COP30 Aims to Triple Climate Adaptation Finance

A week into the UN climate summit COP30, which is taking place from 10 to 21 November 2025, climate adaptation is becoming an urgent priority at this year’s Conference of the Parties, hosted in Belém, Brazil.

The COP, short for Conference of the Parties, is an annual gathering of the countries or parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to address the harmful human impacts on the climate.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines climate adaptation as the process of adjusting human and natural systems to climate change to reduce vulnerabilities and increase the resilience of communities, ecosystems, and economies.

As the effects of climate change escalate globally through extreme weather events—such as more intense storms, heavy precipitation, droughts, and wildfires—the need for climate adaptation becomes increasingly urgent in developing countries.

These countries are disproportionately vulnerable to the impacts of climate change due to their higher poverty rates and lack of infrastructure and resources to mitigate and cope with extreme weather events.

In 2015, the Paris Agreement established the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) to enhance countries’ capacity to adapt to climate change, strengthen climate resilience, and reduce vulnerability to it. However, to gauge progress on climate adaptation, specific indicators are needed.

It was not until 2023 that a group of experts developed indicators for seven key areas: water supply and sanitation; food and agriculture; health impacts and health services; ecosystems and biodiversity; infrastructure and human settlements; poverty eradication and livelihoods; and cultural heritage and traditional knowledge. These indicators will serve as a basis for measuring the progress of adaptation initiatives and strategies.

This streamlined list of GGA indicators is discussed at COP30 and, once approved, can be operationalised or implemented.

To implement the climate adaptation agenda or goals, financing will be crucial. During COP26 held in Glasgow in 2021, countries agreed to double climate adaptation financing to US$40 billion by 2025. However, it is not known whether this target has been met as the deadline approaches, and there is no clarity about what will happen going forward, according to Earth.org.

At COP30, the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) group has proposed tripling the US$40 billion climate adaptation budget. 

COP30 is designed to be the “Implementation COP”, COP29 last year in Azerbaijan was known as the “Finance COP” however, after two weeks of intense negotiations which is typical of each COP, previous year’s summit closed with a climate finance goal of 300 billion dollars a year, falling short of the 1.3 trillion dollars demanded by the Global South from wealthy countries to provide for public and grant-based climate finance.

Will this year’s “Implementation COP” deliver on what climate vulnerable countries demand of them – increasing climate change finance to distribute to developing countries to meet their climate adaptation and mitigation goals?

Last year’s updated goal for all climate finance, including climate adaptation, was at least $300 billion. This new budget is known as the new collective quantified goal (NCQG), deemed insufficient by developing countries and resisted by developed countries.

However, this year, the proposed tripling of the climate adaptation finance goal to US$120 billion is gaining traction, pushed by groups such as the Independent Alliance of Latin America and the Caribbean and the Least Developed Countries.

The World Resources Institute (WRI) indicates that it is possible to mobilise $120 billion for climate adaptation finance by 2035 and outlines a pathway to achieve this goal. It suggests that a majority of the funds—60% of the tripled target—will come from multilateral banks, noting that these banks contributed the same percentage in 2022.

The next source will be from bilateral funding – a flow of funds from one country to another, and from private finance, leveraged by public funding to reduce investment risk, and to fill the gap, governments can increase their Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) for investments in resilience in developing countries.

SDRs are reserve assets allocated to members of the International Monetary Fund. The WRI suggests that governments can use their surplus SDRs to channel them into existing funds focused on resilience.