The UN has increased a subsidy for diplomats from most developing nations to attend COP30, after complaints about the high costs of attending the climate summit in Brazil’s Amazon region – but limited resources mean fewer people can now receive the payment unless more money is raised.

With more than half of all countries yet to secure accommodation in the city of Belém due to soaring costs, UN climate chief Simon Stiell said on Wednesday that the daily subsistence allowance (DSA) had been raised from $144 to $197 per day.

The payment usually helps cover lodging and meals for two delegates each from 144 eligible developing countries, with small island states and least developed countries receiving support for an additional representative.

But Climate Home News understands that the money currently available in a special funding mechanism supported by donations is not enough to guarantee the higher allowance to the usual number of beneficiaries.

The trust fund for participation in the UN climate process had received $2.1 million in voluntary contributions by the end of August – with the vast majority of funding provided by Denmark. That amount falls far short of the nearly $8 million the UN climate body had budgeted for the fund in 2025.

Brazil wants UN to fork out more money

Brazil’s COP30 presidency, which had been pushing for a top-up of the daily allowance rate, welcomed the decision, calling it “a step forward” in helping developing nations attend November’s climate talks.

But its statement added that was still not enough because the amount remains below the rate applied in other Brazilian cities and does not “fully cover local costs”. The COP30 hosts urged the UN climate body (UNFCCC) to consider giving extra money to delegates from developing nations through an “emergency supplement”.

A UNFCCC spokesperson declined to comment on the feasibility of this request.

In recent years, the UN climate body has been struggling for funding as contributions from governments and other donors fail to match the ever-growing list of activities countries have asked it to carry out.

In its budget proposal for the next two years, the UNFCCC Secretariat said that insufficient funding and unpredictable contributions to the trust fund for participation can cause cancellations of important events and limit options for inclusive participation.

Most inclusive COP ever?

Brazil has vowed that COP30 will go down in history as the “most inclusive” climate summit ever. But that promise risks breaking under the weight of an accommodation crisis in the remote Amazonian city where hotels are charging up to 15 times their regular rates during the conference period.

To help the situation, the COP30 presidency has made a set number of rooms available to poorer countries at a fixed price range.

Brazil insists it will host COP30 in Belém, despite accommodation worries

So far, 79 countries have confirmed their accommodation in Belém, while another 70 are still negotiating their lodging options, the COP30 presidency told members of the COP bureau – a committee that advises on COP matters – on Wednesday.

Valter Correia, Brazil’s special secretary for COP30, said the hosts have maintained “active dialogues” with delegations and “have shown flexibility in addressing their concerns”, for example by supporting them in negotiations with hotels and rental providers.

But speaking to Climate Home, Richard Muyungi, chair of the African Group of Negotiators who is also a member of the COP bureau, said he was still not satisfied with the cost, available types of rooms and the number allocated to delegations.

“Still the problem is there – it hasn’t been solved as we had expected,” he said, adding that he had hoped for more support for African countries from Brazil. “I complained and I will keep complaining.”

The few rooms still available on the official accommodation platform cost $420 a night – more than double the daily allowance provided by the UN.

Speaking on Wednesday ahead of the bureau meeting, Ilana Seid, chair of the AOSIS group of small island states, said the cost of the rooms offered by the presidency needs to match the daily allowance rate.

“There are still quite a few things that need to be ironed out, and we are working with Brazil,” she added.

The post UN raises COP30 allowance to help with Belém accommodation crisis appeared first on Climate Home News.

UN raises COP30 allowance to help with Belém accommodation crisis

The COP30 climate summit in Belém will put adaptation to a warming world front and centre, with the aim of moving negotiations from technical debate to deciding how to measure adaptation progress and accelerating action on the ground, according to Alice Amorim, Brazil’s COP30 programme director.

At the mid-year UN talks in Bonn, countries reached a compromise on work to select a set of 100 indicators this year for the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), which is part of the Paris Agreement.

But a key sticking point has been how to track funding for vulnerable communities to become more resilient to climate shifts – which affect everything from agriculture to water and infrastructure – in a way that can help ensure that developed countries are providing adequate support to developing nations.

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A meeting of technical experts in late August narrowed down the list of GGA indicators to 113, but was unable to agree on how to monitor finance for adaptation, according to a summary released this week.

With the negotiations set to continue at COP30, Amorim told this month’s Africa Climate Summit in Addis Ababa that she hopes countries will finally agree on the indicators in Belém, adding that the Brazil conference – being described as an “implementation COP” – must go further to shape a system that can quickly turn those decisions into real-world results.

