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London Climate Action Week 2026 unfolded against the backdrop of record-breaking temperatures in the capital, a stark reminder that climate impacts are no longer distant risks but lived realities. For LIFE-AR, the week reinforced a central message: adaptation finance must move faster from commitments to implementation, and it must be shaped by the countries and communities already living with climate risk.
Reframing adaptation as an economy-wide challenge
Across LCAW, several discussions pointed to the need to reframe adaptation as a systems challenge. At the “Building a Global Adaptation Economy” session hosted by the SOAS Centre for Sustainable Finance and Morphosis, speakers framed adaptation not as a niche issue or separate asset class, but as an economy-wide investment challenge. At Global South House’s roundtable on “Pathways for Resourcing Community Led Climate Solutions,” participants stressed that communities are not just recipients of investment, but climate risk managers whose proximity to climate impacts gives them knowledge that distant institutions often lack. At E3G’s “Climate Governance Forum 2026,” discussions on multilateralism, the rule of law and citizen participation underlined that effective adaptation depends on credible, inclusive institutions rooted in national contexts.
Together, these reflections speak directly to LIFE-AR’s approach: strengthening country systems so that LDCs can define priorities, assess vulnerability, direct finance and learn from implementation; starting from community-level climate risk and vulnerability assessments rather than pre-defined budgets or sectors; and connecting community realities to national platforms and wider climate processes. LIFE-AR demonstrates how locally led adaptation can become a practical governance and finance system, not just a principle.
LIFE-AR at the Climate Resilience Finance Summit
The Climate Resilience Finance Summit brought the finance challenge into sharper focus. At the LIFE-AR and ClimateWorks Foundation Breakfast Meeting, partners and funders discussed the need for long-term, flexible support to strengthen LDC-led adaptation systems and help LIFE-AR transition from an IIED-hosted initiative to an independent facility. The summit panel, “Rethinking LLA Finance: Bridging Public and Private Investment for Scale,” then widened the discussion, challenging assumptions about the role of private finance in adaptation and underlining that public and grant finance remain essential where resilience functions as a public good.
Together, these discussions positioned LIFE-AR as a practical model for reconfiguring how adaptation finance is accessed, governed and delivered. LIFE-AR demonstrates how finance can cascade from local priorities to national platforms and global learning, while helping LDCs strengthen systems, reduce reliance on intermediary-heavy models and keep community-defined resilience at the centre. On the panel, LIFE-AR's Director Tracy Kajumba reinforced that private finance has a role, but within clear limits and with intentional support from public and philanthropic actors, especially where investments in the most vulnerable communities do not generate commercial returns.
Bringing LDC voices into the conversation
Finally, LIFE-AR organised a webinar to bring less heard voices into the LCAW conversation. Adaptation goes hand in hand with capabilities strengthening at national and local level. The discussion featured discussants from Malawi, Ethiopia and Uganda and the strategies they put in place to ensure meaningful participation from communities as well as ensuring sustainability for the systems and processes they relied on for LIFE-AR implementation. Gender equality and social inclusion was important in the discussion which revealed the need for deepened cooperation between different stakeholders to strengthen the capabilities in that area at all levels. In terms of engaging communities, the participants agreed that there is a delicate balance between including traditional and indigenous knowledge and ensuring good comprehension of climate science to deliver relevant and community-specific climate vulnerability assessments.
While climate finance is needed for adaptation, that conversation highlighted that long term sustainability relies on cooperation between strong national and local actors.
Across LCAW, including discussions at the Climate Security Forum on climate risk within a wider poly-crisis, one conclusion stood out: adaptation cannot be separated from development, governance, security or economic stability. The challenge now is not simply to raise more finance, but to build the systems that ensure finance reaches the front lines of climate impacts.
For LIFE-AR, the next step is clear: complete the transition to an independent, LDC-led facility, mobilise the resources needed to strengthen and expand the model, and continue demonstrating that locally led adaptation can move from principle to practice. In a week marked by extreme heat in London, LIFE-AR helped show what adaptation delivery can look like when the people and countries most affected by climate change are placed at the centre of the system.