International funding to help developing countries protect their communities, infrastructure and economies from climate impacts remains far below what is needed, a new United Nations report has found, leaving vulnerable nations increasingly exposed as global warming heads past 1.5C.
The UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) 2026 Adaptation Gap Report estimates that developing countries will need about $305 billion a year to adapt by 2035 in today’s prices, or around $420 billion once inflation is taken into account. Yet international public adaptation finance from developed countries reached only $28.2-31.7 billion in 2024, a modest increase on the previous year.
The estimate is slightly below last year’s $310-365 billion, mainly because UNEP now relies more on countries’ own assessment of costs reported through their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and national adaptation plans (NAPs).
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UN secretary-general António Guterres said the gap in adaptation finance is not measured in money alone but in the lives, livelihoods and futures that are lost in the process.
He called on developed countries to deliver “fast, simple, accessible support” to vulnerable countries, adding that development banks must also scale up their financing. “We know who is most at risk. We know what works. What is missing is the money and the political will. The choice is simple – invest in adaptation today or pay for catastrophe tomorrow,” he said.
At COP30 last year, countries agreed to at least triple adaptation finance for developing nations by 2035. Depending on whether that is measured from current flows or from the $40 billion that rich nations were meant to reach in 2025 under an earlier pledge, tripling would deliver $85-120 billion a year. Even if it is achieved, UNEP says, that would cover only 20-29% of developing countries’ needs in 2035.
The report warns the pledge may be less ambitious than it looks. The COP30 decision sets no baseline year, does not adjust for inflation and allows money that developing countries channel through multilateral development banks (MDBs) to count towards the target. Taking all of this into account, developed countries’ own contribution in 2035 could be as low as $45-66 billion a year in 2025 prices.
“The world is not ready to adapt to current climatic conditions, never mind what overshoot of 1.5°C will bring,” said Inger Andersen, UNEP executive director, calling on governments to intensify efforts to increase adaptation finance.
Global South countries step up
While funding from rich nations flatlines, adaptation finance flowing between developing countries is growing, though it is nowhere near enough to close the gap.
The UNEP report estimates that developing countries contributed $9.65 billion towards international public adaptation finance in 2024, more than double the $3.81 billion recorded in 2019. That is about a quarter of all international public adaptation finance.
The report does not break the figure down by country. “These are voluntary contributions that capacitated developing countries provide via their shares in the MDBs but also through direct South-South cooperation,” said Henry Neufeldt, the report’s lead author, at a press conference on Wednesday.
Fatima Denton, the report’s co-author, said it is “comforting” to see South-South learning and cooperation because countries with similar ecosystems face similar challenges.
Loss and damage mounting
Without stronger action to cut emissions and adapt, climate-related losses and damages will keep rising, the report says, overwhelming the limited resources of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD), whose complex procedures also make support hard to access.
Last month, the fund’s board agreed to set aside $20 million for Nepal’s recovery from the devastating climate-driven flood it suffered in August. It is the first money the fund has allocated since its creation, but Nepali officials called the sum symbolic against estimated recovery costs of $4.8 billion. Nepal must now submit a proposal setting out how it will use the money.
The FRLD has yet to approve any projects from its first funding round, when it received nearly 180 submissions, requiring around $2.8 billion – an amount that dwarfed the around $350 million available to allocate.
Loss and damage fund delays first project approvals as needs dwarf resources
Mattias Söderberg, global climate lead at DanChurchAid, said the risk of loss and damage grows when adaptation falls short, as communities become more exposed to increasingly severe climate impacts.
“When we fail to invest in adaptation today, we risk paying a much higher price tomorrow. And that price is not only measured in dollars. It is measured in lives lost, homes destroyed and futures taken away,” Söderberg added.
A failure to match climate ambition
Ahead of COP31 starting on Monday in Antalya, climate campaigners are calling on rich governments to set out how to close the remaining gap and meet developing countries’ full adaptation needs.
Pooja Dave, adaptation lead at Climate Action Network International, said COP31 must agree a credible plan to deliver at least US$120 billion a year in adaptation finance well before 2035, through new and additional public, grant-based funding that reaches the communities most at risk.
“People have a right to a climate safe world and protection from climate impacts. Adaptation is not charity. It is a legal and moral obligation,” Dave said.
