Evans Njewa of Malawi is chair of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) group at UN climate talks.

At COP30 in Belém, the world took a long-awaited step forward. Countries agreed to triple international finance for adaptation by 2035.

Using the current goal as a starting point, as proposed by the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), the new target amounts to about $120 billion a year.

For the LDCs, which are home to more than a billion people on the frontlines of climate impacts, this commitment is more than just a number. It is a signal of hope, solidarity and the possibility of a more resilient future.

Now the real work begins to turn this promise into reality.

The path ahead is clear. The UN Environment Programme’s 2025 Adaptation Gap Report shows that developing countries will require between $310 billion and $365 billion annually by 2035 to protect lives, livelihoods and ecosystems.

The current adaptation finance target is around $40 billion a year by 2025 – but we do not know yet whether it has been met, with projections suggesting that is unlikely.

Business-as-usual: Donors pour climate adaptation finance into big infrastructure, neglecting local needs

Tripling this goal would be real progress, but still only a foundation. While the global adaptation gap remains wide, we now have a mandate to begin closing it.

The world is no longer debating whether adaptation matters. COP30 made it clear that adaptation is essential; the priority and line of survival for LDCs – and many developing countries are ready to act.

We are ready

Twenty-five LDCs and 72 countries globally now have national adaptation plans in place while others have included adaptation as a component in their broader Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).

Communities have identified concrete, ready-to-implement actions across agriculture, biodiversity, water, health, energy and infrastructure sectors. The blueprints exist. The needs are known. The financial gap is known, too.

People on the ground are prepared to introduce drought-resilient crops, restore mangroves, upgrade drainage systems and build early-warning systems that save lives and livelihoods.

This is where developed countries have an unprecedented opportunity to lead. The technologies exist. Finance exists in the world’s wealthiest economies.

Rich nations “on track” to double adaptation finance but huge gap persists

What is needed now is political will – to honour commitments, uphold the principles of the Paris Agreement, and support those who contributed least to this crisis but suffer its worst impacts.

Grants, not loans

For too long, much of the adaptation support on offer has come as loans, many of them non-concessional, pushing vulnerable countries deeper into debt.

COP30 gives the world a chance to change course. For the LDC Group, the message is clear: adaptation finance must be predominantly grant-based.

Without debt relief, climate action will fail

Grants build resilience without placing new burdens on countries already stretched thin. It is fairer, just and economically wiser than debt-creating finance. When providing adaptation finance, both the quantitative and qualitative aspects must be taken into consideration.

So here is our invitation to developed countries:

• Confirm and make concrete national commitments toward the tripling target of $120 billion a year – accessible, predictable, transparent and aligned with need.
• Prioritise grants at scale, ensuring that protection from climate impacts does not come with a price tag communities cannot afford.
• Channel support for adaptation through funds established under the UNFCCC, particularly those designed to specifically support LDCs and Small Island Developing States (SIDS).
• Streamline access procedures so that LDCs and SIDS can receive support quickly – because bureaucracy should never stand between people and their safety.
• Respond to country needs: Providing funding for countries’ priorities promotes sustainability – and wherever possible, supporting locally-led initiatives that incorporate Indigenous knowledge and technology is preferable.

Disappointment on LDC Fund replenishment

At COP30, LDCs called for scaling up of the Least Developed Countries Fund to $3 billion over the next four years under the Global Environment Facility’s ninth replenishment cycle. This request aligned with the climate finance commitment made at COP29 in Baku.

However, developed countries refused to meet this expectation. If it had been agreed upon in the COP30 decision, it would have significantly strengthened morale and fostered trust with LDCs.

Nonetheless, the COP30 decision on adaptation finance still offers a rare moment of hope and possibility. Early ambition now can build momentum. Factoring in inflation, adaptation needs will rise to between $440 billion and $520 billion by 2035 – so success today must pave the way for even stronger action in the future.

Resources and resolve required

To the developed countries: your leadership can unlock a chain reaction. Your commitments can build trust. Your partnership can help transform vulnerability into resilience.

This is one of history’s defining moments. The world can still choose to meet the climate challenge – not only by cutting emissions, but by ensuring every community has the tools to adapt and thrive.

The LDCs are ready. We bear the leadership in adaptation, have the plans, the determination and the ingenuity. What we need now are partners with resources and resolve.

The post Tripling adaptation finance is just the start – delivery is what matters appeared first on Climate Home News.

Tripling adaptation finance is just the start – delivery is what matters

Resource-rich African nations risk missing out on the investment needed to extract and refine their mineral wealth into high-value products for the clean energy transition because they lack accurate information on what they have, experts are warning.

