Avinash Persaud is special advisor to the president of the Inter-American Development Bank on climate change and an architect of the 2022 Bridgetown Initiative. Emily Wilkinson is director of the Resilient and Sustainable Islands Initiative (RESI) at ODI Global.
Many communities are vulnerable to climate shocks – from the urban poor in Brazil to smallholder farmers in Africa’s Sahel region. But few are more vulnerable than those living in Small Island Developing States (SIDS) around the world, from the Caribbean to the South Pacific.
Storms and rising sea levels present an existential risk. They can wipe out annual incomes several times over. We don’t yet know the full extent of the damage wrought on Jamaica by Hurricane Melissa – the strongest hurricane to hit the island since records began – but they are expected to run into tens of billions of dollars, and recovery will take at least a decade.
These nations are the “canaries in the coal mine”, signalling the dangers that lie ahead. In 2022, the world set out a plan to tackle the threat. Economists, nonprofits and nation states got behind the Bridgetown Initiative, spearheaded by Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley.
It has historically been difficult and expensive to finance the projects many nations need to cope with our changing climate. Yet much progress has been made on the Bridgetown Initiative’s five-step plan to reform the global financial system.
We have seen wider adoption of pause clauses in debt arrangements aimed at taking the pressure off countries when they face disasters. These clauses were used for the first time by Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl in 2024. In 2023, countries agreed to unlock $100 billion in Special Drawing Rights, an international reserve of assets held by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), scaling up states’ efforts to build resilience to climate change.
More recently, progress has been made to reduce the cost of capital and currency volatility, two other major brakes on resilience investments. Brazil, the COP30 host nation, has just launched the Eco Invest programme with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), which will mobilise significant new private and public finance to restore degraded rural areas, produce clean energy and create green jobs.
Closing the yawning climate finance gap
These measures have helped to close a yawning climate finance gap, but more action is needed.
Global average temperatures continue to rise, and we are close to biophysical tipping points with disastrous consequences. For many climate-vulnerable countries, investing in resilience is the best response. Climate adaptation technologies have improved substantially and countries can now build heat-ready homes and schools, while coastal defences can withstand Category 5 hurricanes like Melissa. Every dollar spent on adaptation saves up to $10 on avoided losses.
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The investments that have the greatest savings tend to be public goods, such as sea walls and flood defences, with few capturable revenues for private investors. The private sector has an important role to play in developing resilience technologies and implementing resilience investments, but 90% of the time, the public sector ends up paying.
Many call on rich nations to provide more grant support for the climate vulnerable. But grants are shrinking, so we must consider other ways to unlock more investment.
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First, the major players who influence debt sustainability – ratings agencies such as Fitch and Moody’s, private investors, the IMF, the World Bank and other multilateral development banks (MDBs) – could change their approach. Too often, the risks of climate shocks are priced into debt repayments without considering the opportunity to gain by making countries more resilient to them. This makes it harder for countries to do the right thing.
Second, the most climate-vulnerable nations will need new borrowing instruments that are low-cost, long-term and flexible, for example ensuring that debt interest repayment timings can be adjusted if a disaster such as a devastating hurricane strikes.
Because of their AAA credit ratings, MDBs like the World Bank are best positioned to help. Small island nations require an estimated $36 billion for adaptation efforts but received a fraction of that last year, and the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) have committed to raising their adaptation finance portfolio overall to 50% of climate finance, up from 30%.
Third, climate-vulnerable countries are still paying a huge portion of their tax revenues in servicing debt. More can be done to break this vicious cycle, and one solution is something called a debt-for-resilience swap. That’s when a AAA-rated guarantor guarantees the debt of a climate-vulnerable country, allowing it to borrow at significantly lower interest rates. The proceeds are then used to buy back expensive debt – keeping the level of debt unchanged, but re-routing interest savings for resilience investments. Barbados, the Bahamas and Ecuador have done debt-for-climate swaps, but guarantors are in limited supply.
Comment: Can COP30 mark a turning point for climate adaptation?