“This is a moment where we don’t need to wait anymore for all parties to agree on what needs to happen to make adaptation finance flow to Africa, to Latin America, to the small island states and so on. It’s about acting upon it, it’s about moving from commitments to practice,” Amorim said.

She added that there should be no more delay in investing in adaptation and resilience-building because resources are needed urgently to build climate-safe infrastructure and implement national adaptation plans.

COP30 will not launch “shiny new initiatives”, she added, but will bring existing solutions “to understand what is already happening on the ground that needs to be leveraged and what are the gaps that financial sector players and policy makers need to address”.

An existing goal to double adaptation finance to around $40 billion a year by 2025 – agreed at COP26 – expires this year, and experts say it has helped drive more money into adaptation.

The Least Developed Countries group has called for a new goal of tripling finance from 2022 levels by 2030 to close to $100 billion a year. But even that would not close the gap which the UN estimates to be $160 billion-$340 billion a year by 2030.

Addis summit gets behind adaptation

Brazil’s Amorim told the Africa climate summit in Ethiopia last week that the need for adaptation “is clear and tangible” on the continent. What is missing, however, are the conditions to drive it in a much wider and faster way, she added.

Adapting to climate change by shoring up defences against negative impacts such as extreme heat, floods and food insecurity remains a priority for African countries. Leaders at the summit made it clear in their final declaration – yet to be published – that the continent needs scaled-up, grant-based and concessional finance for adaptation, whose delivery should avoid loading countries with more debt.

Since 2017, most adaptation finance flows to the continent have come as loans, with little private sector investment, raising fears over rising debt burdens on the continent. While Africa needs about $70 billion annually for adaptation, it received only $14.8 billion in 2023, according to an analysis by the Global Center on Adaptation (GCA) and Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) released during the summit.

The analysis showed that since most adaptation finance comes from international public sources such as donor governments and multilateral development banks, cuts in bilateral aid mean capital flows to sub-Saharan Africa are projected to decline in 2025.

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Reacting to the report’s findings, Macky Sall, former president of Senegal and chair of the GCA, said the aid cuts from major donor countries would be “unprecedented – and unacceptable – precisely when resilience spending must rise”.

To enable African countries to build resilient infrastructure without piling on unsustainable debt, Sall called on developed-country partners “to reverse planned reductions, ring-fence adaptation within aid budgets, and expand guarantees and local-currency facilities”.

Tadeous Chifamba, permanent secretary of environment, climate and wildlife in Zimbabwe, said COP30 should focus attention on increasing adaptation finance flows to Africa, drive a restructuring of the global financial architecture and ensure developed countries, which are responsible for historical emissions, play their part in mobilising funds for adaptation.

“It has become a moral obligation on their part to ensure that there is fairness, justice and that they assume responsibility just as we are doing as the first-line defenders,” Chifamba told an event on the sidelines of the Addis summit.

Mobilising African money too

While African leaders need developed countries to help deliver finance for adaptation, they made it clear at the summit that the continent is not asking for charity, but is championing local solutions and will also mobilise resources from African financial institutions to respond to climate shocks.

At the summit, the second phase of the Africa-led Adaptation Acceleration Program (AAAP)- a joint initiative of the African Development Bank and the GCA – was launched with a goal to mobilise $50 billion by 2030 to climate-proof Africa and build resilience in different sectors including agriculture, infrastructure, food systems and urban areas, as well as creating jobs.

This is a boost to the program’s initial target of $25 billion and will be achieved through a convergence of private-sector leadership, innovation and resilient economic growth, according to the GCA.

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Bernadette Arakwiye, Rwanda’s environment minister, told the summit that Africa needs to shift from a position of deficit to opportunity, and start leveraging its assets by unlocking domestic capital. “Africa’s financial institutions hold trillions in assets and yet only a fraction is flowing to climate resilience – we need to change this,” she added.

Investing for resilient growth

Unlocking private finance would scale up adaptation investments to equip countries to quickly respond to climate shocks, Arakwiye emphasised, adding that private capital can move the continent away from small and fragmented initiatives to large-scale bankable projects.

The Baku-to-Belém Roadmap for boosting climate finance to $1.3 trillion a year by 2035, to be presented at COP30, will go some way in showing how more funds can be raised for adaptation, including through multilateral development banks, private investment and country platforms for investment, Melanie Robinson, global climate director at the World Resources Institute (WRI), told journalists this week.