African countries have attracted huge interest as the world scrambles to access the minerals and metals needed for the energy transition and digital and military technologies, with investors from the US, China, the United Arab Emirates and Europe jostling to secure access to the continent’s resources. 

But any knowledge of Africa’s mineral wealth is, at best, an estimate based on century-old-mapping and haphazard geological data, policy experts and investors told Climate Home News. 

The United Nations says Africa is home to 30% of the world’s mineral reserves, including cobalt, copper, lithium and manganese, which are needed to manufacture batteries and other clean energy technologies.

But experts like Bright Simons, who tracks natural resource spending in Africa for the Ghana-based IMANI Centre for Policy and Education, said the 30% number is not backed by any “empirical, evidence-based assessment” of the continent’s mineral wealth. While some analysts like Simons think the figure could be an overestimate, others argue it is likely an underestimate of the continent’s mineral reserves.

Up-to-date and accurate data is critical for governments to negotiate better deals with prospecting mining companies and to help drive investment in mineral extraction and processing facilities that can add value to the continent’s resources.

But the lack of good mapping has negatively impacted the continent’s efforts to capture the economic benefits of booming mineral demand and to create jobs by extracting and processing raw materials into higher-value products before export, experts said.

Colonial maps

Under-exploration and scant information about Africa’s resources have made it challenging for states to attract investment and develop their resources, said Pritish Behuria, a political economist at the Global Development Institute at the UK’s University of Manchester.

“In many cases, former colonial powers retain more current knowledge of the kinds of mineral deposits that exist in African countries – and often, this has proven difficult to access for African governments,” he told Climate Home News.

Thabit Jacob, a researcher of extractive and energy resources at Roskilde University in Denmark, said many African countries “still rely on colonial maps”. 

“There’s a growing realisation that Africa must know its true value in mineral richness and investment in geological mapping is crucial,” he added.

Mapping inequality

However, mapping investment is falling short. Africa’s share of global exploration investment has fallen in the last two decades, data shows.

In 2024 alone, both Canada and Australia received significantly more investment in geological mapping than the whole of Africa, even though the continent’s landmass is three times the size of the two countries combined, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

Even in South Africa, a major mining destination, only 12% of the country has been mapped at a detailed level “which compares poorly with other popular mining destinations such as Canada and Australia where there is near complete coverage at similar scales”, explained Tania Marshall, of the Geological Society of South Africa.

Nigeria’s push to cash in on lithium rush gets off to a rocky start

To address the dearth in data, multinational institutions like the World Bank have provided African countries with finance for mapping, but have simultaneously encouraged them to liberalise and privatise their mining industries.

As a result, international investors prioritising project development have come to dominate the continent’s mining sector, crowding out state-sponsored initiatives with stronger incentives to invest in data-gathering, researchers have found.

Digging blind

Orina Chang, an investor leading geological mapping across Somaliland, which has reserves of copper and zinc ore, said she was surprised to find out that even countries attracting huge interest from institutional miners, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), do not have systematic up-to-date mapping.

Instead, mining firms rely on artisanal mining and surface signs, like exposed ores on the ground – and crossing their fingers, she told Climate Home News.

The mapping deficit means there is little certainty on the size and quality of mineral deposits and provides few incentives for miners to invest in processing plants, Chang explained. 

“Without mapping, everyone is blindly digging and you just get people who are not interested in really investing in your country,” she said. “With mapping, you’re able to attract much better players and build plants, create jobs, drive economic growth, help the GDP.”

The rise of AI-driven exploration tools

Today, AI-driven mapping tools have created new opportunities to obtain high-precision information with less on-the-ground investment. Geophysical data and satellite imagery are fed into a model that creates a geological map which can help point to high-potential deposits.

Last year, California-based KoBold Metals, which is backed by US billionaires Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, discovered a massive copper deposit in Zambia using AI-driven exploration. In July, the firm signed an agreement with the DRC to lead critical mineral exploration there. 

But the technology is expensive and not widely available to governments.

Instead, in its 2024 Green Minerals Strategy, the African Union called for some of the revenues from mineral rents to be reinvested into mapping using low-cost techniques such as satellite imagery and drones, which are less precise.

The case for co-operation

For Gerald Arhin, a research fellow at University College London, greater regional collaboration and pooling resources could also help reduce the costs of mapping for individual governments. Last year, for example, South Africa signed an agreement with South Sudan to co-operate on mineral exploration.

