Heat-related deaths were reported in Africa in 2024, but available sources do not allow for establishing a continental increase in 2024-2025. Climate adaptation has been the subject of fine speeches for thirty years, but it represents 26 billion dollars in international public flows in 2023 against needs estimated by UNEP at 310-365 billion dollars annually by 2035. COP30, held in Belém in November 2025, called for tripling adaptation financing by 2035 and adopted the Belém adaptation indicators. The real test begins now: financial architecture decisions made over the coming years will indicate whether this rebalancing is real or rhetorical.
The essentials
- COP30 called for tripling adaptation financing by 2035 and adopted the Belém adaptation indicators.
- The observed amount of international public adaptation flows is 26 billion USD in 2023, against needs estimated by UNEP at 310-365 billion USD annually by 2035, a gap of a factor of ten to fifteen.
- Africa and South Asia are already experiencing thermal and water shocks, with heat-related deaths reported in 2024, without a comparable data series allowing us to assert an African increase in 2025.
- The financing gap is associated with market failures, perceived risks, information gaps, accounting rules affecting the measurement and comparability of flows, private investors’ risk aversion, and insufficient deployment of instruments suited to project characteristics—not solely a lack of political will.
- Decisions on financial instruments and common definitions can significantly influence adaptation implementation, without being its sole determinant.
Africa burns while negotiators debate 2050
The time lag is the first problem. Dominant climate discourse has long treated adaptation as preparation for future risks. For the 54 African countries, that future is already here.
The Sahel recorded unprecedented heat seasons in 2024 and 2025. The Horn of Africa has endured cascading droughts since 2021, with no real interruption. Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi have declared repeated agricultural emergencies. Assessing heat-related deaths in Africa in 2024-2025 remains imprecise: epidemiological surveillance systems there remain fragmented, and excess mortality linked to heat waves is historically difficult to attribute with precision in contexts where statistical capacity is limited.
South Asia presents the same picture. Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India face simultaneous flooding and heat waves, what climate vocabulary calls “compound events.” These events destroy crops, paralyze cities, and displace populations. They have not waited until 2050.
This time lag between lived urgency and financial architecture designed for long-term investments lies at the heart of the problem. Climate mechanisms legally cover mitigation and adaptation, but actual adaptation flows remain insufficient. Adaptation was treated as a problem for tomorrow. COP30 called for tripling adaptation financing by 2035 and adopted the Belém adaptation indicators.
Belém: diplomatic shift, financing unchanged
COP30 in Belém marks a real shift in diplomatic language. COP30’s Action Agenda emphasizes strengthening adaptation; the Paris Agreement already provided for an objective of balance between adaptation and mitigation. For thirty years, mitigation—the reduction of emissions—has structured the bulk of financing, national commitments, and political attention. Adaptation was the poor relation in negotiations.
Belém’s shift rests on three concrete points. Each Party must submit a nationally determined contribution; this may include adaptation, but no text consulted requires an adaptation component as developed as the mitigation component. COP30 adopted a framework of progress indicators for the global adaptation goal.
Actual financing flows, however, have not changed. The latest published observed data stands at 26 billion USD in 2023 for international public flows, and the gap remains massive between these flows and needs estimated by UNEP at 310-365 billion USD annually by 2035. Belém’s political recognition constitutes a starting point, not a result.
A financing gap that reflects architecture, not intention
This gap persists for several reasons. Wealthy countries’ refusal to finance more is one—real but partial. The architecture of climate capital markets plays a significant role.
Adaptation poses a structural problem for private investors: the revenues it generates are diffuse, difficult to monetize, and often public in nature. A dike protects thousands of homes but typically produces little direct revenue, and its benefits take mostly the form of damage averted and collective protection. An early warning system for droughts reduces mortality but has no obvious buyer in a market. Adaptation projects that resemble genuine investment opportunities—clean energy, resilient buildings in solvent cities—capture financing. Adaptation activities with public benefits or without capturable revenue flows often require concessional public financing; in water and agriculture, private capital can nonetheless intervene, frequently with risk mitigation or public cofinancing.
Public financing suffers from a definition problem. An elevated road in a flood zone is both infrastructure and adaptation; a hospital equipped with generators against outages linked to heat waves is both a health investment and a climate investment. The absence of a common definition limits the comparability and tracking of figures declared across countries and financial institutions.
E3G, the think tank specializing in climate policy, emphasizes that methodological divergences greatly complicate tracking and comparing real progress.
Instruments beginning to change the dynamic
Concrete experiments address this architecture problem. They have not resolved it at scale, but they establish that it is resolvable.