To tackle this challenge, the IDB and other MDBs are developing the first-of-its-kind Multi-Guarantor Debt for Resilience Facility, where multiple guarantors work together to unlock more debt swaps on a larger scale.
In these difficult times, when climate change is driving ever more dangerous and unpredictable impacts in vulnerable places, we must press forward with further reforms. Bridgetown has already channelled hundreds of billions into building stable countries with a secure future – something that benefits all of us. Now we all need to raise our adaptation ambitions.
The post Hurricane Melissa’s destruction shows need for climate resilience push appeared first on Climate Home News.
Hurricane Melissa’s destruction shows need for climate resilience push
This week our powerful Pacific team is in Palau for the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting. This is a major moment in our campaigns for Pacific climate justice and to stop deep sea mining. So what’s it all about, what can we expect over the coming days, and why is this year’s meeting in particular so important? Read on to find out!
*Pawa is Melanesian word meaning collective power.
Meet Moemoana Schwenke, our Pacific Climate Campaigner
“When you love something deeply, you do everything you can to protect it.”
What is the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF)?
The Pacific Islands Forum, or ‘PIF’, is our region’s most important political organisation. It is where countries of the Pacific — including Australia and New Zealand — come together to collaborate on shared challenges and to set collective goals.
The PIF Leaders Meeting is an annual weeklong event that includes a dedicated meeting of the Pacific’s small island developing states (PSIDS), many special side events organised by Pacific civil society, the leaders’ meeting itself, and more. At the end of the week, leaders issue a Forum Communiqué, capturing what they have agreed on, their shared priorities and the actions they will take together.
This year’s meeting is being held in the beautiful northern Pacific nation of Palau, the same place our Pacific team gathered back in January to plan for the year.
What’s at stake this year?
Climate change has dominated the PIF for decades. Pacific leaders have been crystal clear it is their number one priority, and the annual gathering is the moment they can exert maximum pressure on Australia over its fossil fuel record.
The voyage to COP31
This year’s meeting comes less than three months before COP31, where Australia will take on the role of President of Negotiations — a role it has committed to undertaking in partnership with the Pacific — and less than a month before the ‘Pacific Pre-COP’, to be held in Fiji and Tuvalu.
Following a fraught round of mid-year negotiations in Bonn, PIF leaders will need to set out a clear vision and priorities for COP31. These include accelerating a just global transition away from fossil fuels, defending science as the foundation of international climate cooperation, and increasing the availability and accessibility of finance for renewable energy and climate adaptation.
Accountability for Australian fossil fuel exports
Since the last PIF Leaders Meeting, Australia has signed the Belém Declaration on the Transition Away from Fossil Fuels. The declaration reaffirmed the legally binding commitment to help limit global warming to 1.5°C and recognised that this is incompatible with new fossil fuel production. Yet, Australia has continued to approve new coal and gas projects, including at least five since the last PIF Leaders Meeting.
What is Greenpeace doing?
We’re going big this year, taking six members of our team to Palau to support Pacific leaders to hold the line, hold Australia accountable, and show the world what’s at stake. We’ll lobby leaders, hold press conferences, share our messages with the world, and support our incredible local partners in Palau.
How can you get involved?
PIF is the first in a drumbeat of major moments where we’ll be carrying the voices of the Pacific to the world. Come October we’ll be voyaging to Fiji on our ship Oceania for the Pacific Pre-COP, and in November we’ll be off to Antalya for the world’s climate negotiations (COP31).
Learn more about the Pacific way to a fossil fuel free future by checking out our report and exhibition.
Follow our journey, and check back here for more ways to join the movement for climate justice. Together we have the pawa!
Gill Einhorn is head of the Forest Future Alliance and Natalie Çilem is community lead of the Global Wildfire Leadership Network.
Wildfires have devastated communities across the world this summer, claiming lives, displacing thousands of people and leaving billions in economic damage in their wake. In Europe alone, wildfires have already caused an estimated €19 billion in losses this year.
They are an economic, financial and public health challenge that is growing faster than many governments and markets are prepared for – and exposing the real costs of poor land management.
