The pledge to triple climate adaptation funding hammered out in the closing hours of last year’s UN climate summit in Brazil would still leave developing countries with less than a third of the money they need to protect people from deadly heat, rising seas, failing harvests and other mounting threats from the climate crisis.

The UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) annual Adaptation Gap Report, released on Wednesday ahead of next week’s COP31 climate talks in Antalya, Türkiye, estimates developing countries will need around $305 billion a year by 2035 to adapt, or $420 billion once inflation is counted.

Rich countries provided $28.2–31.7 billion in public funding for that work in 2024, roughly a tenth of what is needed.

“For every dollar developing countries need to adapt, they receive just 10 cents,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said. “We know who is most at risk. We know what works. What is missing is the money and the political will.”

“The choice is simple,” the UN chief added. “Invest in adaptation today, or pay for catastrophe tomorrow.”

UNEP said last month that the chance of holding warming to 1.5°C, the Paris Agreement’s stricter limit, without overshooting it “has been lost”, with current policies pointing toward 2.8°C.

Even if emissions nearly halve by 2035, temperatures would peak at around 1.7–1.8°C by mid-century before falling back to 1.5°C by 2100. The adaptation report warns that climate risks will keep rising through any overshoot, and some of the harm done during that time may be irreversible.

“The world is not ready to adapt to current climatic conditions, never mind what overshoot of 1.5°C will bring,” said Inger Andersen, UNEP’s executive director. “Nations must focus on intensifying efforts to achieve the COP30 [pledge] of tripling adaptation finance by 2035, while understanding that they will need to go even higher to save lives, avoid losses and damages and protect economies.”

A pledge ‘not as ambitious as it seems’

An early draft of the COP30 agreement carried a demand from the least developed countries (LDCs), a UN-designated group of the lowest-income nations, to triple adaptation funding to at least $120 billion a year by 2030, in grants rather than loans.

The final deal pushed the deadline to 2035, dropped the requirement for grants so that loans developing countries must repay can count, and never said which baseline year funding should be tripled from, how much money that adds up to or how much of it must come from rich countries’ public budgets.

Depending on the starting point, the pledge could mean anything from about $85 billion a year by 2035, if rich countries triple what they actually provided in 2024, to $120 billion if they triple the roughly $40 billion they promised for 2025 at the Glasgow climate summit in 2021, the report found, leaving developing countries with only 20 or 29% of what they need either way.

Analysts said at the time that the wording had been left vague on purpose. And unlike the Glasgow promise, the report’s authors note, the Belém deal “does not include a baseline”, and its interpretation “should be advanced in the negotiations”.

The deal also ignores inflation and only “calls for efforts” to triple, wording the report says is much weaker than past UN climate finance goals such as the 2009 “promise” of $100 billion a year.

The pledge is also tied to the broader $300 billion-a-year climate finance goal agreed at the COP29 summit in Baku in 2024, so money from developing countries and private investors counts towards it too.

Developing countries’ contributions rose from $3.8 billion in 2019 to $9.6 billion in 2024, roughly a quarter of all international adaptation funding, none of which counted towards the Glasgow promise.

Developing countries’ growing contributions, said Henry Neufeldt, the report’s chief scientific editor, “will contribute to the NCQG goal of reaching $300 billion in climate finance, and we know from last year’s report that, of course, is not enough.”

“It’s not very clear, and I think one of the messages from the report is that the negotiations should look very closely at this relationship between developing countries’ and developed countries’ contributions and responsibilities,” Neufeldt said.

Once inflation and developing countries’ money are stripped out, rich countries could end up providing as little as $45 billion a year by 2035 in today’s money, the report found, only about 60% more than the roughly $28 billion they give now and nowhere near a tripling.

“The money is there, but the political will to provide it isn’t,” said Pooja Dave, adaptation lead at Climate Action Network International. “Adaptation is not charity. It is a legal and moral obligation.”

Flows stall as aid shrinks

Adjusted for inflation, rich countries’ adaptation funding has fallen every year since peaking at $31.5 billion in 2022, even though unadjusted figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) show it edging up by $1 billion in 2024, UNEP found.

“The pace of growth is slowing when it should be accelerating,” Andersen told reporters, “and this growth is below the pace required to double flows to approximately 40 billion by 2025, which is what we agreed back in Glasgow.”

The Glasgow goal could still be met, the report says, as development banks report a joint $10.3 billion increase in adaptation finance for 2025, but that hinges on rich countries’ foreign aid budgets, which supply much of their adaptation funding and are estimated to have shrunk 23% that year.

“Promises are very important because that means we can hold people to account,” Andersen said when asked whether climate finance pledges were worth anything if they went unfulfilled. “What we often see is, however, that it’s difficult for the collective promise to be fulfilled.”

Private money drawn in by public funding doubled to $3 billion between 2019 and 2024, but UNEP found that only 15 of the 111 such investments it reviewed were clearly aimed at climate risks, and that private finance could cover just 15–20% of the gap for the public projects countries have prioritised, such as flood defences.

“You cannot protect a harvest with a pledge,” said Mohamed Adow, director of the Nairobi-based think tank Power Shift Africa. “Protecting a company’s assets is different from protecting a community that cannot afford to pay.”

Losses and damage

In a first attempt to tally “loss and damage”, the UN term for climate harm that adaptation fails to prevent or cannot prevent, the report found that low- and middle-income countries accounted for 99% of the 765 million people affected by floods and landslides between 2020 and 2025.

The Fund for responding to Loss and Damage, agreed at the COP27 climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in 2022 to help vulnerable countries recover from such harm, received requests worth $2.8 billion from 119 developing countries in its first funding round.

Governments have pledged $822 million to the fund in total, only $631 million of which has been formally committed, and it has yet to approve money for a single project, with the first approvals not due until December, according to the report.

“The first funding round of the fund for responding to loss and damage generated requests outstripping the initial funding envelope by a factor of eight,” Neufeldt said. “This demonstrates a large unmet demand, but we do not yet know the global loss and damage finance gap.”

The fund’s first real test came in August, when a glacier collapse high in the Himalayas sent a flood tearing through five districts of Nepal, killing more than 1,300 people and leaving over 5,000 missing, according to the report.

Last month the fund provisionally set aside $21.6 million for Nepal, its first allocation to any country, but that is less than 0.5% of the $4.7 billion Nepal says it needs to recover, and none of it has yet been paid out.

“Shortfalls in adaptation finance are a death sentence,” said Jess Beagley, policy lead at the Global Climate and Health Alliance. “Without adaptation finance, governments of the most vulnerable countries cannot guarantee nutrition, safe water, or resilient health systems for their populations.”

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