Crandi

Cop30 Climate Finance Beyond Goal Setting King S College London

Leo Migdal
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cop30 climate finance beyond goal setting king s college london

Will the Mayfield Review create pathways to work for disabled people? COP30 marks 10 years since the Paris Agreement. As the end of the conference approaches, I find myself with mixed feelings. On one hand, I felt encouraged hearing concrete examples of how countries are accessing funding to build national adaptation pipelines. For example, fourteen developing countries have launched country-led platforms in collaboration with the Green Climate Fund (GCF) to drive climate investment pipelines and strengthen national implementation [3]. However, the scientific updates on the 1.5 °C pathway were unsettling.

By all means, we should not neglect the current efforts, but there is, bluntly, a widening gap between ambition and delivery. “This is a moment for reflection and even more engagement,” as said by Annalena Baerbock in the Third High-level ministerial dialogue on climate finance under the CMA. For me, that felt exactly right. The first thing that struck me was the numbers. They were enormous. COP29 saw developed countries collectively commit 300 billion dollars under Article 9 [5].

In 2024 alone, 2 trillion dollars were invested in clean energy — 800 billion dollars more than in fossil fuels. Yet Jim Skea, Chair of the IPCC, reminded us that global mitigation flows still fall short by a factor of three to six, comparing what has been estimated to be needed and the actual... Adaptation needs are rising even faster: developing countries are estimated to require 310 billion dollars per year by 2025. At the same time, only around 2% of tracked private finance currently supports adaptation. The scale of action is growing, but so is the gap. The gap doesn’t exist solely in the money; it also lies in the system behind it.

We still do not have an agreed-upon definition of climate finance, and this lack of clarity filters through the entire landscape. Methodologies for evaluation differ, and reporting varies widely across countries. Multilateral Development Banks have unlocked greater lending headroom through capital adequacy reforms, yet, as Avinash Persaud, special adviser on climate change to the president of the Inter-American Development Bank, noted, “money is being left... At the same time, private flows are largely opaque. Evidence shows that private investors are not ignoring climate risk, but with the current level of fragmentation and limited transparency, they do not interpret it consistently either. For example, in equity markets, ESG labels often fail to translate into real capital reallocation: funds marketed as “sustainable” can hold firms with strong disclosure practices but weak emissions performance simply because ratings diverge...

Concerns about greenwashing, that is, firms overstating or exaggerating their environmental performance to appear more climate-aligned than they are, make this even harder for investors to distinguish genuine progress from marketing. Other innovative instruments, such as sovereign green bonds and catastrophe bonds, have seen increasing issuance. However, their effectiveness remains unclear: transparency is limited, payouts have been rare, and high transaction costs and opaque modelling still discourage broader use. [4] This lack of clarity also risks leaving emerging markets and developing countries unable to leverage these financial innovations for resilience and adaptation. [1] Green finance is fast becoming a theatre of sustainability - where scientific authority is staged, not scrutinised, and COP30 must call time on the performance…

As COP30 begins, the global climate agenda is once again spotlighting finance. Green bonds, ESG disclosures, and sustainability-linked loans are being hailed as tools to align capital with climate goals. But a closer look reveals a troubling paradox: the very instruments meant to drive environmental transformation may be reinforcing the status quo. In a recent Conversation article, Maud Borie and Sarah Bracking of King’s College London argue that green finance is not always as sustainable as it seems. Their critique centres on the concept of sciencewashing - the strategic use of scientific language to lend legitimacy to financial products that may lack genuine environmental impact, reinforcing business-as-usual or even making things worse. Green bonds, for example, are often marketed with vague criteria and minimal oversight.

ESG frameworks encourage disclosure, but rarely enforce meaningful change. The result is a system where sustainability becomes a branding exercise rather than a transformative agenda. Ben Abraham is a senior consultant at the Talanoa Institute and a former senior climate finance adviser at the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. COP30 must deliver a significant outcome on finance to meet its billing as an “implementation COP”. For whatever commitments Parties reach on mitigation, adaptation, or protecting nature, they will not come to pass if finance flows do not align with their implementation. At COP29 in Baku, countries agreed a new collective goal on climate finance.

By 2035, it aims to channel $300 billion a year in public climate support and $1.3 trillion in wider investment to developing nations. The announcement made headlines, but many countries in the Global South left disappointed, arguing the sums still fell far short of what is needed. And they have a point. Estimates of climate investment needs in the Global South until 2030 are on the order of $5.1 trillion-$6.8 trillion. At a global level, the International Energy Agency estimates annual clean energy investment must reach $4 trillion – more than triple current levels – to achieve net zero emissions by mid-century. At the same time, governments spent $7 trillion on global fossil fuel subsidies in 2022 alone.

The imbalance is stark. While the finance flowing in the right direction is increasing, too much continues to support high-carbon activities, and too little reaches the communities most exposed to climate impacts. For example, only a tiny share (2.5%) of global climate finance flows reach sub-Saharan Africa, despite the region’s acute vulnerabilities. COP30 – the 30th Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change – will take place in Belém, Brazil from 10th to 21st November 2025. The last 10 years have been the hottest on record, and an estimated 3.3-3.6 billion people live in contexts highly vulnerable to climate change. This year, countries were due to publish their updated national climate plans outlining their contribution to cutting global emissions (‘national determined contributions’ or ‘NDCs’).