A system built for recovery, not resilience
Far more money is currently spent responding to the disastrous effects of wildfires than preventing them in the first place. The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that more than half of wildfire-related spending goes towards response, while planning receives only around 0.2 percent. This problem is not limited to wildfires; over 95 percent of disaster aid between 2005 and 2017 was allocated to response, and less than 4 percent was directed towards prevention or preparedness.
Forests are critical, but without investment in how land is managed and protected, their value is neither stable nor guaranteed. Protecting forests requires investing not only in conservation, but in the conditions that keep forests standing.
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Each dollar invested in wildfire-resistant construction could save around $210 in avoided future economic losses, according to a report by the World Economic Forum and Forest Future Alliance. Despite this evidence that prevention can significantly reduce future costs, wildfire resilience remains chronically underfunded.
This spending discrepancy is creating significant challenges for insurers, asset owners and financial institutions. Global insured losses from natural catastrophes reached $107 billion in 2025, with wildfires, floods and storms accounting for 92 percent of claims.
In this context, insurers are reassessing where and how they are willing to underwrite risk. Around 56 percent of global wildfire losses between 2000 and 2023 were uninsured. In some high-risk areas, insurers are scaling back coverage altogether, leaving homeowners, businesses and governments to shoulder a growing share of the costs – making it increasingly difficult to break even.
Proven solutions are already paying off
In many regions, wildfires are driven not by natural causes but by the deliberate clearing of land for agriculture. Degraded landscapes are becoming drier, more flammable and increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic loss, creating a vicious cycle of deforestation, economic damage and rising emissions.
The answer is not simply stronger firefighting capacity. Governments, investors and businesses must work together to shift capital upstream into prevention, resilience and long-term landscape stewardship of healthy forests. That means planting appropriately, investing in heat-resistant species, exploring approaches that minimise fire footprints through active management, and exploring the AI and technology solutions that are burgeoning.
Solutions to this already exist and are proven to have an impact. Following devastating wildfires year-on-year, Portugal shifted its approach to wildfire management, increasing prevention spending within its national rural fire management system from around 20 percent in 2017 to approximately 60 percent in 2022. While many countries remain locked in a reactive cycle of disaster response, public policy can shift investment upstream and make resilience a priority before fires occur.
Indigenous communities have long used proactive land stewardship to reduce wildfire risk while supporting healthy and productive landscapes. For example, the Cheslatta Carrier Nation in British Columbia traditionally managed fuels through cultural fire practices but now implements mechanised fuel removal methods under commercial agreements. By combining Indigenous stewardship with sustainable forest management, Cheslatta is generating community benefits while also boosting wildfire prevention.
Resilience can also be strengthened through finance and technology. FireSat, a partnership led by Earth Fire Alliance with Google.org, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Muon, is a satellite constellation designed for rapid wildfire detection. Scanning every 20 minutes, it can detect fires 400 times smaller than current systems and track them through smoke and darkness in almost real time. In California alone, FireSat could prevent up to 350,000 acres from burning each year. It has recently received significant new investments allowing it to expand towards a constellation of more than 50 satellites that will monitor every point on Earth every 20 minutes or less.
In Brazil’s Pantanal, the Embrace the Forest initiative uses AI-powered detection towers across 2.5 million hectares to support earlier intervention and faster response. During the severe 2024 fire season, the initiative contributed to a 40 percent reduction in burned area compared to 2020.
These examples illustrate what is possible when resilience is treated as an investment priority rather than a recovery cost. But we must ensure funding for these measures is scaled before disaster strikes. Initiatives like the Global Wildfire Leadership Network (GWLN) are key, bringing together corporate decision-makers, investors, insurers, governments and Indigenous leaders to direct investment towards prevention and align finance, technology and stewardship to protect nature, safeguard communities and strengthen future economic stability. With a goal of doing more together than the sum of our parts, the network focuses on Forest Future Alliance GWLN Solutions Labs – where partners sign up with the intent to collaborate.
Rewarding prevention
Financial incentives must be created that reward prevention. This can be done by scaling public-private partnerships, supporting long-term landscape stewardship, investing in community capacity including Indigenous wisdom and technology. Ultimately, our terrestrial natural reserves are critical infrastructure that support resilient economies and thriving communities.