Sovereign catastrophe bonds, “cat bonds,” allow exposed states to transfer the risk of climate disaster to institutional investors in exchange for a return. Mexico, the Philippines, and several Caribbean states have used them for several years. Africa is advancing more slowly in this domain, but the African Risk Capacity, a continental mechanism for pooling climate risks, now covers roughly twenty countries against droughts and cyclones. ARC processed payments to Madagascar within two weeks after cyclones Batsirai and Freddy; Malawi received an ARC payout of 8.1 million USD in 2017 for the 2015-2016 drought. Traditional humanitarian mechanisms take months.
Nature-based solutions constitute a second experimental terrain. Restored mangroves protect coastlines at a cost ten to twenty times lower than equivalent dikes, according to assessments cited by MDPI in its work on natural approaches. Kenya, Senegal, and Indonesia have launched large-scale restoration programs financed by carbon credits and bilateral funds. These programs combine climate and economic benefits, making them more attractive to funders, and constitute a reproducible model. Energy consumption and emissions reduction are one face of climate transition, as illustrated by the French trajectory in electricity consumption per capita, but territorial resilience is another, long neglected.
The Green Climate Fund (GCF), created in 2010, is gradually increasing its adaptation-dedicated share: it represented roughly 30% of its portfolio in 2020 and should exceed 50% in 2026 according to its own targets. This internal rebalancing is slow, but it is real and measurable.
Who pays, and on what logic
Adaptation financing refers to a political dispute lasting since the creation of the international climate process. Since 2015, the Paris Agreement provides for an obligation of developed countries to financially support developing countries for mitigation and adaptation. In practice, this financing remains largely insufficient.
The gap between commitments and actual flows is explained by several mechanisms. “Public” climate financings often include loans, which beneficiary countries must repay, rather than grants. For Africa, the OECD counts loans at 61% of total public climate finance in 2016-2020. For countries already bearing high debt levels, borrowing to finance adaptation to consequences of emissions they did not produce represents an unfair and economically counterproductive burden. The problems of distribution of capital gains between regions and populations observed in other domains resurface here at the international scale.
The private sector is presented as the solution to insufficient public financing. It can be, but under precise conditions. In markets where revenues are predictable and risks coverable, private capital can finance adaptation: indexed agricultural insurance in India, water infrastructure in solvent cities, energy efficiency in commercial buildings. In markets where populations are poor and states fragile, private capital will wait, or not go at all. This dividing line roughly corresponds to the map of populations most exposed to climate shocks.
Expecting investors to finance adaptation in the Sahel or in the Bangladesh deltas without massive public guarantee mechanisms amounts to wishful thinking.
Before 2030: decisions still to be made
The calendar for the next three years is concrete. Several commitments from Belém have explicit deadlines, and several architecture decisions have not yet been taken.
In 2027, ongoing work on private adaptation financing must produce operational proposals. The central issue concerns public guarantees: governments and multilateral financial institutions will need to clarify the level of risk they accept absorbing to make adaptation privately financeable in markets where it is most urgent.
In 2028, as of September 4, 2026, no specific obligation requires integrating adaptation into a nationally determined contribution; a communication on adaptation may be submitted as a component of a nationally determined contribution or jointly with it. For several African countries, technical assistance constitutes a major obstacle: preparing bankable projects remains a bottleneck among several constraints on translating adaptation priorities into financeable investments. Expertise in climate engineering, financial structuring, and project development is concentrated in Northern countries and large multilateral institutions, creating a paradox: the countries that need it most are those with the least capacity to rapidly absorb financing, even when it is available.
COP30 adopted Belém indicators for the global adaptation goal without creating a separate process for common definition of financing. Without increased harmonization of definitions and methods, monitoring will remain difficult and less comparable, limiting political accountability.
The most useful signal to follow in the coming months is simple: the share of grants versus loans in climate financing commitments made by end-2026. If it remains at 30% grants, Belém’s commitments will remain rhetorical for the most vulnerable countries. If it progresses toward 50%, the rebalancing will be real. This ratio is measurable, public, and politically precise; it allows separating discourse from action.
Financial architecture choices playing out by 2028, namely public guarantees, the grants-to-loans ratio, and project development capacity, influence adaptation implementation in Africa.
Sources
- E3G – What will shape global climate resilience in 2026?
- COP30 Action Agenda 2025 – UNFCCC, Belém (official document, available on unfccc.int)
- World Bank – Report on adaptation climate financing needs 2026 (World Bank Climate Finance Report)
- African Risk Capacity – Climate risk pooling mechanism (africanriskcapacity.org)
- MDPI – Nature-based Solutions for Climate Adaptation (peer-reviewed scientific journal)
- IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) – Working Group II: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability
