State and Trends in Adaptation 2021 combines in-depth analyses, case studies, and viewpoints from those on the frontlines of climate change impacts in Africa. It presents a detailed blueprint for action: offering innovative adaptation and resilience ideas, solutions, and policy recommendations. The results are clear and compelling. Adaptation measures can be enormously cost effective and have the potential to start a positively reinforcing cycle of benefits. As these measures protect people and communities from floods, droughts, and others impacts, they also help lift people out of poverty, reduce hunger and undernourishment, raise incomes and living standards, fight diseases, create jobs, reduce inequality, mitigate the risk of conflicts, and give voice to the most vulnerable. These realizable results, in turn, further increase resilience to climate impacts.

The average global temperature is on track to rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels within the next decade or so and 2°C or more by mid-century. These warmer temperatures are already transforming the planet, causing more extreme storms and floods, rising sea levels, more intense heatwaves, and longer and more severe droughts. As global temperatures continue to climb, those impacts will inevitably intensify.

Africa is particularly vulnerable to these extreme impacts of climate change. It faces exponential collateral damage, posing systemic risks to its economies, infrastructure investments, water and food systems, public health, agriculture, and livelihoods, threatening to undo its hard-fought development and reverse decades of economic progress. Rates of poverty are high, both among the millions of smallholder farmers and the large numbers of people who live in informal settlements with low access to basic services in cities. In addition, large portions of Africa—in particular, the drylands areas that cover three-fifths of the continent—are warming at a rate twice the global average, putting half a billion
people at risk.