One in three people are dependent on forest services, goods and economic opportunities for survival, so it’s in all our interests to protect what we have. Forests support cooling, water and food security – and are a very cost-effective way of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, where done appropriately.
UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire
No sector can solve this challenge alone. The benefits of wildfire resilience are shared across communities, governments, insurers, investors, utilities and businesses. A single intervention can protect homes and livelihoods, reduce insurance claims, secure water supplies and lower future public costs. Because the benefits are shared, the solutions must be too. Coalitions of actors can take proven approaches further than any one individual or organisation could alone.
As wildfires continue to burn at an unprecedented scale, the opportunity now is to roll out solutions, shift investment upstream and build a future where resilience, rather than recovery, becomes the foundation of thriving economies.
The post From firefighting to future-proofing: Preventing wildfires must be the priority appeared first on Climate Home News.
From firefighting to future-proofing: Preventing wildfires must be the priority
Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and the second-largest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide (CO2).
Methane traps heat in the atmosphere more efficiently than CO2, but has a significantly shorter lifespan, fading after just a few decades.
Therefore, reducing emissions of methane – a gas primarily produced by agriculture, fossil fuels and waste management – is a powerful option for limiting global warming in the near-term.
Yet climate strategies and models often only focus on CO2, or combine all greenhouse gases into one metric known as “CO2 equivalent”.
The latter approach makes reducing methane emissions dependent on modelling choices and assumptions about the “equivalence” of methane and CO2.
It hides the opportunities and challenges linked to methane’s high warming and short lifetime.
In a new study, published in Communications Earth & Environment, we offer a different perspective that “decouples” CO2 and methane reduction and takes global warming limits as a starting point for determining the required level of methane cuts.
We show that, even under the most ambitious existing national net-zero targets, an absence of methane reduction leads to peak warming that exceeds 1.85C above pre-industrial levels.
The study highlights that, to limit peak warming to well-below 2C, net-zero CO2 targets must be complemented by stringent methane emissions cuts.
CO2 equivalent
How much methane corresponds to one tonne of CO2?
The question is as difficult to answer as: ‘how much spaghetti equals a chicken?’ You could compare the two meals according to their calories, protein content or cost. Each metric can be convenient, but is only valid for that specific comparison – no amount of spaghetti is the same as a chicken.
The same is true for the conversion of emissions of methane and other gases to CO2-equivalent emissions. It can be convenient, as it allows different gases to be compared or combined into a single number. This is why the metric is used in climate targets or evaluating the effectiveness of different mitigation options.
But, because methane and CO2 have different atmospheric lifetimes and warming properties, any conversion is only valid for a chosen time horizon and a chosen baseline.
Depending on the assumptions baked into calculations, methane mitigation can either appear as an immediate priority or framed as almost unnecessary.
There are a number of metrics that scientists use to convert greenhouse gases – whether methane, hydrofluorocarbons or nitrous oxide – into CO2-equivalent emissions:
- “GWP20” measures how much heat a greenhouse gas traps in the atmosphere over a 20-year period, relative to CO2. It emphasises urgent methane mitigation but has been criticised for its implicit discounting of future damages.
- “GWP100” looks at a 100-year timeline. It gives more weight to long-term warming and is used in “integrated assessment models” (IAMs) used by scientists, national emission reporting to the UN and by the GHG Protocol used by companies.
- “GWP*” considers the rate of emissions, rather than warming over a fixed time horizon. Under GWP*, very limited methane reductions bring CO2-equivalent emissions to zero, meaning remaining methane emissions can be designated as causing “no additional warming”. (This interpretation remains controversial as it assumes the continuation of historical levels of warming.)
IAMs are the tools used to generate future emissions scenarios. Because they combine CO2 and methane emissions, the impact of methane emission cuts alone is difficult to isolate in existing emission scenarios.
IAM-generated scenarios also assume mitigation decisions driven by costs. Combinations of CO2 and methane emission pathways that are not purely cost-effective are, therefore, not represented, even though climate policy is messy and emission pathways are rarely cost-effective in the real world.
