Highlights and images for 8 March 2021

Nadya Yuti Hutagalung, Environmental Advocate and TV Presenter, opened the 7th Asia-Pacific Climate Change Adaptation Forum, encouraging participants to fully use the opportunity of this flagship event – held virtually – to engage and participate in conversation. Hiroyoshi Sasagawa, State Minister of the Environment, Japan, acknowledged the 7th Forum’s theme underlining that we are at the beginning of a critical decade to scale up action. Dechen Tsering, Regional Director, UNEP Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (ROAP), highlighted the need to build back better, and to promote the transition to carbon neutrality in combating the triple crises of climate change, nature loss and pollution.

Key messages from the six sessions include:

• Climate adaptation and mitigation, including securing funding for them, are essential in combating the climate crisis;

• Youth engagement is key and youth are asking for better commitment in public climate financing, especially to build resilience in local communities;

• Policy action informed by climate justice, science and technologies must be at the core of climate governance;

• Nature-based solutions must be mainstreamed to tap into greater resources;

• On linking adaptation and mitigation, building education and technical capacity and ensuring community participation is important;

• Resilience starts from people’s experience and t opening up the political space to engage with existing structures is necessary;

• Many challenges exist to scaling up local and community resilience, and adaptation and mitigation strategies are key to addressing them; and

• Shifts are needed to deal with the climate crisis and COVID-19 recovery, including through changes in systems thinking, delivery systems, targeted interventions, and engagement with the private sector.

In the evening, the Forum celebrated International Women’s Day with an event honoring women in climate adaption, emphasizing that climate change is not neutral, and women are often the most vulnerable and have fewer means to cope with related challenges.