COP31 climate finance: Guterres says tripling adaptation aid would meet under 30% of need

COP31 climate finance dominated the talks on Friday, 13 November, at the UN summit in Antalya, Türkiye. UN Secretary-General António Guterres told reporters that tripling the money for the most exposed countries to adapt to climate change would still meet under 30 per cent of their needs. It was his last press conference at a COP as Secretary-General; he leaves office when the year ends.

“You cannot build peace on a burning planet,” Guterres said. Disasters, he added, were wiping out decades of hard-won progress and pushing poorer nations further into debt.

Earlier in the day he had met the heads of the international climate funds and asked them to strip out the paperwork that keeps countries with limited means from the money. He asked whether a financial order designed in the years after 1945, when much of the developing world had little voice in it, was fair. A dollar of capital in a development bank, he said, could unlock $8 to $10 of lending.

An $840 billion hole

Rich nations are expected to take the lead in mobilising at least $300 billion a year for the developing world by 2035, inside a wider goal of $1.3 trillion. An assessment cited at COP31 indicates that, if current trends hold, yearly flows could miss the larger figure by $840 billion. Simon Stiell, who heads UN Climate Change, told ministers that many developing countries were caught in a “downward loop of debt, disaster, and devastating capital costs”.

A new initiative emerged the same day. British, Norwegian and Canadian development finance institutions announced plans to mobilise $10 billion by 2030 for climate work in emerging economies. Kaveh Zahedi, an Assistant Director-General at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, said roughly 5 per cent of climate-linked development money goes to farming, and that the share is falling.

Where India stands

India laid out its own finance demand before the summit opened. In New Delhi on Tuesday, 3 November, Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav said India wanted COP31 to adopt a decision launching the Climate Finance Work Programme, with rich nations providing finance that is largely public, concessional and predictable. Telugu Scope set out India’s negotiating priorities when the summit opened on 9 November. The talks are scheduled to close on Friday, 20 November.