Integrating carbon removal can make COP30 a turning point for urban adaptation

With 2024 registering as the warmest year on record, the resulting extreme weather led to unprecedented floods, storms, and wildfires that caused mass displacement and billion-dollar disasters. And yet climate finance, particularly for climate adaptation, remains woefully insufficient. Matching climate adaptation efforts with Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) is an opportunity to achieve climate adaptation and mitigation co-benefits with the same finite dollars. Additionally, the CDR component of adaptation-CDR efforts can generate carbon credit revenues to further fund and sustain adaptation. 

Many cities are heavily exposed to climate risk and require climate adaptation interventions to maintain the health and wellbeing of their populations and systems. This means addressing issues such as water security, storm protection, flood mitigation, heat impacts, and sea level rise. Cities also hold substantial capacity for interventions with adaptation-CDR co-benefits, primarily through nature-based solutions (NbS) and carbon-negative concrete or carbon-storing materials that sequester and store CO₂ in resilient infrastructure. For example, a city greening effort intended to reduce heat could also generate carbon credits that may, in turn, be used to support the project. 

With highly constrained climate finance, climate professionals and decision-makers need innovative approaches that secure social buy-in, maximize impact, and incentivize funding. New policies and approaches are needed to explicitly promote adaptation-CDR synergies and encourage the use of related carbon credit revenues for adaptation. For local governments operating on the frontline, integrated climate action planning is now a must. It is time to elevate integrated adaptation-CDR as a sustainable solution with critical co-benefits. These co-benefits include climate adaptation and mitigation alongside biodiversity, clean air, and other socio-economic benefits, such as fostering local business, creating new municipal revenue sources, and attracting investment and talent. 

The climate adaptation imperative 

In 2024, the globe surpassed 1.5°C of warming over historic levels for the first time, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in its WMO Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update 2025-2030. The resulting extreme weather led to social and economic upheaval, including a record number of people displaced from their homes and rising acute food insecurity. Cities are hit hard by climate through the loss of critical infrastructure and services, such as energy and transport and impacts to human health, economic productivity, and the ecosystem services cities rely on. Adaptation action is essential for cities to thrive in this rapidly evolving climate context.

Despite the increase in extreme weather events and the need to accelerate climate adaptation, this has not led to a material shift in adaptation finance. According to the 2024 State of Cities Climate Finance, City climate finance is still more than 95% dedicated to emissions reductions. The United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) Adaptation Gap Report 2025 estimates the cost of adaptation finance needed in developing countries at between $310-365 billion annually in 2035. This contrasts with the International public adaptation finance flows to developing countries; in 2023, only $26 billion was provided, $2 billion less than in 2022. 

This financing gap severely limits cities’ capacity to plan for, navigate, and address climate risk, while building greater urban resilience over time. It calls for new approaches to policymaking and funding that involve embedding adaptation in systemic approaches that generate multiple benefits. Harnessing the synergies between adaptation and carbon removal can be a vital avenue for scaling adaptation action and securing additional funding. 

Integrated planning for adaptation and co-benefits 

There are helpful precedents for harnessing adaptation synergies. For the UNEP report, researchers analyzed more than 1600 adaptation actions reported in the Biennial Transparency Reports (BTRs), a key reporting tool under the Paris Agreement for countries to submit progress on climate commitments. It found evidence of integrated planning; 23% of all adaptation actions also target biodiversity and ecosystems, followed by food and agriculture, water and sanitation, infrastructure, and human settlements (14–18%). Health and poverty alleviation, and livelihoods have lower levels of reporting. The report also calls for considering climate mitigation (decarbonization) and adaptation together from the outset, as this can maximize co-benefits and avoid trade-offs. 

This is reflected at a city level. As part of its urban CDR opportunity baselining research, the City CDR Initiative interviewed sustainability decision makers in fifteen cities across four continents on issues ranging from governance and carbon accounting to policy and regulation. One of the questions focused on the synergies among adaptation efforts and emissions reduction. Twelve cities indicated that such synergies are systematically considered, with another two noting that while there is no methodical approach to integrated adaptation planning, emissions reductions are factored in on a case-by-case basis. 

Factoring CDR into adaptation and resilience 

Climate adaptation seeks to avoid and moderate harm from climate impacts or exploit beneficial opportunities. Climate adaptation involves using climate information to inform policy instruments and project interventions. Adaptation interventions target climate information services, early warning systems, NbS, and addressing climate risk across sectors, including health, water, education, food, energy, and transport infrastructure and systems. Adaptive capacity is “the ability of systems, institutions, humans, and other organisms to adjust to potential damage, to take advantage of opportunities, or to respond to consequences”. Building on such definitions, the article Adaptation and Carbon Removal (Buck et al. 2020) puts forward the concept of "adaptive carbon removal." It connects climate adaptation with CDR by highlighting efforts that benefit human and natural systems in the context of climate impacts and also remove CO₂ from the atmosphere. These win-win opportunities advance local and global adaptation and mitigation goals in projects and policy. 

