KEY MESSAGES

Adaptation to mute the impact of climate change will be essential in the poorer parts of the world. The poorest countries will be especially hard hit by climate change, with millions potentially pushed deeper into poverty.

Development itself is key to adaptation. Much adaptation should be an extension of good development practice and reduce vulnerability by:

• Promoting growth and diversification of economic activity;

• Investing in health and education;

• Enhancing resilience to disasters and improving disaster management;

• Promoting risk-pooling, including social safety nets for the poorest.

Putting the right policy frameworks in place will encourage and facilitate effective adaptation by households, communities and firms. Poverty and development constraints will present obstacles to adaptation but focused development policies can reduce these obstacles.

Adaptation actions should be integrated into development policy and planning at every level. This will incur incremental adaptation costs relative to plans that ignore climate change. But ignoring climate change is not a viable option – inaction will be far more costly than adaptation.

Adaptation costs are hard to estimate, because of uncertainty about the precise impacts of climate change and its multiple effects. But they are likely to run into tens of billions of dollars. This makes it still more important for developed countries to honour their existing commitments to increase aid sharply and help the world's poorest countries adapt to climate change. More work is needed to determine the costs of adaptation.