Call to triple adaptation finance
At COP26 four years ago, governments agreed to “urge” developed countries to double finance for adapting to climate change up to around $40 billion a year by 2025.
That goal ends this year, although we will not know until 2027 if it has been met. But at a press conference in Bonn this afternoon, the Least Developed Countries group chair Evan Njewa called for a successor goal – tripling adaptation finance by 2030 on 2022 levels. “Adaptation is a lifeline,” he explained.
Other developing countries are likely to back this. Grupo Sur and the Like-Minded Developing countries have made the same call in different negotiating rooms and Njewa said he was sure that the small islands group AOSIS would back it too.
“We’re never going to say no to adaptation finance,” AOSIS finance negotiator Thibyan Ibrahim told Climate Home in Bonn. But he noted that even tripling “does little to close the adaptation finance gap”. The UN estimates that developing countries need $160-340 billion a year by 2030, whereas tripling on 2022 levels would bring in just under $100 billion.
Last year in Baku, developed governments would not agree to having a sub-goal on adaptation in the wider $300-billion-by-2035 finance goal and it’s not currently clear which negotiating track a new adaptation goal could be included in.
The doubling-by-2025 goal was in the COP26 cover decision – a stand-alone declaration all governments agree to – but the COP30 Presidency has said it does not want a cover decision.
It would fit in the Baku to Belem roadmap to $1.3 trillion or the Global Goal on Adaptation. But the roadmap is not an official negotiated UN agreement – so may not be followed up on – and developed-country governments have been resisting financial indicators in the Global Goal on Adaptation.
Meanwhile outside the world of UN climate talks, a recent CARE report showed that adaptation finance is likely to fall by 10% in 2026. France, Germany, the Netherlands and particularly the UK are set to make big cuts between 2025 and 2026.
The US is giving nothing in either 2025 or 2026. Commenting on US climate finance cuts generally, Njewa said he expects “someone somewhere to rise up and fill in the gap that that party has left”.
From Bonn to Nairobi?
Denouncing the visa problems faced by some developing country delegates heading to Bonn, more than 200 climate campaign groups made a joint call yesterday for governments to consider whether Germany should remain the default host for the mid-year climate talks.
Chanting “no borders, no nations, no visa applications”, a dozen campaigners gathered outside the conference centre on Tuesday morning, holding up a banner calling to move the annual talks to “visa-friendly countries”.
With many of those affected by the perennial issue unable to protest themselves, the demonstrators played a voice note from Roaa Alobeid, a young Sudanese climate activist who spoke movingly at COP28 about the war in her country.
She said she had gone to great lengths to get a visa for the Schengen area, which includes Germany, making an appointment, submitting 15 documents – including five letters of support and a bank statement – but was still rejected.
“I’m not there. I will never be there”, she said. “Why? I’m not worth it?” “We shouldn’t be left behind when we are the ones impacted.”
Cameroonian activist Zoneziwoh Mbondgulo-Wondieh did make it, but told the protest her one-year-old daughter had been refused a visa for being too young. She asked why Germany would implicitly tell a nursing mother they must stay at home and not work abroad.
When Climate Home questioned the German foreign office on this issue last year, a spokesperson said it was important to the government that all delegates could attend but there are legal requirements for getting a visa for the EU’s Schengen zone of free movement.
Rachitaa Gupta, head of the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice, said it would be better to hold the annual mid-year talks somewhere like Nairobi or Bangkok – where UN facilities already exist and visas are easier to obtain. Holding the meetings in the Global South would also be cheaper, Gupta added.
Climate finance on the rise – mostly for the rich
New figures out today paint a fairly positive picture of global climate finance, showing it climbed to a record $1.9 trillion in 2023, more than tripling over six years.
Climate Policy Initiative (CPI), which compiles the data, said that at the current rate of growth, the world could deliver $6 trillion in annual climate investment – the most conservative estimate of needs – by 2028.
Private-sector funding rose above $1 trillion for the first time in 2023, driven by household spending on electric vehicles, solar and energy-efficient housing – with clean energy in advanced economies and China receiving the bulk of the money.
