A dozen countries ravaged by conflict and humanitarian crises have joined forces to urge the international community to deliver the funding they need to absorb and respond to worsening climate shocks, calling for a growing gap to be tackled at critical talks this year.
In a statement agreed on Monday and seen by Climate Home News, the newly created network – which includes countries such as Chad, Iraq, Somalia and Yemen – said fragile states, which are “so often forgotten by climate action”, bear the brunt of climate change despite being among the least responsible for its causes.
As “hundreds of millions of the world’s most climate vulnerable remain left behind by climate finance”, the group said it is “determined to bring this issue to the forefront and centre in climate discussions”.
A united voice
The call to action follows the network’s first meeting in Abu Dhabi last month, when fragile states discussed how to make the intersection of climate, conflict and humanitarian needs a priority in climate negotiations.
Representatives from 13 fragile nations attended the meeting, including ministers from Burundi, Chad, Somalia and Yemen and high-level officials representing Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Iraq and South Sudan.
The network, created at the COP29 climate talks in Azerbaijan last December, aims to be a diplomatic force advocating for more and better climate financing tailored to conflict and humanitarian settings.
It will allow fragile states to speak with a united voice in climate negotiations, where their experiences are “overlooked”, Liban Obsiye, executive director of Somalia’s National Climate Fund, told Climate Home.
US approves multi-billion-dollar loan for troubled Mozambique gas plant
Failure to build long-term resilience
More than half of the world’s 25 most climate-vulnerable countries are affected by armed conflict, violence or high levels of humanitarian need, according to think-tank ODI Global, which is supporting the network.
Poor governance and conflict leave people more vulnerable to climate change, with every flood, drought and storm making it more difficult to develop the ability to cope and adapt to future impacts.
Yet funding for these countries falls seriously short, amid real and perceived risks associated with working in unstable settings, including weak institutions, lack of data and limited capacity to formulate proposals and manage projects. Available funding often focuses on short-term humanitarian needs rather than longer-term climate resilience.
Between 2014 and 2021, a group of 13 states identified as “extremely fragile” by the OECD received only $2 per person in multilateral climate finance compared to $162 per person for non-fragile states, a UN study found.
“This conflict blind spot represents a damning failure at the heart of the international climate system,” said the network.
Brazil decides leaders will speak before COP30, easing logistics crunch
“Our message to all countries is clear: we can no longer afford to ignore this,” Yemen’s minister of water and environment Tawfiq al-Sharjabi told Climate Home in a statement.
“We urge governments, climate funds and international organisations to take immediate action to close this funding gap by increasing finance dedicated to climate change adaptation, simplifying bureaucratic procedures, and building capacity in developing countries,” he said.
A key issue for COP30
To make their case, the network has written to COP30 president André Aranha Corrêa do Lago urging him to keep the issue “high on the agenda” of the UN climate summit Brazil will host in November.
In a letter dated Tuesday and seen by Climate Home, countries representing the alliance called on Brazil to ensure fragile states are “kept front and centre of efforts to scale up climate finance” and to hold a thematic day on climate, relief, recovery and peace, which took place at COP28 and COP29.
“COP30 is an irreplaceable moment to bring the agenda forward, to align the needs of climate-vulnerable and conflict-affected countries with global development objectives,” the letter says.
Brazil’s COP30 president: Climate summits must move from words to real action
Setting out his vision for COP30 last week, Brazilian diplomat Corrêa do Lago, who is the country’s chief climate negotiator, emphasised the need to remove barriers for developing countries to access climate finance and to scale funding for them from all sources to at least $1.3 trillion per year by 2035 – a goal agreed at COP29 last year.
Large and growing gap
Collectively, fragile countries need an estimated $41.5 billion annually by 2030 to mitigate and adapt to climate change, nearly four times the $11 billion they received in 2022, according to forthcoming ODI analysis shared with Climate Home.
The projection is based on the needs of 37 countries on the World Bank’s 2025 fragility list (excluding Palestine and Ukraine, whose conflicts would raise it substantially) as identified in their carbon-cutting and adaptation plans submitted to the UN.
The US contributed nearly 9% of the climate finance committed by wealthy nations to fragile states in the decade to 2022 – financial flows which President Donald Trump, a climate change-sceptic, has now halted.
The US retreat and cuts to European aid budgets could further increase the existing funding gap and create more competition for already-scarce funds, said Habib Ur Rehman Mayar, deputy general secretary of the g7+ Secretariat, a grouping of conflict-affected countries.
Age of “climate whiplash” puts residents of Africa’s fast-growing cities in danger
Closing that gap will be a first step. But fragile nations’ needs will continue to grow as climate impacts intensify, said Mauricio Vazquez of ODI. “That makes it more urgent to invest in adaptation today before it becomes loss and damage. What these countries need is resilience finance to anticipate, adapt to and absorb shocks,” he told Climate Home.