Comment: How COP30 could deliver an ambitious outcome on global finance flows

Citing WRI’s research, she noted that every dollar invested in adaptation can generate more than ten times its value in economic, social and environmental benefits.

In addition to finance, policy and regulatory changes such as insurance systems, land zoning and business incentives are also needed to support adaptation on the ground, she said.

“COP30 will be an opportunity to focus more on adaptation and resilience – and this is about investing, not just to save lives, although that’s very important, but actually to drive resilient growth and enable communities and businesses to thrive in a changing climate,” she added.

The post Can COP30 turn adaptation talks into real-world investments? appeared first on Climate Home News.

Can COP30 turn adaptation talks into real-world investments?

The year 2025 has seen exceptionally dry conditions in many parts of the UK.

At the time of writing, a large area of England is officially “in drought” and hosepipe bans are in force for more than 8m households.

This follows severe drought episodes in the summers of 2022 and 2018 – which raises the question of whether these events are part of a pattern towards a drier future.

However, the intervening periods between these drought events have been associated with major floods.

There is good reason to assume this “hydrological volatility” could be linked to climate change.

Writing for Carbon Brief in 2020, we explored how climate change might be impacting UK river flooding.

Here, we revisit this theme – but ask whether global warming is driving a long-term trend towards increasing drought severity in the UK.

To do so, we draw from the findings of a 2023 Environment Agency report, a chapter of which we authored and has now been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

Key findings include:

• Future projections indicate hydrological droughts will become more severe in the UK, especially over the months of April to September, due to hotter, drier summers.
• However, observations from the past 50 years – and longer where records allow – do not provide evidence of worsening drought.
• This apparent conflict is largely because natural climate variability can obscure underlying trends driven by climate change.
• An increasingly variable climate in the UK means planners still need to prepare for more severe droughts, as well as more floods.

The 2025 hydrological drought

Droughts are complex events that vary in duration, time of year, location and severity.

They are often categorised into different types. For example, a meteorological drought is defined by a lack of rainfall – whereas agricultural drought is a period when there is not enough water for crops to grow.

Here, we are focusing on hydrological drought, which is when a lack of rainfall results in less water in streams, lakes, rivers and reservoirs.

In particular, we look at deficits in river flow. It is through dwindling river flows that droughts have some of their greatest impacts on society and the environment.

Over March-July of this year, flows for many UK rivers were at their lowest level on record. Hosepipe bans have been introduced by water companies, while the Environment Agency has imposed restrictions on extracting water from rivers and warned of widespread environmental impacts, such as fish die-offs and algal blooms in rivers, streams and lakes.

The map below shows how a significant number of rivers in the UK this spring saw exceptionally low flows (marked by a dark red circle) or notably low flows (marked by an orange circle) compared to the 1991-2020 average. This includes many rivers in northern parts of Great Britain – which is typically wetter the south-east.

The graphs on the right, meanwhile, show how flows in the River Derwent and the River Wye (black line) in 2025 have been at equivalent levels, or lower, than in major past droughts (red, green and orange lines). This includes the record-breaking drought of 1976 (orange line), often used as a benchmark.

How is climate change going to affect droughts in the UK?

Globally, climate change causes an intensification of the hydrological cycle. This means that both wet and dry extremes – floods and droughts – are likely to become more frequent and severe.

One way of understanding the impact of climate change on hydrological drought is to use rainfall and temperature projections from climate models to drive hydrological models that simulate how the flow of water through river catchments could change in the future.

There are numerous studies that provide such projections of UK drought. (A summary of these can be found in the chapter on modelling in the 2023 Environment Agency report, linked above.)

Across these studies, river flow models generally show that, in the future, the UK should expect lower summer river flows, increasing drought severity and decreasing minimum flows – in other words, the lowest flows in each year will get lower.

The graphs below show projections of changing low flows for a selection of UK rivers from the 1980s to the 2080s over consecutive 30-year moving averages (1983-2012, 1984-2013 and so on, through to 2050-79).

These projections are based on the “enhanced future flows and groundwater” (Eflag) dataset, which provides simulated river flows for 200 catchments around the UK, using four river flow models. These are driven by the “regional” projections from the Met Office’s UK Climate Projections 2018 (UKCP18), a 12-member climate model “ensemble” which uses the very-high-emission RCP8.5 scenario.

(For more on why this regional data is only available under this pathway, read Carbon Brief’s in-depth Q&A on UKCP18.)

The multiple lines on each plot – which indicate different projections for low flows – show the uncertainties arising from the different climate model runs and river flow models used.