While this suggests the long-touted need to “shift the trillions” towards green investment is underway, the headline numbers mask the fact that many of the poorest countries are still failing to receive anything like the amounts they need.
The CPI report shows that overall public climate finance fell by about 8% from 2022 to 2023, as government budgets were tight after the COVID-19 pandemic. It also warned that recently announced cuts to official development assistance, in countries such as the US and the UK, raise concern that money from this source could decline further.
International climate finance for emerging markets and developing countries reached $196 billion in 2023, with 78% of that from public sources. Yet while both climate-related development finance and private investment rose, CPI said the least-developed countries still face barriers to accessing affordable capital, and need more financial innovation and support.
In a separate report released on Monday, however, Oil Change International and 17 other NGOs warned that a widely used approach of using government money to lower investment risk and bring in more commercial cash – known as “blended finance” – is falling short of expectations.
The report found that every public dollar of concessional lending is bringing in 4-7 times less private investment than anticipated, leaving the Global South with massive shortfalls of cash for its energy transition. Most money, it said, is going to Global North countries and China, with the remaining 69% of the world’s population receiving just 15% of finance in 2023-2024.
“A just energy transition is dramatically more affordable than continued fossil fuel dependence. But unfortunately affordable doesn’t mean ‘attractive to banks and hedge funds’,” said Bronwen Tucker, global public finance lead at Oil Change. “It is clear from the data that private investors are not fit to lead the way to the fossil free future we need, and that governments must step in.”
Mineral justice for Africa
Efforts to revive the Lobito Corridor trade route in central Africa must prioritise local economic development over raw material exports, researchers at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) said, as campaigners in Bonn call for justice for resource-rich countries and an end to the extractive injustices of the fossil fuel era.
The US and the European Union are providing financial support to Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia to upgrade their infrastructure to aid transport of critical energy transition minerals like cobalt and copper through a rail system which terminates at the port of Lobito on Angola’s Atlantic coast.
In a policy brief issued this week, highlighting the Corridor’s opportunities and challenges for a just transition, the researchers questioned how the project’s development will benefit the wider economies of the countries involved, while protecting social benefits and human rights including being fair to the people whose land it might encroach upon and the artisanal miners who dig up many of the raw materials.
They said the involvement of the EU and the US has raised concerns in participating countries such as Zambia, where a parliamentary committee has said the Lobito Corridor project appears to focus on “mopping up critical raw materials” to respond to the energy security concerns of wealthy nations without adding value to the countries.
Lorenzo Cotula, IIED principal researcher, said if the EU and other prospective funders are interested in a genuine, long-term partnership with Angola, Congo and Zambia, they should support their efforts to promote economic development and improve the lives of their citizens.
“This project shouldn’t just be a means to export more raw materials more quickly to wealthier countries, or another chess piece in the great power game,” Cotula said.
“Millions of people in mineral-rich, lower-income countries are being sidelined in a global rush for materials to power electric cars, computers and even military technologies in richer nations,” he added.
Sharing similar concern, campaigners from Power Shift Africa and the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI) convened a press conference at the ongoing talks in Bonn calling for the need for just minerals in the just transition, because one cannot exist without the other.
Anabella Rosemberg, senior advisor on just transition at Climate Action Network International (CAN-I), said the transition that is happening is not one that is needed for a climate-compatible world because the needs of resource-rich countries are being ignored.
Rosemberg said there is need for international cooperation to overturn the current competition over resources, adding that “we know that investment and trade deals are being arranged to secure the supply of these minerals, and in the end, we are reproducing all the mistakes that have been done in the past with the fossil-based economy”.
Samira Ally, project officer at Power Shift Africa, said Africa’s mineral wealth can accelerate a global shift to net zero when governed by justice and stability with necessary guardrails in place.
To do this, she asked governments to integrate language from the G20 and the UN panel on critical minerals into the climate talks and national climate plans so that they “reference sustainable supply chains and the right to development and industrialisation in the Global South”.
The post Bonn bulletin: Developing nations call for adaptation finance to triple by 2030 appeared first on Climate Home News.