Mohamed Adow, director of Kenya-based climate change think tank Power Shift Africa, said COP31 must establish a clear starting point, milestones and a credible delivery plan, especially on how public finance, in the form of grants not loans, must reach those most at risk
“Communities facing floods and droughts cannot wait until 2035 to find out what this promise means,” he said.
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On 3 November, the Brazilian presidency of the COP30 climate talks released its long-awaited “roadmap” on ending deforestation.
Ahead of the Belém summit, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made a call for a “roadmap” to halt and reverse deforestation.
Although this voluntary roadmap was outside the COP’s official agenda, it snowballed into a rallying point at the “Amazon” COP.
By the end of the summit, 93 countries had signed on to the deforestation roadmap, committing to develop voluntary pathways to reverse forest loss and degradation by 2030.
The Brazilian presidency called on countries to describe what a pathway away from deforestation could look like, what challenges and support they needed.
This call was answered by 18 countries and four negotiating blocs that offered their inputs on the roadmap, along with scores of NGOs, research centres and other groups.
Now that the roadmap has been published, Carbon Brief explains where it came from, what it entails, why some did not sign on – and what’s next.
What is a deforestation ‘roadmap’?
The “deforestation roadmap” was one of the signature announcements of the Brazilian presidency of the COP30 climate summit in Belém – albeit one that fell outside the official, negotiated outcomes.
Brazilian president Lula first proposed the deforestation and forest degradation roadmap, alongside one on the fossil fuel transition, at the leaders’ summit in Belém a few days before COP30 began.
By the end of COP30, nearly 100 countries had expressed their support for such a roadmap. This includes the EU, with its 27 member states, as well as the 56-member Coalition for Rainforest Nations.
However, this was still short of the 196 parties needed for consensus at a COP, meaning that, ultimately, the roadmap was not a formal outcome.
Instead, COP30 president André Corrêa do Lago announced during the closing plenary session that the presidency would work towards creating both deforestation and fossil-fuel phaseout roadmaps outside of the COP process.
The deforestation roadmap is the latest in a series of international pledges to put an end to forest loss.
In 2014, 39 countries pledged to end natural forest loss by 2030 at UN Climate Week, as part of the New York Declaration on Forests.
Seven years later, at COP26, more than 140 countries signed the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use. The declaration stated that countries “commit to working collectively to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030” – although conflict subsequently arose over what, exactly, countries had agreed to.
The objective of halting and reversing deforestation by 2030 was ultimately agreed in a negotiated text for the first time two years later, at COP28 in Dubai, where it was part of the global stocktake.
Unlike these previous pledges, the roadmap does not make any new commitments. It also does not “seek to reopen agreed decisions”.
Instead, the roadmap’s stated objective is to “translate forest-related outcomes into coordinated, country-led action while respecting different national circumstances, priorities and implementation challenges”.
Following the conclusion of COP30, the presidency – along with the Climate Policy Initiative thinktank – began soliciting inputs from countries, civil society organisations, Indigenous peoples, academic researchers, the private sector and other groups.
(The Climate Policy Initiative was chosen to serve as the secretariat and technical partner to the roadmap process.)
The secretariat notes that it received more than 200 contributions following this invitation. However, just 18 of these came from countries, and four from blocs – the EU, the Coalition for Rainforest Nations, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) and the Least Developed Countries (LDC) blocs – themselves.
What does the roadmap say about reducing deforestation?
The roadmap was released less than a week before the COP31 climate summit is due to begin, at an event hosted by the UN Development Programme in Brasilia.
During the launch event, Do Lago highlighted recent figures showing that Brazil’s deforestation rate had fallen to its lowest level on record – dropping by more than 70% since 2022.
“Even the optimists wouldn’t believe that we were able to decrease deforestation” by as much as the country has managed in recent years, he said.
Corrêa Do Lago said that he hoped the roadmap would be a “living document” and that it could provide countries with a “practical pathway for climate action”.
The roadmap divides forest action into three complementary parts: national action, international action and financial mechanisms.
For each of the three, the document highlights current actions or instruments and the enabling conditions required to promote action. Then, it offers “COP30 presidency proposals on the way forward” on each pillar.
Under “national efforts”, the roadmap addresses the challenge of halting and reversing deforestation across five “forest dimensions”:
- Maintaining existing forests.
