Adaptation at a crossroads: LAC perspectives for addressing critical gaps and strategic messages ahead of GST2

As the international climate community prepares for the Second Global Stocktake (GST2) from 2026 to 2028, the GST2 opens against a daunting backdrop: shrinking climate finance and Official Development Assistance, escalating threats to human and national security, rising climate denialism, and a deepening crisis of multilateralism.

Yet, GST2 holds a unique potential to mend long-standing fractures in the negotiation process, offering the hope, clarity, and direction needed to keep humanity’s Paris Agreement goals within reach.

Assessing progress on climate adaptation under the Paris Agreement remains a critical and complex task under the Paris Agreement. Drawing on analysis from Argentina 1.5 and the Adaptation Research Alliance (ARA), this piece highlights the key gaps identified during the first Global Stocktake (GST1) and outlines strategic messages from Latin America and the Caribbean to ensure GST2 delivers a more equitable, comprehensive, and effective assessment of adaptation.

Key gaps in the assessment of adaptation progress during GST1

While the Paris Agreement establishes four core dimensions for evaluating collective progress on adaptation, GST1 revealed operational, conceptual, and procedural shortfalls:

1. Recognizing adaptation efforts of developing countries:

• Procedural gaps: Key steps outlined in Decision 11/CMA.1 were skipped—most notably, the synthesis report on adaptation efforts was never compiled, and the high-level recognition event at COP28 lacked an official, pre-announced segment.
• Conceptual & technical limits: A lack of clarity remains around what constitutes an adaptation effort and how to account for subnational, local, or community-level contributions.

2. Enhancing adaptation implementation, taking into account Adaptation Communications:

• Reporting delays: Biennial Transparency Reports (BTRs), a primary reporting tool, were only submitted in 2024, after GST1 concluded.
• Meaning of implementation: The assessment of implementation was reduced to counting submitted documents such as NAPs, NDCs, and Adaptation Communications), without evaluating the actual needs, gaps, or actions outlined within them.

3. Assessing adequacy and effectiveness of adaptation and support:

• Lack of conceptual consensus: GST1 suffered from a lack of agreed methodologies to define and measure the adequacy and effectiveness of adaptation actions or the support provided to enable them.
• Institutional & data gaps: Weak cross-sectoral coordination and underdeveloped Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning systems (MEL) hampered the collection of robust, reliable data.

4. Reviewing progress toward the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA):

• Unsynchronized timelines: The UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience (adopted at COP28) was negotiated in parallel to GST1 rather than being fully integrated.
• Delayed indicator frameworks: Although 59 Belem Adaptation Indicators were adopted at COP30 in 2025, the methodological groundwork will not be completed until COP32 (late 2027). This poses significant aggregation challenges not only for GST1 but also for GST2.

Strategic messages from Latin America and the Caribbean for GST2

To move beyond the limitations of GST1, negotiators, civil society, and other relevant stakeholders from the LAC region put forward a number of key messages intended to shape the GST2 process:

• Integrate all four mandates coherently: GST2 must not focus solely on the GGA and the UAE Framework on Global Climate Resilience. It should address all four mandates of Article 7.14 in synergy, linking subnational and national efforts to global goal outcomes.
• Formally value domestic investments & South-South cooperation:
  • Developing countries already spend significant portions of their budgets on adaptation, between 1% and 9% of GDP in Latin America alone. GST2 must recognize these investments alongside South-South cooperation on knowledge and technology.
  • Standardization of costing methodologies is essential. Adaptation needs for Latin America alone are estimated at over US$34 billion annually.
• Shift beyond quantitative counts: Rather than simply counting submitted planning documents, such as National Adaptation Plans, Nationally Determined Contributions, Adaptation Communications and Biennial Transparency Reports, GST2 should qualitatively evaluate actual implementation gaps, priorities, and support needs at different levels.
• Adopt a bottom-up view of effectiveness: Adaptation success should be evaluated from the ground up. Measures are effective when they reduce real risks for communities—not merely when they align with donor-driven metrics or top-down priorities.
• Adequate finance begins with not creating more debt: The assessment of financial adequacy must consider the quality of adaptation finance received, prioritizing concessional and non-debt-generating resources.
• Challenges on assessing progress of the GGA remains: While GST2 should represent a step forward on the GGA, methodological and metric-related issues tied to the Belem Adaptation Indicators, and the aggregation of information remain unresolved and require urgent agreement.
• Integrate key adaptation architecture: GST2 should incorporate the lessons learned from testing the 59 Belém Adaptation Indicators, as well as from the Belém-Addis Vision and the Baku Adaptation Roadmap. Other elements are also key, including finance and transparency, avoiding compartmentalization and fragmentation.
• Assess means of implementation rigorously: GST2 should evaluate the delivery of finance, technology transfer, and capacity-building from developed to developing nations, holding commitments accountable under the New Collective Quantified Goal on climate finance (NCQG), doubling and tripling adaptation finance and other Paris Agreement obligations.
• Expand multilevel & non-party stakeholder participation: Institutional mechanisms must accommodate contributions from subnational governments, local communities, Indigenous Peoples, academia, and civil society to capture the ground-level realities of climate change.

Pilar Bueno Rubial is Executive Director of Argentina 1.5°C Foundation. Researcher at CONICET, Argentina, and professor of the National University of Rosario. She has been deeply involved in climate change negotiations for more than 15 years and has served as Argentina´s Secretary of Climate Change and Rosario´s Undersecretary of Climate Change.   

María Luz Falivene Fernández is the Adaptation Coordinator of the Argentina 1.5°C Foundation. She has worked on adaptation, loss and damage, and international climate change negotiations for more than 10 years.  

Joel Hernán González is a member of the adaptation team of the Argentina 1.5°C Foundation. He is also a professor at the National University of Rosario. He works at the intersection of forests and adaptation within the context of environmental governance.