Bonn bulletin: Developing nations call for adaptation finance to triple by 2030
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The planet is heating up more quickly than ever before.
For decades, greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity have been building up in the atmosphere and trapping ever-higher levels of heat.
The resulting asymmetry between incoming solar energy and energy radiated back out into space – known as “Earth’s energy imbalance” – provides a direct measure of the extent to which humans are disrupting the Earth’s climate system.
This imbalance is growing and in 2025 its 10-year average reached a record high, indicating that global temperatures could increase at even higher rates in the future.
This is among the headline findings of the latest “indicators of global climate change” (IGCC) report, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, which tracks changes in the climate system on an annual basis.
The report, now in its fourth iteration, has been produced by dozens of scientists from around the world.
Its findings are designed to fill the gap between Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) science reports, which are published every 5-7 years.
In this article, we unpack the IGCC report, which explores how human activity is driving a growing energy imbalance and why monitoring systems to track global climate are so crucial.
(For more on previous IGCC reports, see Carbon Brief’s coverage in 2023, 2024 and 2025.)
Greenhouse gas emissions remain at an all-time high
Global greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to increase, mostly as a result of the use of fossil fuels. However, deforestation, agriculture and industrial processes also play an important role.
Over the most recent decade (2015-24), emissions stood at the equivalent of 54.6bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) per year. In 2024, the most recent year for which we have complete data, emissions reached 56.8GtCO2e.
As the chart below shows, these emissions have pushed up atmospheric levels of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. In 2025, concentrations of these gases reached 425.6 parts per million (ppm), 1936.3 parts per billion (ppb) and 339.4ppb, respectively.
This represents a rise of 3.8%, 3.8% and 2.2%, respectively, since the 2019 levels reported in the IPCC’s sixth assessment report (AR6).
At the same time, declines in emissions of aerosols such as sulphur dioxide, partly as a result of efforts to tackle air pollution, are increasing the Earth’s energy imbalance. This is because aerosols have a cooling effect on the Earth’s climate, counteracting warming from CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions.
(Tackling sulphur dioxide, alongside other particulate emissions, remains critical because the immediate health and environmental damage they cause far outweighs their short-term cooling effect on the climate.)
The Earth’s energy imbalance is rising rapidly
The Earth’s energy imbalance has long been recognised as a key indicator of how the climate is being affected by human activities.
However, it is only in the last few decades that scientists have been able to record temperature changes deep enough in the ocean to accurately quantify it.
Earth’s energy imbalance measures how quickly excess heat is accumulating in every part of the Earth system, primarily in the ocean, but also in land, ice and atmosphere.
Through this accumulation of heat, the energy imbalance influences the rate of sea level rise and ice melt across the world, as well as increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as storms, floods and droughts.
Without human influence, the Earth’s energy imbalance would be close to zero.
But, as greenhouse gas emissions have built up in the atmosphere, the imbalance has been growing since the 1970s. Recent increases to Earth’s energy imbalance have outpaced those projections made by climate models — indicating the planet could see more warming than expected in the future.
As the right-hand chart below shows, the imbalance is now at a record high, having more than doubled over the past two decades.
It has increased by around 40% since 2019, from an average 0.79 watts per square metre (Wm2) over 2006-18, according to IPCC AR6, to 1.12Wm2 over 2013-25.
The left-hand chart shows how heat is accumulating in the ocean (blues), ice (grey), land (orange) and atmosphere (purple).
Global temperature rise
The excess heat building up in the climate system from the energy imbalance is pushing up global temperatures at a record rate of 0.27C per decade.
We estimate that human-induced warming – the amount of observed global surface
temperature increase attributable to both the direct and indirect effects of human activities – reached 1.37C in 2025. This has risen from 1.0C in 2017, as reported in IPCC AR6.
While natural variability in the climate system – such as El Niño or La Niña events – can also influence temperatures year-to-year, the upward temperature trend we are seeing is being driven by the persistent imbalance in energy.
We now expect global temperatures to exceed the Paris Agreement limit of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels around the year 2030.