Green Climate Fund invests in Somalia
The lack of funding could have catastrophic implications for countries like Somalia, which has been gripped by political instability, ethnic tensions and an Islamist insurgency. In recent years, the East African country suffered a deadly drought made more severe by rising temperatures and devastating flooding, compounding an existing humanitarian crisis.
Today, there is “an enormous gap” to finance flood defences and roll out measures to address soil erosion and curb impacts on food security and farmers’ livelihoods, said Obsiye, who heads the country’s climate fund.
Last year, the UN’s Green Climate Fund (GCF) announced plans to invest $100 million in Somalia under the first national programme of its kind. Stephanie Speck, the GCF’s head of special initiatives, told Climate Home the fund has been “laser focused“ on getting finance to under-served countries and is currently discussing how to support climate action in South Sudan.
Once disbursed, the money will partly help strengthen Somalia’s capacity to access more finance from other donors and institutions, said Obsiye. It’s a “historic” but small start to meet the country’s huge needs, which run into the billions, he added.
The post “Forgotten” fragile states unite to end climate-finance blind spot appeared first on Climate Home News.
“Forgotten” fragile states unite to end climate-finance blind spot
Climate Change
Pressure builds on Australia to deliver, as Guterres injects fresh momentum for fossil fuel phase out at COP31
ANTALYA, Türkiye, Tuesday 10 November 2026 — Following the launch of the Brazil COP30 Presidency Roadmap which saw a rousing address by outgoing United Nations climate chief Antonio Guterres, who spoke alongside former COP Presidents and John Kerry, Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling on the Australian government to step up and deliver a concrete national roadmap away from fossil fuels.
UN Secretary General Guterres urged all countries to build concrete national roadmaps for transitioning away from fossil fuels that are aligned with science and with clear timelines and responsibilities. He urged greater cooperation between fossil fuel importing and exporting countries and said that by 2028, every country should be able to show what it has done to cut fossil fuel use of production, and outline what it will do next.
In addition to encouraging all countries to develop national plans, he encouraged the COP31 Presidency of Australia and Türkiye, and future presidencies, to carry forward the work of Brazil in driving the global transition away from fossil fuels.
Shiva Gounden, Head of Pacific at Greenpeace Australia Pacific said: “The success of COP31 will be judged by whether it delivers real action and momentum to phase out fossil fuels. The Pacific and the world need concrete dates and credible plans to deliver roadmaps away from fossil fuels based on the best available science, and a commitment to put people, energy security and the planet ahead of fossil fuel interests.
“Brazil’s determination to push on despite resistance from a handful of fossil fuel producers can be a lesson for Australia as it takes the reins of negotiations. Australia must pick up the baton from Brazil, and lead by example with its own national roadmap away from fossil fuels, including exports.
“Minister Bowen urged us to “show the world that multilateralism works.” He acknowledged the science of overshooting 1.5°C, the non-negotiable survival line for Pacific communities, and the urgent need to return as quickly as possible to reduce the duration and severity of harm. Yet the Australian government continues to greenlight coal and gas, including 38 approvals since it took office in 2022.
“Our planet is on the brink. Communities bearing the brunt of climate disasters and soaring cost of living do not need another meeting where leaders tell us that change is coming — we need leaders that will show us when it will happen, and how it will happen fairly.
“Australia cannot champion the survival of the Pacific while simultaneously exporting our destruction. Australia must step up and deliver practical policies, not paper pledges.”
ENDS
COP31 images and video available here in Greenpeace Media Library
Media contact: Kate O’Callaghan in Antalya (GMT+3) on +61 406 231 892 (Whatsapp/Signal)
Energy and Transport Day at COP31 ironically saw a second morning of horrible traffic jams and over-crowded buses and trams, meaning early events at the venue had to be hastily rescheduled.
This COP has more than 68,500 registered participants, together with another 24,500 workers needing to reach the venue, which is around 25 kilometres from the centre of Antalya.
Once things finally got underway in the halls, the focus was on two main voluntary pushes: transitioning away from fossil fuels (TAFF) and the COP31 Global Electrification Pledge, meant to usher in the “age of electricity”, according to the Turkish presidency.
The pledge sets a goal of raising electricity’s share of final energy consumption from around 23% today to 35% by 2035 (known as 35×35) by electrifying transport, buildings and industry.
“This year’s energy crisis has shocked us out of our complacency and demonstrated the inherent vulnerability of dependence on energy imports. Electrifying the global economy is now essential to boost energy security, cut emissions, and drive economic growth,” COP31 President Murat Kurum said in a statement.
