Paper short abstract:

Amid accelerating climate impacts and looming threat of tipping-points, even new CNIs are increasingly vulnerable. Which means they will need to be invested in again and again but adaptation finance is scarce and loss and damage fund is not ready yet. Mis-governance and geopolitics will not help.

Paper long abstract:

Countries, particularly in the global south, are already struggling to keep up with fast-paced climatic changes. As a result, not only their old CNIs are sustaining damages, but even newly built ones are increasingly unable to withstand the impacts. Ecosystem collapses and looming threat of tipping points make them more vulnerable while in many poor countries implementation of adaptation and climate-proofing plans are severely delayed due to combination of factors like bad-governance, corruption, hinderances from bureaucracy of international financing agencies, among others. In effect, even new adaptation plans become obsolete by the time they materialise as climate impacts accelerate. Meantime, global climate action and energy transition are not at all moving at the speed science requires them to. Instead, the world is headed towards locking-in certain fossil fuels for quite sometime. All this will mean more warming and worsening climate impacts which in turn will mean countries will need to invest more and again and again in CNIs. But adaptation funds in international climate finance is already so scarce and talks on materialising loss and damage fund, that was historically created at COP27, are yet to properly begin. As if all this were not enough, geopolitics in some places are making things worse. For instance, in the Himalayan region, infrastructure-building race between China and India has hastened climatic and environmental impacts resulting in the loss of both public and private properties. Highways, railways, hydropower projects built bypassing Environment Impact Assessments are already seeing huge damages.