The charts reveal that, across all rivers and different future trajectories, the trend points in the same direction – towards diminishing minimum flows. This suggests a drier future across the UK, most notably in the summer.

Past trends in drought

Given these projections, we would expect to see a similar trend of decreasing minimum flows emerging in observational data over the last few decades.

However, our research concludes that there is little compelling evidence for any evidence of a widespread worsening of UK droughts over the last half century – yet.

The maps below show how river flows have changed since 1965 across the UK for very low (Q95), medium-low (Q70) and median (Q50) flows.

For much of the north and west of the UK, the lowest flows in each year have, in fact, increased since 1965 (blue triangles). In the south and east of the country, there are decreases (inverted red triangles), but it is a mixed picture. Overall, the number of statistically significant trends is modest.

But, while these river flow records span more than 50 years, this is still a relatively short timeframe.

As a result, we also explored much longer records, including “reconstructed” river flows, which stretch back to 1890. Here, too, we find there is no consistent trend towards worsening drought over these long periods.

In fact, our research shows how trends in the last 50 years are often unrepresentative of longer-term changes. Some of the apparent decreasing trends from the maps above disappear when a longer view is taken.

Mismatch between past trends and future projections

There is a clear contradiction between future projections and past trends. We do not yet see much evidence of the drier future that climate models project.

However, this apparent contradiction is unsurprising once uncertainties inherent in both future projections and historical observations are considered.

Future projections are highly uncertain and span a wide range of possibilities – as shown by the multiple lines in the Eflag graphs above.

Caution is needed in interpreting trends in observations, too. While 50 years seems a reasonably long period, trends can be influenced by variability associated with natural atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns.

The trends towards increasing river flows in the north and west are consistent with changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) – the atmospheric pressure system that influences the UK’s weather on year-to-year and decade-to-decade timescales.

There is a growing list of drivers of drought variability, including the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the role of the influx of freshwater into the North Atlantic due to the melting of the Greenland ice sheet.

In a recent paper, we highlighted that long-term trends in low river flows for many UK catchments may not be detectable for decades due to being obscured by natural climate variability.

This is shown by the plot below, which illustrates how projected trends of very low river flows over the 21st century (red line) contrasts with the estimated range of historical river flow variability (dashed lines). (The grey shading shows the range of different climate models.)

It shows that for some catchments – for example, the Lambourn River in south-east England – significant trends do not emerge until the 2050s.

Part of the mismatch between historical observations and climate projections for UK summer is due to a run of wet summers from the late 2000s onwards. This climate variability has ‘masked’ an underlying trend that could eventually emerge and bring a more worrisome consistency with the projections of climate models.

That this masking has often entailed living with an excess of water, in the form of widespread, damaging flooding, only highlights the challenges water managers face.

A drier and wetter future

Further research is required into how different types of hydrological drought will evolve.

We are confident we will see more droughts in April-September, typically associated with heatwaves, as in 2025, 2022 and 2018. This is because warming temperatures – which, unlike rainfall trends, are certain – will exacerbate droughts.

The increased likelihood of hot, dry summers also means more rapid-onset “flash droughts”, which have impacts on soil moisture as well as river flows.

As such, the droughts of recent years should be interpreted as a warning that hotter temperatures will worsen drought impacts.

However, we are much less confident that we will see more long, multi-annual droughts driven by dry winters that fail to replenish reservoirs and aquifers, such as those seen in 1988-93, 2005-06 and 2010-12. This is because climate models generally predict wetter winters for the UK. (These multi-annual droughts have, historically, posed some of the greatest challenges to water management.)

Nevertheless, climate variability means that even if winters get wetter, there will always be runs of dry years. This is a cause for concern, as the greatest problems occur when wet winters combine with dry summers. (It was the dry winter of 1975-76 which made the 1976 drought so severe). 

Our finding that it is difficult to confirm whether droughts are, overall, becoming more severe offers little comfort to water managers preparing for the future.

Our research offers a number of recommendations for water planners trying to navigate this complexity. This includes using large climate model “ensembles” to test the resilience of water supply systems to different types of droughts. Although model projections are uncertain, they provide a way to assess the UK’s vulnerability to a range of future outcomes.

Furthermore, the hydrological volatility of the recent past indicates the importance of preparing for both a drier and wetter future in the UK.

The UK is known for its variable weather, but it will have a future climate that is even more variable and extreme.

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The post Guest post: Is climate change making UK droughts worse? appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Guest post: Is climate change making UK droughts worse?