However, plans so far fall well short of what is required to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C.[1] Therefore, COP30 needs to focus on the further ambition required to close the gap. Yet achieving this greater ambition will not be possible without the large-scale delivery of grant-based climate finance, making finance an equally critical discussion in Belém. Last year’s COP in Baku agreed to a new global climate finance goal (the so-called NCQG) to deliver at least $300 billion per year by 2035, led by developed countries and directed to developing... However, the agreement lacked both a roadmap and the accountability mechanisms required to ensure that governments pay up. The NCQG also included an even vaguer aspiration to scale up finance to $1.3 trillion per year. Implementation of the new finance goal is critical, as lower income countries require significant finance to develop their economies cleanly; to adapt to worsening climate impacts; and to pay for the escalating costs of...

The impacts of the climate crisis disproportionately affect the most vulnerable and least responsible the hardest, and could push up to 132 million more people into extreme poverty by 2030. African countries contribute just 4% of global carbon emissions but are among the hardest hit, and yet, along with other lower income countries, have thus far received only a small fraction of the finance... Indeed, the climate crisis is one of the key drivers of today’s debt crisis, as governments are forced to borrow more simply to recover and rebuild from climate disasters. In this context, building trust among developing countries that the NCQG will be fulfilled is essential to maintaining a multilateral process capable of limiting temperature rises to safe levels. Delivery of climate finance at scale by developed countries, including the UK, is a well-established principle in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and is a legal obligation, as recently affirmed by... It is also a moral responsibility falling upon historically high emitters who bear the greatest responsibility for causing the climate crisis.

Any wealthy government that considers itself a principled global actor must, at a very minimum, act in good faith to deliver their fair share of the $300 billion finance goal as a starting point. As the end of COP30 approaches, how can the world make sure it delivers on its climate finance promises? In this latest expert piece, King's Business School PhD student Zining Yuan discusses the decisions and promises made throughout the conference, her takeaways as a virtual delegate, and how we can build a financial... 💚 Read the piece: https://lnkd.in/eEBEKqhF #MakeChangeTogether #Finance #COP30 #Climate #Sustainability #Research #Banking #Environment #KCL The 2025 UN climate talks wrapped on Saturday, Nov. 22 after negotiations pushed into overtime.

The resulting decision secured some important wins, both inside and outside the negotiations. But it omitted some of the big-ticket items many hoped to see. With efforts to halt temperature rise severely off track and climate disasters becoming ever-more destructive, the summit (COP30) aimed to establish clear pathways to deliver past pledges and put the world on a safer... A key question was how countries would address lagging ambition in their new climate commitments (NDCs). Hopes that countries would commit to roadmaps to end fossil fuel use and halt deforestation were ultimately dashed after opposition from petrostates. The final decision only included new voluntary initiatives to accelerate national climate action, though the Brazilian Presidency intends to move forward with fossil fuel and deforestation roadmaps outside of the formal COP talks.

Building resilience to climate impacts took center stage, with COP30 securing a new target to triple finance for climate adaptation. The COP also laid out practical solutions to increase finance for the low-carbon transition. In an era of trade wars and tariffs, negotiators also agreed for the first time to hold discussions on how trade policies can help — or hinder — climate action. Against the backdrop of the Amazon, nature also saw advances, including a new fund for tropical forest conservation. Indigenous Peoples and other local communities were recognized like never before. And outside the formal negotiations, the summit saw a raft of new pledges and action plans from cities, states, countries and the private sector.

It is clear that we are moving from negotiations to implementation, and from wrangling over what to do to how to do it. These victories matter. It shows that international cooperation can still deliver, despite deepening divides on climate action and a difficult geopolitical context. Will the Mayfield Review create pathways to work for disabled people? Nearly 60,000 delegates travelled to the heart of the Amazon. They came hoping that this COP would pivot from negotiation design to real-world implementation.

COP30 in Belém was billed as the “COP of Truth”. It took place during a year marked by record heat, widespread climate disasters, and a growing sense of global instability. With the United States withdrawing again from the Paris Agreement and geopolitical tensions rising, expectations for the summit were layered with uncertainty. Belém saw progress on climate finance, adaptation, and the just transition. It also exposed the widening gap between what the climate crisis demands and what governments are prepared to agree. But above all, it revealed a stark reality, after 30 COPs, the world still cannot agree on a collective plan to phase out the fossil fuels that are driving the crisis.

For many, COP30 was expected to be the moment when countries finally confronted the central driver of the climate crisis. More than eighty nations agreed in Belém on a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels. The hosts had championed the idea in the run-up to the summit, and support grew quickly among Latin American states, Europe, and many vulnerable nations. Even major fossil fuel exporters such as Norway signalled openness to the discussion. By the end of the first week, that early momentum had collided with political reality. Major oil producers and several emerging economies made clear that any reference to a fossil fuel roadmap was unacceptable.

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