue a warning in advance of floods, businesses and schools can shut down and prepare, reducing economic losses. In that case, the net benefit is easy to see and understand.

“But if the disaster being warned of doesn’t happen, it’s harder to evaluate the avoided losses,” said Chen Yingjie of Huzhou Green Finance Institute. Nevertheless, adaptation measures reduce physical risk and so cut investment and construction costs, as well as insurance premiums. The long-term benefits should not be overlooked, she said.

Nor is adaptation just about disasters. “A facility built for extreme weather events could be used as a community space day-to-day, improving the quality of life for residents, boosting property values, and bringing other benefits,” Chen added.

In May, the World Resources Institute published an analysis of 320 climate-investment projects from around the world. It found that each dollar invested into adaptation and resilience returned ten dollars in value over the following decade. That means benefits globally could be worth over USD 1.4 trillion, with an annual return on investment of 20-27%.

That analysis grouped the benefits into avoided losses, economic growth such as from increased manufacturing, and broader social and environmental benefits such as lower emissions.

Xi Wenyi used the same approach in a 2021 analysis she co-authored. Her team analysed efforts to mitigate the risks of agricultural drought in Ningxia, urban waterlogging in Wuhan and storm surges in Shenzhen. They found that each yuan invested brought benefits worth between two and 20 yuan.

At the lower end of that range was dike construction in Shenzhen and at the higher end, upgrading irrigation systems in Ningxia, she explained.

Shifting funds from fossil fuels to adaptation

Another key issue is how countries can make sure limited funds are channelled most effectively towards adaptation, rather than to low-value or wasteful projects.

Shao Danqing says: “China spends huge amounts of subsidies for various industries, but how much of that goes to mitigation and adaptation, and how much goes to activities with the opposite outcomes? There’s currently no transparency.”

Globally, big subsidies still flow to activities harmful to the climate. For example, upstream fossil-fuel firms and associated industries (such as transportation, refining and coal power) still benefit from tax breaks, investment subsidies, low-interest loans, finance underwriting, and even government procurement and long-term contracts. In 2022, subsidies for the fossil-fuel sector were worth USD 7 trillion globally.

“In many countries, subsidies are being used inefficiently or incorrectly. Those governments need to look at these and gradually redirect funds from ‘brown’ activities towards climate mitigation and adaptation,” said Shao Danqing.