From one U.N. climate summit to the next, the struggle has intensified to secure sufficient financing from wealthy, industrialized nations to aid the world’s poorest, climate-vulnerable countries in their efforts to avoid climate catastrophe — even as the gulf widens between what has been paid out for climate adaptation and resilience, and what is truly needed. The U.N. in 2024 estimated this gap now totals as much as $359 billion in annual unmet requirements. But a new report by the World Resources Institute (WRI) argues that nations and financiers have been thinking all wrong about adaptation and resilience: By evaluating it only as a means to avoid potential climate losses, it grossly underestimates the true value of each dollar spent. The authors found that the investments now being made are far more valuable to countries and communities than previously understood or acknowledged. To prove this valuation, WRI analyzed 320 adaptation and resilience investments across 12 countries (mostly in tropical Asia, Africa and Latin America) totaling $133 billion between 2014 and 2024. The final WRI report estimates that when evaluated far more broadly, every $1 invested yields $10.50 in benefits over a decade — an aggregated potential worth for those 320 projects totaling $1.4 trillion. This restoration project in Costa Rica was part of a country-led effort to change the dynamics of land degradation in Latin America and the Caribbean. Countries, financial partners and technical partners set the goal of bringing 20 million hectares (49 million acres) of degraded land in…This article was originally published on Mongabay