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This October, the Green Climate Fund’s board approved a spending breakthrough, agreeing to send more than $100 million to help Somalia’s farmers – battered by droughts, floods and conflict – to shore up their access to water, restore land and earn a more reliable living from their animals and crops.  

The deal – the fund’s first sizeable help for a single conflict-affected state – is an early example of the kind of investment climate finance experts say needs to be rapidly expanded as many of the world’s most vulnerable countries face the crushing double pressures of conflict and climate impacts.  

At COP28 in Dubai last year, more than 100 countries, banks and other organisations called for “collective action to build climate resilience at the scale and speed required in highly vulnerable countries and communities, particularly those threatened or affected by fragility or conflict”.

On Friday, as the COP29 climate summit in Baku reached its halfway point, a handful of fragile countries – including Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Chad and Burundi – launched a “Network of Climate-vulnerable Countries Affected by Conflict or High Levels of Humanitarian Needs”, aimed at scaling up the climate finance they say has been lacking. 

“There is a blind spot in climate funding which is preventing the world’s most vulnerable people from receiving the support they desperately need. Our message to all countries is clear: we can no longer afford to ignore this,” said Yemen’s environment minister Tawfiq al-Sharjabi, speaking at a COP event. 

Aid agencies grapple with climate adaptation in fragile states

With climate shocks growing in scale and number, “climate change is a matter of survival for Somalia,” the country’s environment minister Khadija Mohamed Al-Makhzoumi said in October as the new Green Climate Fund (GCF) package was announced. 

But persuading the GCF to take a chance on Somalia took years of diplomatic pressure and wrangling, climate finance analysts say – and rapidly moving the much larger sums of money needed for urgent climate adaptation in fragile nations through a range of finance providers will be a colossal challenge. 

“Somalia is only one country. All that diplomacy and work went for financing $100 million,” said Mauricio Vazquez, who leads work on climate change and conflict at ODI Global, a London-based global affairs think-tank. 

“It’s just not feasible to do that for $35 billion,” he warned, referring to the amount of money the 24 most fragile and conflict-affected countries say they need annually over the next 5-10 years to achieve their national climate adaptation plans. 

As he sees it, the GCF’s Somalia funding “is one in 1,000 they should be doing – so the Somalia success, when you look at it in the big picture, is a demonstration of collective failure.” 

Low appetite for risk 

Countries embroiled in conflicts, or with weak or absent governments, have long struggled to access climate finance, not least because much of it is provided as loans – and loan providers prefer low-risk investments. 

Heavily conflict-affected countries received an average of just $2.74 per capita each year in international adaptation funding in the decade to 2020 – 40% of what other low-income countries got, according to a World Bank report published in July.

Weaker states often also lack the systems, human resources and know-how to effectively apply for funding. As part of its mandate to push half of its adaptation finance to the most vulnerable states, the GCF offers every country at least $4 million in “readiness” funds to help prepare their applications. But an analysis found most fragile and conflict-affected states hadn’t even sought that money. 

“They weren’t accessing investments, or even getting to readiness,” Stephanie Speck, a spokeswoman for the Green Climate Fund (GCF) told Climate Home in an interview. Relying on countries to “come to us” – the normal process – doesn’t work in these cases, she said. 

Adaptation Fund head laments “puzzling” lack of pledges at COP29

Under international pressure to try to move more funding to countries and communities where it is needed most, the GCF – and some other multilateral development banks, including the African Development Bank (AfDB) – are trying to fundamentally rethink how they work with fragile countries. 

They are also looking for new sources of funding – particularly from the long-reluctant private sector – with public climate and development aid unlikely to grow substantially, especially given developments such as the re-election this month of incoming US President Donald Trump, who cut international climate spending during his first term in office. 

“Every actor, including the multilateral development banks, says it’s absolutely vital to bring in the private sector. Otherwise, it’s just a drop in the ocean,” said Yue Cao, an ODI climate finance researcher. 

Much room for improvement 

The AfDB now factors in both fragility and climate change as part of its decision-making on all investments, said Frederik Teufel, the bank’s lead coordinator of efforts to boost its work in fragile contexts. 

To woo more private investors, the bank is moving away from focusing first on the fragility of countries such as Somalia and Chad – a term the countries themselves dislike – to emphasising potential investment opportunities that could aid longer-term development, from expanding access to mini-grid power to building irrigation systems, Teufel said.  

“When you overly focus on the problem, investors say, ‘I can’t invest there,’” he told Climate Home. 

The bank also is shifting from a project-by-project approach in fragile situations to a longer-term investment effort – and its new 2024 strategy sees homegrown African investors as the key. 

“The risk perception from investors is completely different within the continent versus outside the continent,” he said. 

