Scaling Adaptation and Resilience Innovation in Africa at COP30
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elém, Brazil, November 14, 2025 — The Global Center on Adaptation (GCA), in partnership with the African Development Bank (AfDB), the CGIAR/Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT), convened a side event at the COP30 Food & Agriculture Pavilion in Belém, Brazil.
The event, “Scaling Adaptation & Resilience Innovations through Strategic Partnerships: The AAAP Model” — brought together international experts, policymakers, practitioners and private-sector leaders to showcase how the Africa Adaptation Acceleration Program (AAAP) is catalysing and shaping agricultural investment in Africa. The discussions focused on how proven climate adaptation and resilience innovations can be effectively mainstreamed into International Financial Institutions’ (IFIs) large-scale agricultural projects, creating tangible benefits for farmers, farming communities and agri-food systems across the continent.
Africa is on the frontline of the climate crisis. Seventeen of the world’s twenty most climate-vulnerable countries are in Africa, and the impacts fall hardest on agriculture and land use—the very sectors that underpin food security and livelihoods for more than 75% of rural households.
Strengthening agricultural resilience is essential to protect livelihoods and secure food supplies. The Africa Adaptation Acceleration Program (AAAP)—jointly implemented by the Global Center on Adaptation (GCA) and the African Development Bank (AfDB), with support from the African Union—is the continent’s flagship vehicle for scaling adaptation finance and action. Through this partnership, GCA collaborates with CGIAR and TAAT to embed climate-smart innovations into major IFI-backed agricultural projects, closing the gap between smallholder farmers and cutting-edge science and magnifying those projects’ adaptation impacts.
The COP30 session shared practical lessons from a country-level case study in Nigeria—the SAPZ-II Special Agro-Industrial Processing Zones project—showing how the AAAP partnership model embeds adaptation innovations directly into the investment. Panelists discussed how to replicate this approach across regions, underscoring how partnership-driven models can deliver system-wide transformation and build resilience.
“By partnering with African financial institutions and CGIAR, we are embedding science-proven solutions and technologies directly into lending portfolios, reaching millions of farmers and value-chain actors,” said Professor Patrick V. Verkooijen, President and CEO of the Global Center on Adaptation. “This work, anchored in the Climate Action Program and supported by the Scaling for Impact Accelerator, is turning research into investment-ready solutions that strengthen climate resilience at scale.”
Following the call at the Africa Climate Summit in Addis Ababa to launch a second phase of AAAP, partners are prioritizing domestic capital mobilization and tighter links between research and finance. By converting CGIAR’s validated technologies into bankable investment cases, GCA and AfDB are ensuring innovation shapes lending standards, unlocks climate finance and accelerates resilient agriculture at scale. National development banks and commercial lenders are already exploring portfolio-level replication. GCA invites governments, IFIs, and private financiers to join the AAAP partnership—aligning pipelines with climate-smart design, co-finance shovel-ready projects and scale proven solutions across Africa.
