“You have to do adaptation,” said Youssef Nassef, director of adaptation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which oversees the global response to global warming, in a telephone interview this month from a round of international climate negotiations in Bangkok. “And the sooner you start working on it, the better.”

The work is going slowly. In 2009, developed countries agreed to mobilize $100 billion annually by 2020 to help developing countries both mitigate and adapt to climate change.

No comprehensive accounting exists of how much is being spent on adaptation, United Nations officials say. What’s clear is that the sums, distributed across a variety of pools, are relatively small.

One example is the Green Climate Fund, through which rich countries have agreed to fund climate mitigation and adaptation in developing countries; through the end of July, it had received, by the United Nations’ calculations, only $10.3 billion in pledges and only $3.5 billion in actual commitments, of which $1.4 billion was for adaptation projects.

Another example is financing by six large multilateral development banks for adaptation efforts in emerging and developing countries, which totaled $7.4 billion in 2017, according to the World Bank. The Bangkok talks failed to achieve agreement on more adaptation money; diplomats are expected take up the issue again in December, at a climate conference in Katowice, Poland.

Lack of money isn’t the only problem in adapting to climate change. So are the unintended consequences. Some moves to adapt to climate change actually are worsening carbon emissions.

One example is the use of air-conditioning which, particularly in developing countries, is soaring, both because of rising heat and humidity linked to climate change and because of economic growth, said Caroline Lee, an analyst at the International Energy Agency who focuses on adaptation.