But to attract homegrown – or other – investment, the bank admits in its strategy it will need to help fragile countries develop and put into action stronger financial management systems, aimed at building “transparency, accountability and anti-corruption measures, and sustainable management of debt”. 

The GCF, in turn – which Speck noted was “established to be a high risk taker” – is trying to build more flexibility into its investments to accommodate the often fast-changing situation on the ground in conflict-hit countries. 

“Things sometimes change one day to the next. You think you can work in District A, then a warlord takes over. You don’t want to have to take a year to decide to move to District B,” she said. Being flexible and nimble, she noted, “is new for us”. 

In Somalia, Green Climate Fund tests new approach for left-out communities

Recognising that making applicants wait up to two years for an answer on a funding proposal also didn’t work, especially in fragile settings, the GCF, under its new executive director Mafalda Duarte, has pledged to report back on basic concept proposals within six weeks starting next year, and to provide decisions on full proposals within nine months, Speck said. 

Funders including the GCF and the AfDB say they are also increasingly taking into account that not backing a project in a fragile setting can carry as much or more risk than funding it. 

“People’s careers are based on success – and success is riskier in places that are more difficult,” said Vazquez. Investing in conflict-affected states is also often more expensive than in more stable settings, he said. 

But in places with very low levels of food security or poor health, for instance, the amount of improvement that can potentially be achieved with an investment is huge, he noted, compared to more “minimal” advances in places with less severe problems. 

With climate impacts surging globally, “the adaptation window is closing, and countries affected by conflict and fragility can easily reach their limits, if they’re not already there,” he said. “The question is, who actually pays the cost of doing nothing?” 

Sponsored by SPARC (Supporting Pastoralism and Agriculture in Recurrent and Protracted Crises) through the Climate, Peace and Transboundary Resilience Pavilion at COP29. See our supporters page for what this means. 

Laurie Goering is a freelance writer and editor based in London, UK. 

The Climate, Peace and Transboundary Resilience Pavilion at COP29 will host 30 events with world-leading experts, including heads of state and other leading representatives from governments, climate funds, aid agencies, civil society organisations, and more. All events will be livestreamed. For more information visit the Pavilion page here.

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COP30 rainforest fund unlikely to make first payments until 2028

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March 20, 2026

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The Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) – a major new rainforest protection fund launched by Brazil at COP30 – is unlikely to make payments to rainforest countries until at least 2028, experts said, while it raises funds in financial markets.

The proposed new mechanism aims to pay rainforest countries for achieving low deforestation rates. Rather than depending on grants, the TFFF would seek to raise public and private capital to make investments in financial markets, and then use part of the returns to reward countries which protect their rainforests.

But raising the US$125 billion of public and private investment needed to make meaningful payments could take years, according to Andrew Deutz, managing director of Global Policy and Partnerships at WWF, one of the organisations involved in the fund’s design.

He said it will likely take two or three years for the fund to raise private capital by issuing bonds, invest the money and generate enough returns to make significant payments. “So I don’t think we’re going to see payments to rainforest countries until 2028 or 2029,” Deutz said.

    Norway’s climate minister Andreas Bjelland Eriksen, another of the fund’s early backers, told Climate Home News that “the TFFF requires scale, which will take some time”, but added that it “is a historic opportunity” to finance the protection of tropical forests “for generations”.

    The delay is not necessarily bad, according to Deutz, as it will allow communities to build capabilities and legal structures to handle the new flow of funds. “There needs to be a capacity-building process over the next couple of years with Indigenous organisations and local communities to be able to manage the flow of funds at that level,” he added.

    At the COP26 climate summit in 2021, over 140 countries – covering 85% of the world’s forests – pledged to end deforestation by 2030. At last year’s COP30, the Brazilian government promised to create a roadmap towards ending deforestation by that same date.

    But governments are far off track, with a yearly review showing that deforestation rates are currently 63% higher than what they should be to reach this goal. An estimated $570 billion funding gap for nature protection has contributed to the deficient results.

    First step: raising $10 billion

    While the TFFF has a long-term goal of raising $125bn in public and private capital, its proponents say the key goal for the fund in 2026 will be to raise the total amount of public investment to $10bn so that it can start to scale up.

    The fund has already raised $6.7bn, but Norway’s $3bn pledge requires that the TFFF raises about $10bn mostly from other funders by the end of 2026 or they will not invest.

    Before scaling up to the long-term $125bn goal – of which $25bn is public and $100bn private – the TFFF will have to prove that it can be successful in paying back investors and channeling funds for rainforest protection. The whole process can take years, Deutz said.