Only a few countries – including Japan, Mexico and South Korea – specify methane mitigation targets.
A different approach
In our study, we separate CO2 and methane emissions and treat them as independent.
Instead of choosing a conversion method, we suggest that states and organisations set a limit on peak global warming first, then, based on their existing net-zero targets, determine the minimum compatible methane reduction target.
Companies and countries around the world have set net-zero targets focused on CO2, as well as those that include all greenhouse gases. As a result, our research looks at the necessary methane reductions for both types of goal. We consider scenarios where companies or countries deliver linear – in other words, steady – emissions reductions to reach net-zero.
Using a simple climate model, we systematically combined methane and CO2 (or greenhouse gas) mitigation pathways starting in 2025 and calculated peak warming.
The figure below shows how peak warming depends on both the year of reaching net-zero CO2 and the level of methane cuts.
The blue arrows in the figure show that to limit warming to 1.7C under a 2050 net-zero CO2 scenario, methane emissions would need to fall by at least 69% by 2050, relative to 2020.
Our research also finds that, if an organisation or country’s 2050 net zero-target covers all greenhouse gases, its methane emissions would need to fall by 63% instead.
However, under current policies, methane emissions are expected to increase by around 20% by 2050, relative to 2020. We find that this pathway would result in peak warming above 2C by 2050 – even if global CO2 emissions were to reach net-zero by that date (see purple bar on the right-hand side of the figure above).
The figure also shows how, if methane emissions remained at 2020 levels and net-zero CO2 was delivered by 2040 or later, warming would exceed 1.85C. This level of warming is above what has been argued as consistent with the Paris Agreement’s “well-below” 2C limit.
Conversely, cutting methane emissions by around one-third – in line with the Global Methane Pledge target for 2030 – could reduce peak warming by 0.15C, of which 0.05C could be delivered by interventions that come at no net cost. These are shown by the orange and red bars, respectively, on the figure above.
The table below highlights the minimum compatible methane cuts for three different peak warming levels and net-zero CO2 or greenhouse-gas emission targets.
| Peak warming | Year of net-zero CO2 emissions | Year of net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions | ||||
| 2050 | 2060 | 2100 | 2050 | 2060 | 2100 | |
| 1.7C | -69% | – | – | -63% | – | – |
| 1.8C | -32% | -56% | – | -11% | -47% | – |
| 2C | +8% | -8% | -83% | >50% | +33% | -78% |
Minimum methane emission reductions between 2020 and the year of net-zero emissions, consistent with peak warming of 1.7C, 1.8C, and 2.0C at 50% likelihood, assuming linear emission trajectories. For some net-zero targets and peak warming levels, there are no compatible methane mitigation targets (indicated by “–”).
Remaining carbon budget
The global carbon budget refers to the amount of cumulative CO2 emissions allowable while still meeting a particular global warming threshold.
The 2021 climate science report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a 2023 Nature study estimated that, by 2025, the remaining carbon budget for holding warming to 2C would be around 1,000-1,150bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2).
We find that these estimates are founded on the assumption of methane reductions of 27-35% by 2050, relative to a 2020 baseline. (A 2024 Communications Earth & Environment study reached similar conclusions.)
Under the GWP* metric, where methane emissions are only cut to maintain “no additional warming”, the remaining carbon budget would be constrained. The best estimate of a 2C budget shrinks by around 30% to approximately 750GtCO2.
Finally, if methane emissions are not cut at all in the future, our findings suggest that the remaining carbon budget for 1.7C of global warming has, in effect, already been exhausted.
Our analysis shows how peak warming depends on both CO2 and methane reduction – and how methane-specific targets can help refine existing net-zero targets.
Crucially, we show that complementing net-zero CO2 targets with stringent methane cuts is necessary to limit peak warming to well-below 2C.
Weber, K. et al. (2026) Limiting warming by CO2 and methane mitigation in an expanded scenario space, Communications Earth & Environment, doi:10.1038/s43247-026-03832-1
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The post Guest post: Why tough methane cuts are crucial for keeping warming ‘well-below’ 2C appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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