Nana Antwi-Boasiako Amoah is chair of the African Group of Negotiators on Climate Change. Charles Wanguhu is director of the Enzi Ijayo Africa Initiative and Africa Futures Policy Hub.

A COP held in Africa does not automatically deliver for Africa. That matters now, with COP31 in Antalya ahead and COP32 in Addis Ababa on the horizon. What counts is not where the world gathers, or what it pledges, but whether climate finance reaches African countries on terms they can use.

Without real progress on finance and implementation at Antalya, an African-hosted COP will simply inherit the same unmet promises.

Africa accounts for about 4% of global emissions, yet carries a wildly disproportionate share of the cost, losing an estimated 2%-5% of GDP each year to climate extremes, money pulled from classrooms and clinics into disaster response.

The finance meant to help it adapt arrives in a trickle. Developing countries will need an estimated $305 billion a year for adaptation alone by 2035, according to the latest UN Adaptation Gap Report. In 2024, international public adaptation finance stood at $28 billion-$32 billion, just a $1 billion increase over the previous year. That gap is the difference between plans on paper and protection on the ground.

Predictable, grant-based funding

The problem is not only how much, but on what terms. Too much arrives as loans rather than grants, deepening a debt burden that already crowds out spending on essentials in health, education and multipliers of development like affordable and accessible energy. The cost of capital has become the real tax on African ambition. A fairer financial system is not charity. It is the precondition for delivery.

So, Africa comes to Antalya with a collective strong proposition. This is no longer a slogan: across the continent, states are building shared positions and common pavilions, learning to bargain as a bloc. We will press for finance that is predictable and grant-based, and for adaptation finance to be at least tripled, to around $120 billion a year by 2035. Even that would fall short of what the continent actually needs.

The goal this forms part of, which was agreed at the Baku COP – $300 billion a year – is a floor, not a ceiling; the real benchmark is the $1.3 trillion from all sources sketched out in the Baku-to-Belém Roadmap. And we will ask for direct access, so resources reach the institutions and communities that must use them, and for mechanisms that track whether commitments are met.

Powering green industrialisation

Finance is not an end in itself. Pledges become results when finance builds economies, creates jobs and strengthens productive capacity – the grids, the processing and the skills that let African economies add value to what they produce rather than exporting it raw.

Here we should be honest with ourselves. Value addition is an energy story before it is a minerals story. There is little point in curbing raw exports if there is no reliable power to run the smelter. Credibility means pairing the call to process at home with a plan to power it.

Other enablers of a just transition become crucial. Trade, for instance, can be an enabler of a low-carbon transition by facilitating the exchange of low-carbon goods. However, it has increasingly become a hindrance, particularly for African countries.

The use of unilateral trade measures has disproportionate impacts on market access and industrial capabilities, consigning African countries to the export of raw materials. The poor sequencing of these measures and lack of flexibilities, exemptions and targeted support are likely to cause harm.

At COP31, we will push for an agenda item on trade to create a specific space as an enabler of systematic discussion on the impact of trade‑related climate measures.

Communities at the table

This is where the design of co-operation matters as much as its scale. The proposed Just Transition Mechanism should be country-led and grant-based, so it adds capacity rather than debt. It should fund the things that make diversification real – reliable power (smarter grids and delivery networks), local processing, and the skills to run them – and it should put workers and affected communities at the table, not merely in the communiqué. Get that design right, and diversification builds new industries and jobs rather than leaving communities behind.

Antalya opens into a vacuum in global climate leadership. Africa can help fill it, not with grievance but with a credible voice on delivery and finance. An implementation COP must be judged by implementation.

The question is plain. Does the finance follow the ambition, and does it reach the economies and the people who need it? Africa will be watching the answer.

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COP31 must deliver finance for Africa or there will be no implementation

At India’s ocean technology institute in Chennai, scientists have been developing a range of hi-tech mining equipment that can operate 5 or 6 kilometres underwater – from a remote-control submarine to a seabed soil tester and slurry pump.

Their task: to ensure that India is ready if deep-sea mining takes off by building the technology and knowledge about how – and where – critical minerals can be extracted from the depths of the ocean, even as dozens of nations call for a moratorium on this activity.

After a series of successful deep-water equipment tests in recent years, government officials say big strides have been made.

“(India) has made significant progress in building the scientific and technological foundations for deep-sea mining,” a spokesperson for the Ministry of Earth Sciences, which oversees the institute, told Climate Home News.

Deep-sea ambitions

Highlighting the country’s ambitions, it signed a second contract last year with the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the UN body that regulates the deep ocean floor, to explore polymetallic sulphides, which contain minerals such as copper and zinc – key ingredients in clean energy technologies such as wind turbines and storage batteries.

Besides the two polymetallic sulphide contracts, it holds an ISA exploration contract for polymetallic nodules in the Central Indian Ocean Basin. China and South Korea are the only other countries with three ISA exploration contracts directly under government control.

Yet deep-sea mining is controversial for its potential impacts on the ocean floor, a little-studied, undisturbed ecosystem that should be protected by a precautionary pause on the activity, marine scientists say.

A coalition of 46 countries is pushing for a moratorium on deep-sea mining, until enough scientific evidence shows the ecosystem impacts can be reduced.

Despite this push, ISA contract-holders are still racing to develop the technical capabilities to mine the ocean floor, betting that commercial-scale operations will eventually be permitted and prove economically viable. India, an emerging clean-tech powerhouse, does not want to fall behind competitors, government officials told Climate Home News.