(Photo by iStock/Derek Brumby)
In recent weeks, the climate and development community has moved through a crowded calendar of convenings ahead of COP31, from the UN Climate Week in Baku and Climate Week NYC in September to the pre-COP in Fiji and Tuvalu, Bangkok Climate Action Week, the first-ever Global Heat Forum, the World Bank Group–IMF Annual Meetings in Bangkok, the IPCC plenary in Addis Ababa and the biodiversity COP17 now under way in Yerevan, Armenia. Each of these moments has produced a familiar output of pledges, platforms, hubs and coalitions, announced to applause and then handed to systems that move at a fraction of the speed of the risk they are meant to address.
The climate field is already expert in producing declarations, roadmaps, pledges, branded funds and collective statements that generate the appearance of movement while leaving the machinery of escalating harm intact, even as more than three billion people live in contexts highly vulnerable to climate change. Commitments without implementation are not neutral; they function as a form of delay, preserving the appearance of action while leaving the underlying distribution of risk untouched.
The COP31 negotiations in Antalya, Türkiye, will test whether that gap can be closed, building on the agreement at COP30 that adaptation finance should triple by 2035 and on a first set of indicators for the Global Goal on Adaptation, neither of which is binding and both of which still depend on contributions that have not been negotiated. Adaptation is the point at which climate politics either becomes public protection or remains performative, and Antalya should be judged on which of those it delivers.
The Announceable Is the Problem
Climate politics continues to reward the announcement more reliably than delivery, as September showed when the UK said it intends to invest £400 million in the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, taking sponsor commitments to $7.3 billion out of a $10 billion target for governments by the end of 2026. An intention to invest is not a disbursement. The COP29 agreement to triple climate finance for developing countries to $300 billion per year by 2035 sets the right scale, while the delivery record tells a different story: the $100 billion goal per year set in 2009 for 2020 was only reported as met in 2022, two years late.
The convenings held across Asia this month make the gap plainer still. At the first Global Heat Forum in Bangkok, nearly 600 scientists, health leaders, and funders launched a Roadmap for Investment and Action on Extreme Heat to carry into COP31, alongside estimates that scaling heat-health warning systems could protect 1.5 billion people and avert nearly 100,000 deaths each year. Heat is already linked to an estimated 489,000 deaths per year, and the evidence on what works now exists; what is missing is finance that reaches cities, health systems, and outdoor and informal workers at the pace the risk demands.
The language of “climate shocks” compounds the problem by presenting heat, flooding, drought, water stress, and displacement as sudden, surprising, or external, when they are the predictable consequence of systems that have extracted, deferred, underinvested, and shifted risk downwards for decades. Calling these events shocks lets institutions pretend the system was working until climate change interrupted it, and steers money towards response, recovery, and political announceables rather than the infrastructure that stops risk from becoming catastrophe.
Pooled Finance at the Speed of Risk
The launch of the World Bank Group Philanthropy Hub at the Annual Meetings in Bangkok in October is a significant signal, giving philanthropy a single entry point into the bank’s flagship programs on energy access, health, and water at a moment when development needs are rising and public budgets are constrained.
What the hub could do is far more ambitious than coordination, if it becomes a vehicle for pooled philanthropic finance that de-risks investment. Private capital will not flow at scale into climate-resilient health systems, water infrastructure, or adaptation in low- and middle-income markets while perceived risk outweighs return. Philanthropic capital, pooled and deployed as first-loss capital, guarantees, or concessional tranches alongside multilateral balance sheets, could change that calculation, absorbing the risk that keeps commercial investors out and unlocking many times its own value. Few institutions are better placed than the World Bank Group to make that blended model work at scale, combining philanthropy’s appetite for risk with the bank’s balance sheet, country relationships, and project pipeline.
If it took that path, the hub could turn philanthropy from a source of pilots into a source of market-shaping capital, shifting the question donors ask from “what can we fund?” to “what can our money make investable?” Without that ambition, the hub risks becoming another convening platform, useful for relationships and too slow and too small for the scale of the problem.