The COP31 presidency is “determined to chart a path forward and use the annual UN summit to build momentum”, he added. But it remains to be seen whether and how the pledge will be incorporated into the final cover decision from Antalya, as some fossil fuel-producing countries are set to oppose any mention of the electricity to meet it coming from clean sources.
Neither is it clear which countries are backing the pledge. Climate Home News understands that no list is expected this week, as Turkiye rallies governments to the cause. Australia and other recent COP host nations are on board, while the European Union co-hosts the first “Electrification Forum” on Tuesday, bringing together governments, institutions, businesses and financiers.
The International Energy Agency (IEA), meanwhile, will lead a Global Electrification Tracking Mechanism to monitor global and regional electrification trends.
The IEA says the 35×35 electrification goal is within reach with strong political backing. But a recent analysis from Climate Action Tracker shows current policies will only lead to a share of 28% for electricity by the deadline.
-
COP31 outcome needs to prioritise transition away from fossil fuels
Many countries are already working on parts of their transition, such as phasing out coal or ending fossil fuel subsidies, with more expected to follow soon -
Developing countries face climate finance deficit as loan payments soar
Repayments on climate loans could overtake new lending by 2036, according to CARE analysis shared exclusively with Climate Home News
On the TAFF front, Brazil’s COP30 presidency held a high-level event to showcase its new global roadmap, which is essentially a toolkit to help countries start planning their transitions away from coal, oil and gas.
Here, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said countries should use the document to build their own concrete national roadmaps including clear timelines, responsibilities and financing needs.
By the next Global Stocktake of national climate plans in 2028, “every country should be able to show what it has done to cut fossil fuel use or production, what it will do next, and how it will measure progress,” he said, in a challenge to governments.
He added that it is “long past time to stop treating the transition away from fossil fuels as taboo or intractable” and called on COP31 to “move from discussing the transition to organising it, financing it, and delivering it”.
European nations signal support for fossil fuel roadmap, says COP30 president
As with the electrification pledge, the TAFF process remains a pick and choose effort. Some fossil fuel-producing nations are adamant it will stay that way and are likely to resist any attempt to anchor the roadmap in the cover decision or other negotiated outcomes at COP31.
Nonetheless, energy security concerns are expected to lead to an almost 60% increase in renewable capacity growth from 2026-2031 compared to the previous six years, according to the IEA, with solar power accounting for three quarters of that growth.
Declarations aim to electrify shipping and rooftops
One sector that is tricky to electrify – mainly because of a lack of chargers in the middle of the ocean – is maritime transport.
But a newly formed group of ports, shippers, campaign groups and think-tanks want electricity to be used where it can in the sector – electrifying ships on short routes like ferries, plugging ships into the electricity grid when they’re in port and electrifying the machines that handle ships’ cargo.
While the COP31 presidency has proposed a 35% by 2035 goal, this group said on Tuesday they want electricity’s share of final energy demand in shipping to rise to a more modest 20% by 2035 – up from a negligible amount today. The Danish Port of Esbjerg and Californian Port of Long Beach are among the backers of the Maritime Electrification Breakthrough Goal.
Maritime electrification projects could get a huge boost from the International Maritime Organisation’s Net Zero Fund, if it is agreed at intergovernmental talks in London starting later this month.
Also on Energy Day at COP31, a group of countries including Australia, Bangladesh, Kenya, Nigeria and Vanuatu signed onto the Global Rooftop Solar Declaration, an Australia-led initiative to try and double the number of solar-powered households to 300 million by 2030.
It’s not clear exactly how many countries are backing it. But the presidents of Palau and Pakistan also joined leaders to discuss the initiative while Indonesia’s state-operated utility PT PLN signed up too.
Australia’s climate minister Chris Bowen said in a statement: “Many countries have the sunshine, the space and the demand, but lack the finance, infrastructure and workforce needed to unlock this opportunity. This declaration is about changing that.”
Coal phase-out partnerships offer emerging economies early help
A multilateral initiative launched in Antalya aims to tackle one of the key demands from coal-producing countries in the Global South: help to access the existing pool of funding for transitioning away from fossil fuels.
Through “Coal Transition Partnerships”, the Powering Past Coal Alliance (PPCA) – a group of governments and other actors launched in 2017 – is seeking to unlock more than $23 billion by supporting developing countries to draw up their first phase-out plans.
Backers of the initiative include the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the Climate Investment Funds (CIF), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and climate research think-tanks like Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) and TransitionZero.
Julia Skorupska, head of the PPCA secretariat, told Climate Home News in Antalya that the early interventions could help developing countries access larger financial mechanisms along the lines of the Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs), which are working to help several developing countries phase out their coal fleets.