    If this $10bn target is reached, the fund could begin raising private finance – up to an estimated $40bn, Deutz said. This initial $50bn tranche would serve to start making investments and show that the model works and can generate returns.

    Bjelland Eriksen also said that reaching the $10bn target will be “an important priority” this year. “Only a handful of countries had the opportunities to assess it in detail before the [COP30] Belém summit – now is the time for more countries to do so,” the Norwegian minister said.

    Public finance from governments is key for the TFFF model because it would act as a guarantee to lower risk for private investors, something very common in the financial sector, said Charlotte Hamill, partner at hedge fund Bracebridge Capital and one of the fund’s financial advisors, at an event earlier in January in Davos.

    “Being able to do this at scale is actually really important, not only to be able to make the payments that are necessary for rainforest preservation but also, in a funny way, it allows you to buy slightly less risky assets because you’re gonna have a much larger pool to buy them off of,” she added.

    New contributions?

    João Paulo de Resende, TFFF Leader at Brazil’s Ministry of Finance, told Climate Home News that the country will continue fundraising efforts throughout this year, and said he has recently concluded a tour in East Asia speaking with government officials from Japan, South Korea and China.

    Conversations with the Chinese government have become “a lot more serious”, said Felix Finkbeiner, founder of the non-profit Plant-for-the-Planet, which operates the online tracking platform TFFF Watch. He added that a Chinese investment would likely be similar in size to the French or German contributions, which would grant the country a seat on the TFFF board. France has pledged a €500m ($578m) investment while Germany has promised €1bn ($1.17bn).

    While China is categorised as a developing country at UN climate talks, and thus has no legal responsibility to grant climate finance, the TFFF has been seen as an opportunity for the Asian country to contribute because it’s not an official mechanism within the UN. Deutz said that, for the Chinese government to contribute, they will need reassurance that the funds will not be counted as formal climate finance.

    The UK is another of the countries expected to announce a contribution in the coming months, both Finkbeiner and Deutz said. The country announced cuts to climate finance this week as it ramps up defense spending, but Deutz noted that it could still contribute with funds to the TFFF.

    “I’m still somewhat optimistic that [the $10bn goal] can happen despite the geopolitical turmoil because the TFFF does not require grant money. We’re not competing with humanitarian assistance,” Deutz explained. “Because governments are being asked to make a loan that would be paid back with interest, this comes out of a different pile of money”.

    Multilateral banks such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) also reportedly considered contributions.

    Brazil sharing leadership

    Despite having led the official launch of the fund and spearheading its fundraising efforts, Brazil is now aiming to “share leadership” as other countries join the TFFF’s steering committee and establish a new board.

    De Resende told Climate Home News that “the project no longer belongs solely to Brazil”, and added that the group of countries that have pledged contributions to the TFFF are also now playing a larger role in “finding ways to jointly promote sponsor outreach”.

    Deutz said that Brazil wants to move towards a “shared leadership model”. “They are now asking the European countries to have one of them set up to be the co-chairs so that this is not seen as a Brazilian initiative but is rather seen as owned by all of them,” he added.

    The fund will now have to form a steering committee, likely chaired by Brazil and one European country, which will instruct the World Bank on setting up the formal structures of the fund.

    Bjelland Eriksen said there is “important work” ongoing to formally establish the fund’s investment arm (known as the TFIF), while de Resende said he expects to “have the fund incorporated in some European jurisdiction by the beginning of the second semester.”

    The post COP30 rainforest fund unlikely to make first payments until 2028 appeared first on Climate Home News.

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    Corpus Christi Cuts Timeline to Disaster as Abbott Issues Emergency Orders

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    March 19, 2026

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    The governor’s office said the city’s two main reservoirs could dry up by May, much sooner than previous timelines. But authorities still offer no plan for curtailment of water use.

    By Dylan Baddour

    City officials in Corpus Christi on Tuesday released modeling that showed emergency cuts to water demand could be required as soon as May as reservoir levels continue to decline.

    Corpus Christi Cuts Timeline to Disaster as Abbott Issues Emergency Orders

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    Climate Change

    Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems

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    March 19, 2026

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    Lena Luig is the head of the International Agricultural Policy Division at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a member of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. Anna Lappé is the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.

    As toxic clouds loom over Tehran and Beirut from the US and Israel’s bombardment of oil depots and civilian infrastructure in the region’s ongoing war, the world is once again witnessing the not-so-subtle connections between conflict, hunger, food insecurity and the vulnerability of global food systems dependent on fossil fuels, dominated by a few powerful countries and corporations.

    The conflict in Iran is having a huge impact on the world’s fertilizer supply. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical trade route in the region for nearly half of the global supply of urea, the main synthetic fertilizer derived from natural gas through the conversion of ammonia.