Adaptation and CDR synergies are especially powerful when they provide additional co-benefits such as biodiversity and aesthetic improvements. Such "impact multiplier effects" of adaptation and carbon removal measures are designed-for elements in both projects and policies; they must be intentionally factored in to be realized. For example, green and blue corridors in urban settings, such as green roofs, rain gardens, and constructed urban wetlands, help absorb extreme rainfall and counter heat stress, sequester carbon, boost biodiversity, and have positive effects on mental health. 

The opposite is also true; faulty designs can lead to ‘maladaptation’ that can increase vulnerability, disadvantage marginalized groups, increase emissions, or lock systems into unsustainable pathways. Maladaptation examples include energy-intensive cooling and hard infrastructure that shifts flood risk from one area to another. Poorly designed adaptation-CDR integration efforts may reduce adaptation capacity. When considering interventions at the adaptation-CDR nexus, cities must assess whether the carbon removal method and specific deployment pathway have the potential to measurably increase adaptation objectives. 

Mapping adaptation-CDR integration opportunities and risks 

Cities exposed to climate risk need to prioritize adaptation action for the health and well-being of their populations and systems. This means addressing issues such as water security, storm protection, flood mitigation, heat impacts, and sea level rise. CDR can often complement adaptation options and, in some cases, bring additional funds to adaptation efforts by producing carbon credits that can be sold in carbon markets. For example, a city greening effort to reduce heat could generate carbon credits that could, in turn, support the project. 

Across the landscape of CDR methods, there are urban deployment pathways that simultaneously achieve carbon removal and climate adaptation, biodiversity goals, air pollution reduction, soil quality improvement, and other socio-economic benefits, such as fostering local business development and new municipal revenue sources. Two areas for climate adaptation and CDR synergies stand out: 

• NbS for adaptation, for example, urban forests, green spaces, urban wetlands, and coastal ecosystems such as mangrove forests, reduce temperatures and flood risk (adaptation) while also sequestering CO₂. 

• Resilient infrastructure, for example, storm protection infrastructure, flood-proof buildings, or expanded storm water drainage systems, can use carbon-negative concrete or bio-based/carbon-storing materials to sequester and store CO₂.

There is great potential for adaptation-CDR synergies in these two areas. But there are also many adaptation and carbon removal interventions that do not have co-benefits. For example, early warning systems are critical for adaptation but do not contribute to CDR, while Direct Air Capture is key for CDR but does not have immediate adaptation co-benefits. There can also be risks in integrating CDR into adaptation efforts, such as increased cost, time, and effort for planning and coordination, increased resource use, and negative biodiversity impacts from novel CDR methods. Integrating CDR into adaptation planning should not be done haphazardly. 

Figure 1: Adaptation interventions with the greatest CDR integration potential 

Figure 2: Adaptation Intervention with Limited CDR Integration Potential

Closing the gaps 

Integrated climate adaptation-carbon removal urban planning is a promising synergy for increasing resilience and achieving mitigation goals that bring additional co-benefits. Cities should structurally consider the potential for CDR integration when designing climate adaptation policies and projects to achieve co-benefits and potentially garner additional resources for adaptation through carbon credits. This systematic approach will significantly increase the social and economic value of fitting adaptation investments. 

New policies and approaches are needed to explicitly promote adaptation-CDR synergies and encourage the use of related carbon credit revenues for adaptation. Additionally, a focus on related government capacity and planning is critical to realizing adaptation-CDR co-benefits. At the same time, it is a new area of work and research into adaptation-removal integration is still in an early stage. Caution is warranted and centering local social and ecological conditions critical to securing co-benefits. 

Principles for city-led adaptation-CDR integration:

1. Integrate carbon removal into municipal climate adaptation plans and consider mandatory integration requirements across city government departments. 

2. Add carbon removal considerations to the portfolio of the Chief Resilience Officer or other officials with climate adaptation and resilience-building responsibilities. 

3. Incentivize municipal agencies and regulated entities, such as wastewater, stormwater, and drinking water utilities, to advance adaptation-CDR integration. 

4. Design NbS for adaptation interventions with carbon sink integration factored in at the outset to set projects up to account for and receive carbon credit for carbon removal. 

5. Identify carbon-negative opportunities for materials when designing adaptation infrastructure interventions. 

6. When adaptation is the main objective, prioritize adaptation goals when choosing and designing projects over realizing carbon removal.

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