She added that countries are required to have done “a lot of work” before applying for transition funding, including having investment plans and a portfolio of projects. “For us that feels like a gap,” she said.
She added that the initiative has received “a lot of interest” and is meant to enable early-stage planning in coal-dependent emerging economies such as Kazakhstan, Indonesia and Pakistan.
By the time of the next Global Stocktake – the UN’s five-year review of climate progress – in 2028, the PPCA aims to be supporting ten of the world’s most coal-dependent countries. These include Indonesia, Vietnam, India and South Africa, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Farah Heliantina, energy transition official at Indonesia’s Ministry of Economic Affairs, said in a statement that the country’s experience “has taught us how challenging this transition can be”, as uncertainty in global fossil fuel markets threatens energy security at home.
Finance for the transition away from fossil fuels has proven difficult to channel effectively. At COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, South Africa was the first country to announce an $8.5bn JETP – funded by a group of donor countries including the UK, Germany and France – which included projects like early power plant retirements, reskilling workers and building transmission lines for renewable energy. However, by 2025, only around $3.8bn had been allocated.
After the war in Iran disrupted oil and gas markets this year, countries with gas-fired power fleets like China, Korea, Japan, and some European countries have turned to easier-to-source coal generation to keep their economies running, the IEA has highlighted. Skorupska said there’s a risk that new coal investments could become stranded.
“Fundamentally, we want to think about how we can help people overcome those shorter-term challenges to get the real long-term benefits of the transition away from fossil fuels,” she said.
Traffic chaos set to get worse as leaders arrive tomorrow
The first two days of COP31 have seen travel chaos which looks set to get worse tomorrow. As world leaders arrive in town and head to the conference centre, some roads will be closed so that the VIPs can be ferried in past not-so-important delegates. The COP31 presidency is warning of “severe disruptions”.
In an email to all COP participants, it advises getting to the venue by 7am. There will be more public transport than usual between 5-7am, after which time no public transport can leave the area, the email says, without specifying when it will resume.
Route schedules are still being planned and will be shared “as soon as possible”, the COP31 Transport Coordination Center says.
The 42 world leaders causing this heightened level of disruption on Wednesday will speak from 2pm local time. They include Brazil’s recently re-elected President Lula, European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen and China’s Vice President Han Zheng. The Turkish and Australian leaders are not on the list, but are expected to speak as COP31 co-hosts.
The speech of Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley will be worth a watch as she often uses COPs to unveil interesting and progressive new ideas. So will that – for different reasons – of Saudi energy minister Abdulaziz bin Salman Al Saud, the only minister allowed to speak on a day reserved mainly for presidents and prime ministers.
After COP28 agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems, he infamously described this as just one item on an “a la carte menu”.
Another set of leaders – kicking off with the UK’s Andy Burnham – will speak on Thursday morning, including those of Nigeria, DR Congo, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Venezuela’s new President Delcy Rodriguez.
The post COP31 Bulletin Day 2: Energy Day off to slow start amid transport chaos appeared first on Climate Home News.
COP31 Bulletin Day 2: Energy Day off to slow start amid transport chaos
With rich governments and development banks delivering more climate finance as loans, developing countries could be paying back more each year than they receive in new lending by the mid-2030s, new research has found.
CARE Denmark and the CARE Climate Justice Center worked out the repayment schedules of around 17,500 climate loan records reported by developed countries and multilateral lenders between 2011 and 2024, in what the researchers say is the first analysis of its kind.
It estimates that repayments on these public climate loans, including interest and fees, nearly tripled from $6.9 billion in 2020 to $20.1 billion in 2024. That is equivalent to around a fifth of the public climate finance that developed countries reported providing that year.
If climate lending stays at its 2024 level each year and on the same terms, annual repayments on old and new loans would overtake fresh lending in 2036, the researchers found.
“By not making the backflows of climate finance visible, Global North countries cheat their public,” John Nordbo, senior climate adviser at CARE Denmark, told Climate Home News. “They give an impression that they are actually more supportive than they are.”
Finance takes centre stage at COP31
The World Bank is by far the biggest lender in the portfolio, followed by Japan and France. Overall, loans worth $489 billion will cost borrowers an estimated $663 billion over their lifetimes.
Climate finance looks certain to become a central issue at COP31 after developing nations scored an early win by getting a new work programme on climate finance added to the summit’s official agenda.
A key question looming over the talks in Türkiye is how rich countries will make good on their promise to deliver at least $300 billion a year in climate finance by 2035, amid shrinking aid budgets and spending redirected to other priorities, including defence.
-
When the oil companies leave, who pays?
Across the world, communities facing the decline of fossil fuel industries are demanding a Just Transition that gives them a say in what comes next. Establishing a strong mechanism at COP31 could help them secure it