    With the Strait impacted by Iran’s blockades, prices of urea have shot up by 35% since the war started, just as planting season starts in many parts of the world, putting millions of farmers and consumers at risk of increasing production costs and food price spikes, resulting in food insecurity, particularly for low-income households. The World Food Programme has projected that an extra 45 million people would be pushed ​into acute hunger because of rises in food, oil and shipping costs, if the war continues until June.

    Pesticides and synthetic fertilizer leave system fragile

    On the face of it, this looks like a supply chain issue, but at the core of this crisis lies a truth about many of our food systems around the world: the instability and injustice in the very design of systems so reliant on these fossil fuel inputs for our food.

    At the Global Alliance, a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations working to transform food systems, we have been documenting the fossil fuel-food nexus, raising alarm about the fragility of a system propped up by fossil fuels, with 15% of annual fossil fuel use going into food systems, in part because of high-cost, fossil fuel-based inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. The Heinrich Böll Foundation has also been flagging this threat consistently, most recently in the Pesticide Atlas and Soil Atlas compendia. 

    We’ve seen this before: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked global disruptions in fertilizer supply and food price volatility. As the conflict worsened, fertilizer prices spiked – as much from input companies capitalizing on the crisis for speculation as from real cost increases from production and transport – triggering a food price crisis around the world.

      Since then, fertilizer industry profit margins have continued to soar. In 2022, the largest nine fertilizer producers increased their profit margins by more than 35% compared to the year before—when fertilizer prices were already high. As Lena Bassermann and Dr. Gideon Tups underscore in the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Soil Atlas, the global dependencies of nitrogen fertilizer impacted economies around the world, especially state budgets in already indebted and import-dependent economies, as well as farmers across Africa.

      Learning lessons from the war in Ukraine, many countries invested heavily in renewable energy and/or increased domestic oil production as a way to decrease dependency on foreign fossil fuels. But few took the same approach to reimagining domestic food systems and their food sovereignty.

      Agroecology as an alternative

      There is another way. Governments can adopt policy frameworks to encourage reductions in synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use, especially in regions that currently massively overuse nitrogen fertilizer. At the African Union fertilizer and Soil Health Summit in 2024, African leaders at least agreed that organic fertilizers should be subsidized as well, not only mineral fertilizers, but we can go farther in actively promoting agricultural pathways that reduce fossil fuel dependency. 

      In 2024, the Global Alliance organized dozens of philanthropies to call for a tenfold increase in investments to help farmers transition from fossil fuel dependency towards agroecological approaches that prioritize livelihoods, health, climate, and biodiversity.

      In our research, we detail the huge opportunity to repurpose harmful subsidies currently supporting inputs like synthetic fertilizer and pesticides towards locally-sourced bio-inputs and biofertilizer production. We know this works: There are powerful stories of hope and change from those who have made this transition, despite only receiving a fraction of the financing that industrial agriculture receives, with evidence of benefits from stable incomes and livelihoods to better health and climate outcomes.

      New summit in Colombia seeks to revive stalled UN talks on fossil fuel transition

      Inspiring examples abound: G-BIACK in Kenya is training farmers how to produce their own high-quality compost; start-ups like the Evola Company in Cambodia are producing both nutrient-rich organic fertilizer and protein-rich animal feed with black soldier fly farming; Sabon Sake in Ghana is enriching sugarcane bagasse – usually organic waste – with microbial agents and earthworms to turn it into a rich vermicompost.

      These efforts, grounded in ecosystems and tapping nature for soil fertility and to manage pest pressures, are just some of the countless examples around the world, tapping the skill and knowledge of millions of farmers. On a national and global policy level, the Agroecology Coalition, with 480+ members, including governments, civil society organizations, academic institutions, and philanthropic foundations, is supporting a transition toward agroecology, working with natural systems to produce abundant food, boost biodiversity, and foster community well-being.

      Fertilizer industry spins “clean” products

      We must also inoculate ourselves from the fertilizer industry’s public relations spin, which includes promoting the promise that their products can be produced without heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Despite experts debunking the viability of what the industry has dubbed “green hydrogen” or “green or clean ammonia”, the sector still promotes this narrative, arguing that these are produced with resource-intensive renewable energy or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a costly and unreliable technology for reducing emissions.

      As we mourn this conflict’s senseless destruction and death, including hundreds of children, we also recognize that peace cannot mean a return to business-as-usual. We need to upend the systems that allow the richest and most powerful to have dominion over so much.

      This includes fighting for a food system that is based on genuine sovereignty and justice, free from dependency on fossil fuels, one that honors natural systems and puts power into the hands of communities and food producers themselves.

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