As climate negotiators gather in Belém, Brazil, for COP30 over the next two weeks, a new UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report has issued a stark warning: the world’s defences against climate impacts are dangerously underfunded and off track.
The Adaptation Gap Report 2025, titled “Running on Empty”, found that developing countries’ adaptation finance needs by 2035 are at least 12 times greater than present international flows. The Glasgow Pact’s pledge to double 2019 adaptation finance to about $40bn by 2025 will almost certainly be missed.
SA is no stranger to climate shocks. In recent years, the country has faced devastating floods in KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape and Western Cape, record-breaking heatwaves in the Northern Cape, prolonged droughts across several provinces and severe wildfires in the Western Cape. Poor communities are suffering the worst effects, and municipalities are struggling to recover between disasters.
Developed countries caused most of the planet’s warming, but it is developing nations, particularly in Africa, that endure the harshest effect. That is a reason they expect richer nations to deliver on climate finance promises.
Belém, a humid Amazonian port city better known for its rivers and forest trade, will host 143 delegations, including 57 heads of state and 39 ministers, for the next two weeks. But organisers have had to improvise: with hotel rooms in short supply, the leaders’ summit took place on Thursday and Friday before COP30 formally opened.
“Climate change is the defining crisis of our time,” forestry, fisheries & the environment minister Dion George told delegates in Belém on Friday.
“No nation can face it alone. SA reaffirms its commitment to the Paris Agreement and to the principles of equity, as well as common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in the light of differentiated national circumstances. The global stocktake is clear. Progress is too slow. We must accelerate action on mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage, and the means of implementation.”
Adaptation in centre stage
Adaptation will be a defining test of COP30. The UNEP report warned that developing countries will require $310bn-$365bn a year by 2035 just to keep pace with mounting climate impacts.
While almost 200 countries, including SA, now have national adaptation plans, many are outdated, raising the risk of maladaptation. Even SA’s adaptation plans, experts told Business Day, suffer from low ambition.
Negotiators in Belém are expected to finalise indicators for the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), established under article 7 of the Paris Agreement. Until now, there has been no consistent way to measure resilience or to track whether adaptation finance actually protects lives, livelihoods and economies.
For SA and other climate-exposed emerging markets, a clear set of metrics could help unlock investment in resilient infrastructure, agriculture and early-warning systems, which are essential defences against recurring floods, droughts and heatwaves.
Climate finance will also feature through the Baku-to-Belém Roadmap, a proposed pathway to mobilise $1.3-trillion a year by 2035, the framework for which was released last week.
For Pretoria, which has banked heavily on concessional climate finance to fund the Just Energy Transition Investment Plan, these negotiations matter. A credible global finance framework could ease SA’s borrowing costs and attract more blended finance for adaptation and clean-energy infrastructure.
Transition and forests
COP30 must also take forward the Dubai global stocktake’s call for a “just, orderly and equitable transition away from fossil fuels”.
Negotiators will attempt to turn that principle into a practical roadmap, one that ensures coal-dependent economies such as SA are supported through the transition without deepening inequality.
Forests remain central to Brazil’s presidency. As carbon sinks and biodiversity strongholds, they are also economic lifelines for rural communities. Protecting them is among the fastest, most cost-effective ways to cut emissions. Nature-based solutions could deliver up to 37% of global mitigation needed by 2030.
COP30 marks the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement and a reckoning with its unfulfilled promises. Clean-energy investment now outpaces fossil fuels two-to-one, but national pledges still fall short of the 1.5°C pathway. The Belém talks will test whether leaders can close both the ambition gap and the trust gap that have plagued climate diplomacy.