“The sharing of data, industrial intelligence and technical expertise across borders could be transformative for African countries, as well as for developing countries in other regions,” Clovis Freire, who heads the Extractive Commodities Section at UN Trade and Development (Unctad), told Climate Home News.

Mapping, however, is only one element of a complicated equation when it comes to developing minerals for the energy transition, said Eszter Szedlacsek, who researches climate justice in the context of the green transition at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

“In the race for Africa’s critical minerals, deals hinge only partly on where resources are found, and more on geopolitics, investment conditions and longstanding trade ties,” she said.

The post Outdated geological data limits Africa’s push to benefit from its mineral wealth appeared first on Climate Home News.

Outdated geological data limits Africa’s push to benefit from its mineral wealth

Mukhtar Babayev is COP29 President and Special Representative of the President of Azerbaijan for Climate Issues.

COP has entered “late-stage multilateralism”. We have already agreed the processes, targets and mechanisms to guide action. The system is now fully operational, resilient and delivering results. Success today depends less on what new things all countries agree and more on what individual actors achieve.

And we are in a race against the clock, so there is a desperate need for speed. This will require new modes of working, rather than repeating the lumbering mechanisms of generations past. Our conversations at COP30 confirmed to us that the will and energy is there in bundles. It now needs to be directed.

On finance, there is much to do. At COP29 we set the Baku Finance Goal to scale up support for the developing world to $1.3 trillion per year by 2035. This was no small ask.

We are trying to intervene in the normal functioning of the world economy and channel the forces of global finance. Success will require great political will, sustained focus, and relentless action from all of us – the private sector, central banks, financial institutions, and everyone in between.

But while the problems are easy to identify, the solutions are often missing. Efforts to reform the global financial system have been disjointed and the COP process needed a new framework to engage with actors outside our normal systems.

More room for creativity outside negotiations

In recognition of the need to try something new, countries mandated the Azerbaijani and Brazilian COP Presidencies to produce the Baku-to-Belém Roadmap to $1.3 trillion to set out the next steps. This was an innovative format, outside the negotiations and therefore given a free hand to be more creative.

We opened the process to everyone. And while we promised that we would not be prescriptive, we were clear that we would be fearless at providing an honest look at a wide range of options.

Countries have warmly welcomed the approach, and we were pleased to see the Roadmap recognised in COP30’s Global Mutirão decision. In Belém, they told us that while they don’t necessarily agree with every line, they still see the value of the exercise and want to build on it. This is a radical change from the normal process where we argue over every word and comma of each formal text.

Practical next steps

The Roadmap can act as a focal point and a coherent reference framework that incorporates existing initiatives. It identifies key action fronts and thematic priorities. And it concludes with practical short-term steps to guide early implementation.

Many of these were designed to address the problems that COP presidencies have seen firsthand – lack of consistent data and reporting, uncertainty about forward projections, silos and a lack of continuity and interoperability between different processes.

But we must acknowledge that this exercise has made some feel uneasy. They have feared that by broadening our focus, we are providing cover for governments not to fulfill their traditional responsibilities. And it is unacceptable that we have indeed seen cases of donors cutting funds and expecting the private sector to fill the gap.

Donors must deliver in full

So as we set out the Roadmap for all to follow, we have a duty to be unequivocal with governments. The COP29 negotiations to agree on the historic target for $300 billion per year in public funds by 2035 were hard. Now, there can be no excuses. We asked vulnerable communities to accept the limits of how much support they could expect. In equal measure, we insist that donors deliver in full, with developed countries taking the lead.

COP30 fails to land deal on fossil fuel transition but triples finance for climate adaptation

Too often, when we set a target for everyone, no one steps up, as collective responsibility undermines individual accountability. That must change. And in the Roadmap we have asked developed countries to work together on a delivery plan that explains how they will meet the $300 billion per year climate finance goal.

Innovative approaches needed

Late-stage multilateralism demands that we are ready to innovate with our processes. They did well to get us this far and they need to be preserved. But we also need to think outside the box on how we deliver the aims and objectives that we have set ourselves.

COP30 showed that there is an appetite for new approaches and new ideas. The Baku-to-Belém Roadmap could be a template for one such evolution of the COP process.

Now we need other ideas, more creativity and real-world action to show that this template can work. The COP29 Presidency will continue to work with everyone to find new solutions, scale promising initiatives and deliver on the promises we have all made.

The post From Baku to Belém and beyond: How we turn a climate finance roadmap into reality appeared first on Climate Home News.

From Baku to Belém and beyond: How we turn a climate finance roadmap into reality