Pooled capital alone will not make adaptation investable without the market infrastructure that tells investors what genuine resilience looks like, from credible standards and taxonomies that define eligible investments to the disclosure and verification that guard against resilience-washing. Philanthropy has a distinctive role in funding that public good, which no single investor has an incentive to build and on which every blended vehicle depends.
The pace of change across philanthropy and finance markets remains glacial, and Bangkok hosted only the Bank’s first Philanthropy Forum, decades into a crisis whose financing gap is measured in trillions. Philanthropy still moves in multi-year strategy cycles and lengthy due diligence; finance markets wait for a track record that no one is funding them to build; multilateral processes add years between pledge and project. Risk is compounding faster than any of these institutions is learning to move.
New initiatives will stand or fall on the strength of the leadership at their helm. The Climate and Health Funders Coalition, launched by more than 35 philanthropies with an initial $300 million and a co-convenor of the Global Heat Forum, recognizes that fragmented philanthropy cannot meet the scale of the crisis. Whether it becomes more than a pooled announcement will depend on leaders with the authority, mandate, and operating experience to move money quickly, broker between funders, governments and capital markets, and hold the coalition to outcomes rather than membership.
Pooled Finance Must Reach the Frontline
Pooling money is not the same as moving it to where risk sits, and climate finance still too often treats frontline communities as beneficiaries, consultees, or risk categories rather than as institutions of protection, while money moves through organizations further from the land, from communities and from the consequences of delay.
Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) offer the clearest example of this contradiction. Forests managed by Indigenous Peoples in the Amazon removed a net 340 million tons of CO2 per year between 2001 and 2021, while forests outside Indigenous territories were collectively a net carbon source, and a review of 111 peer-reviewed studies found that 75 percent reported positive conservation outcomes on Indigenous lands. International aid for IPLC tenure and forest management, meanwhile, averaged only around $270 million per year between 2011 and 2020, less than 1 percent of international climate aid.
Donors need to get funding into grassroots organizations, local institutions, Indigenous-led organizations, feminist funds, disability movements, and labor and rural organizations already responding to climate risk, either directly or through mission-led, not-for-profit re-granters rooted in the ecosystems they serve. Where donors are worried about delivery capacity, the answer is to fund governance, financial management, safeguarding, and staff time as part of the work, as OECD guidance on locally led development now sets out, rather than to bypass these organizations. Grants should be unrestricted where possible and multi-year as standard, and they should be co-designed with the organizations doing the work.
The same test applies to the Philanthropy Hub and to every new coalition announced this autumn. If pooled finance de-risks private investment in resilient infrastructure while also routing flexible capital to local institutions, it changes the operating model; if it simply adds another layer between those announcing ambition and those absorbing risk, it is innovating around the problem rather than through it.
Measure Protection, Not Activity
Engagement numbers, consultation counts, launch events, pledge totals, and coalition membership lists describe activity; they do not prove that people are safer. The measure of COP31 should be whether investment reaches the systems carrying risk; whether governments and local authorities have the capacity, mandate, and budget to act; whether public institutions can maintain services under stress; and whether communities receive direct finance that respects their rights and governance.
This Is About Power
Resilience is ultimately about who is protected, who is funded, who is trusted, and who is expected to absorb risk. Institutions that cannot protect people from foreseeable harm will face a crisis of legitimacy as much as a crisis of capacity, and the defence of surprise has been over for 50 years.
Delegates in Antalya will produce another round of declarations, and the question is whether the finance announced in Baku, New York, Bangkok, and Antalya moves at the speed of risk, under leaders willing to be judged on delivery. If the system cannot fund the unglamorous infrastructure that turns policy into protection, it is not serious about adaptation; it is only serious about looking serious.
Read more stories by Jennifer S. Martin, Sidra Irfan, Bismah Nayyer, Dan Hunt & Carolina Batista.