This is significant because 1.5C has been identified as the critical dividing line between manageable climate risks and catastrophic, potentially irreversible damage to global ecosystems and human societies.
Heat accumulating throughout the Earth system
While heat is accumulating throughout the Earth system, it is not being distributed evenly around the globe.
Since the 1970s, around 90% of this heat has been taken up by the ocean, affecting marine ecosystems, ocean circulation patterns, sea level rise and climate extremes.
For example, the number of marine heatwave days – periods of unusually high sea surface temperatures – has more than tripled globally since the early 1990s. The year 2025 alone saw 65 days of marine heatwaves – meaning they occurred, on average, more than one day a week.
Meanwhile, the cryosphere – the portion of the Earth made up of frozen water, including glaciers, ice sheets and permafrost – is experiencing widespread ice loss and thawing in response to the growing energy imbalance. This affects ecosystems, sea level rise and infrastructure in polar and high-latitude regions.
Rapid warming has also resulted in record extreme temperatures over land, with average maximum temperatures for any single day over 2016-25 around 1.92C above pre-industrial levels). This is an increase of almost half a degree compared to the previous decade (2006-15).
Sea level rise and the energy imbalance
Sea level rise provides one of the clearest long-term signals of a changing planet.
It is closely linked to Earth’s energy imbalance. As heat accumulates in the ocean, water expands, raising sea levels. Meanwhile, a warming land and atmosphere means addition of water to the oceans through melting of glaciers and ice sheets, also adding to sea level rise.
Over the long-term, sea levels have been rising, on average, at a rate of around 1.8mm per year since 1901, totalling a record 23cm in 2025. This is increasing the risk of coastal flooding, erosion and habitat loss in many low-lying areas around the world.
This rise can be seen in the left-hand chart below, which shows observed global sea level changes from tide gauges (grey and blue dashed lines) and satellites (red dashed lines) since 1901. The solid lines indicate the average across multiple datasets.
Sea level rise is accelerating consistent with the observed increase in Earth’s energy imbalance. Over 2006-25, sea levels have risen at a rate of 3.67mm per year – more than double the rate of 1.69mm per year seen over 1976-95.
This increasing rate is shown in the right-hand figure below, which shows four successive overlapping 20-year periods and the most-recent decade.
(Last year’s transition from El Niño to weak La Niña conditions affected global rainfall patterns and led to a small and temporary fall in global average sea level in 2025. This explains the slight decrease in rate of sea level rise for the most recent decade, which is affected more than the 20-year period 2006-25.)
The bigger picture
Despite greenhouse gas emissions not increasing as rapidly as in the 2000s, this year’s IGCC findings continue to show how far and how fast the climate is changing due to human activity.
A significant increase in decarbonisation efforts in the second half of this decade is required to slow down the rate of human-caused warming and limit the escalation of climate risks and impacts.
These findings, like many others produced by scientists across the globe, rely on international expertise, partnership and the maintenance and availability of global climate datasets and the global observing programmes that underpin them.
This year’s edition of IGCC used more than 40 global datasets produced by research teams around the world, including the NASA satellite record of the Earth’s energy imbalance and the ARGO deep ocean float network.
However, a number of long-term monitoring programmes could be threatened by funding decisions made by governments around the world, most notably the Trump administration in the US.
Local meteorological data and weather balloon measurement programmes in many countries have declined in recent years, especially in Africa, the west Pacific and South America. This reduces scientists’ ability to monitor and understand key indicators of climate change.
This is not just an issue for climate science. Many of these observations are key to weather forecasts and systems that provide early warning for extreme weather. For example, media reports have suggested that recent reductions in weather balloon measurements in Alaska led to a lack of warnings for a recent winter storm.
The continuity and integrity of the climate observations that scientists use to understand how the climate is changing depends on effective and sustained coordination by international organisations, such as the Global Climate Observing System, the World Meteorological Organization and World Climate Research Programme.
Without this data and its coordination, future assessments will be much more difficult at a time when urgent climate action is needed.
The post Guest post: How a record-high ‘energy imbalance’ is driving global warming appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: How a record-high ‘energy imbalance’ is driving global warming
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