Least responsible.
Most exposed.

Mitigation projects generate power, credits or a product, so they can be financed commercially. Adaptation prevents a loss that may not happen this decade, and prevention does not invoice.

That is why adaptation depends on public balance sheets and concessional money, and why it is chronically underfunded relative to the exposure it addresses.

Groynes, breakwaters and reclamation interrupt the natural drift of sand along a coast. Protect one stretch and the erosion usually reappears down-drift, often in a community with no engineering budget.

Coastal defence only works when it is planned at the scale of the whole littoral cell. Planned lot by lot, it is a transfer of damage rather than a reduction of it.

Most African urban flooding happens in systems that were adequately sized and are now blocked. The rainfall was survivable. The uncleared drain was not.

Clearing and maintaining drainage is the highest-return climate spend available in most cities, and it is almost never counted as climate spend.

A carbon project is usually a long commitment about what will not happen on a piece of land. That requires clear tenure, real enforcement and a community that benefits enough to keep to it.

Where any of the three is absent, the credit is fragile regardless of how the methodology reads.