20 years of adaptation finance: taking stock of origins, destinations and determinants of allocation

Adaptation finance allocations to developing countries started soon after the formation of the UNFCCC and are now primary outputs of the international climate change negotiations. The word 'adaptation' first appeared in Global Environment Facility (GEF) projects and programmes in the late 1990's. Such projects and programming then grew exponentially during the late 2000's. A growing body of policy and academic research now investigates the scale of adaptation funds, though what constitutes adaptation finance within the larger body of development finance, has remained contested. There is also now a considerable literature on the direction of funds, and the reasons behind the distribution from donors to recipients. This chapter summarizes the state-of-the-debate on the scale of adaptation finance distribution, its origins and destinations. To support the review, a new manually coded OECD dataset is used to analyse the determinants of allocation.