- Using forests sustainably while generating value for communities.
- Combatting forest degradation.
- Combatting deforestation.
- Restoration, reforestation and afforestation.
The roadmap identifies 18 policies or “implementation approaches” that countries can use to address forest loss and degradation, although it notes that the list is not intended to serve as an “exhaustive or prescriptive classification”.
This includes a wide range of approaches, including establishing or maintaining protected areas, recognising the territorial rights of Indigenous peoples, managing the spread of pests and plant diseases and restricting permits for activities associated with forest conversion.
For each of these policies, the roadmap explains the approach and gives an overview of the evidence of its effectiveness. It also gives examples of how countries are implementing that policy.
Then, the roadmap discusses the enabling conditions that need to be ensured for action to occur at the national level, such as supporting land governance and promoting environmental education.
Finally, for national action, the roadmap proposes a five-step process for countries to follow. It provides “guiding questions” that countries may consider in their work to support each step.
On “international architecture for forest action”, the roadmap discusses how various international environmental and human-rights instruments address the problem of deforestation in different ways. It says:
“Climate change, biodiversity, land degradation, Indigenous peoples and local communities’ rights, ecosystem conservation and species protection are addressed through distinct international regimes, but their objectives and implementation intersect in important ways in relation to forests.”
The roadmap highlights some of the global forest-monitoring initiatives that can support national efforts, while noting that countries’ capacity for accessing and using such information “remains uneven”. It calls for improving technical cooperation between countries and increasing capacity-building.
Finally, the roadmap discusses two cross-border issues: crime and trade. On the latter, it notes that trade measures that reward compliance are generally more effective than those that impose “additional economic and administrative burdens on exporters”.
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The roadmap’s final proposals for international action include strengthening national capacity for investigating environmental crime and prioritising trade policies that reward sustainable, deforestation-free production.
The roadmap notes that countries need an estimated $300bn per year by 2030 to halt and reverse deforestation, yet current finance reaches less than one-third of that figure.
Of this, nearly 90% comes from domestic public finance, as forest countries already dedicate “substantial effort” to protecting their domestic policies and budgets, the roadmap notes.
The roadmap offers 10 proposals for action on forest finance, including aligning domestic finance flows to support forest action, enacting effective benefits-sharing measures and strengthening the position of forests in carbon markets.
It concludes with an appeal to countries to “keep the collective dialogue going” through the conclusion of the second global stocktake in 2028.
In a statement, Kelly Stone, coordinator of the civil society network Climate Land Ambition and Rights Alliance, said:
“The forest commitments in the first global stocktake and this roadmap process are important steps, but these commitments need to translate into actual urgent action on the ground.
“This roadmap needs to be taken forward in a process where countries are working together for rapid, ambitious action on the ground to address deforestation and degradation and protect food security. We cannot afford to wait.”
Why did some countries not sign onto the roadmap at COP30?
In Belém, discussions around the deforestation roadmap were highly charged and several countries did not sign on.
Historically, India has opposed and raised concerns about top-down commitments around mitigation and land-use change. For example, the country did not sign the original Glasgow pledge on forests and land-use at COP26, objecting to “trade” being linked to forests and climate action.
In Belém, India – as part of the Like Minded Developing Countries bloc – objected to the inclusion of voluntary roadmaps outside of the COP agenda in the formal COP30 outcome.
However, in an interview after the talks concluded, the country’s minister for environment, forests and climate, Bhupender Yadav, told the Times of India that India “welcomes” the forest roadmap. He added that it additionally “endorses” Brazil’s Tropical Forest Forever Facility fund.
Russia was an early objector to the deforestation roadmap, laying out its position as early as April last year. While the country reiterated its commitment to the Glasgow forest declaration and the first global stocktake, it “does not support the development of a universal roadmap”, arguing that:
“…such initiatives are not mandated under the agreed international climate architecture and go beyond adopted decisions under the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement.”
Russia hosts the world’s largest boreal forests, which are seeing more intense wildfires. In its submission on the deforestation roadmap, Russia “underscored” that there is no “universally agreed, legally binding definition” of forest degradation, although it adds subsequently that wildfires are a “key driver” of degradation.
Like India, it also opposed the roadmap on trade grounds.
Other countries were wary of signing on to new non-negotiated mitigation commitments outside of the official COP agenda, a