WHY AFRICA DESERVES MORE THAN EMPTY PLEDGES

By Brian Onali Nduw

 

Every year, world leaders gather at yet another climate summit, announce yet another trillion-dollar climate finance goal, and return home. Meanwhile, a smallholder farmer somewhere, especially in Africa, watches her maize wilt in a drought that was never supposed to be this bad, this early, this relentless. The connection between those two scenes, the conference hall and the cracked field, is not just political. It is financial, institutional, and deeply moral.

Climate finance is supposed to be the bridge. Over the past decade, a body of evidence has built up around what this bridge actually looks like, who is paying to build it, who is crossing it, and, most critically, where it keeps collapsing. Drawing on the latest academic research, policy analyses, and civil society accountability reports, it is possible to tell one clear, damning, and ultimately hopeful story: the money exists, the economic case is overwhelming, the governance tools are available, and yet the world’s most vulnerable people are still being left behind.

 

The numbers that sound good and the ones that don’t

In 2022, developed countries reported providing nearly USD 116 billion in climate finance to developing nations. A headline that seemed to finally cross the long-promised USD 100 billion annual threshold set at the Copenhagen Accord in 2009. It was celebrated. It was also, according to Oxfam and CARE’s Climate Finance Shadow Report 2025, largely fiction.

When loans are counted not at their face value but at the genuine financial effort they represent, adjusted for interest rates, concessionality, and repayment burden, and when projects with dubious climate relevance are stripped out, the true value of that reported finance collapses to just USD 28–35 billion. Rich countries have learned to count generously. The UK, for instance, reclassified GBP 1.7 billion in humanitarian and development spending as climate finance. The accounting trick inflates the headline while the climate gap widens.

And the situation is worsening. Due to planned official development assistance (ODA) cuts across major donors, public climate finance may have already fallen to around USD 87 billion in 2024, and could drop to as low as USD 72–79 billion in 2025 – heading in exactly the wrong direction at precisely the worst moment in human history.

The irony is staggering. We are on track for catastrophic warming of 3°C. The Horn of Africa has endured relentless drought and flooding cycles displacing millions. Developing countries need around USD 1 trillion a year by 2030 in external climate finance for mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage. The New Collective Quantified Goal agreed at COP29 commits to USD 300 billion annually by 2035, and even that falls drastically short. Meanwhile, developed countries collectively spend around USD 270 billion a year subsidising fossil fuel production. The world is spending nearly as much to accelerate the crisis as it is committing to slow it.

 

Debt dressed up as Aid

Perhaps the most insidious dimension of the climate finance crisis is not the volume gap, but the instrument problem. Over the period 2021–22, roughly two-thirds of all public climate finance came in the form of loans – the majority non-concessional, meaning offered at near-market interest rates. For loans disbursed in 2022 alone, the total debt service that recipient countries will ultimately repay ranges from USD 79.8 to 88.4 billion, between 29 and 42 percent more than the face value of those loans.

Put plainly: countries that have contributed almost nothing to the climate crisis are being asked to borrow money, at significant cost, to adapt to its consequences. Countries like Malawi, one of the world’s Least Developed Countries (LDCs), which emit a negligible fraction of global greenhouse gases but rank among the most climate-vulnerable nations on earth, find themselves in a grotesque financial position: indebted to survive what they did not cause.

This matters doubly for adaptation finance. The money that helps communities survive floods, droughts, and ecosystem collapse rather than just reduce emissions. Article 9.4 of the Paris Agreement calls for a balance between adaptation and mitigation finance. In practice, adaptation receives just one-third of total public climate finance. Even the Glasgow commitment to double adaptation finance by 2025 is at serious risk: projected ODA cuts could leave adaptation finance at only USD 26 billion in 2025, far below the USD 38 billion needed to honour that pledge.

For the most vulnerable countries and small island developing states (SIDS), the situation is bleaker still. More than half of climate finance flowing to LDCs and SIDS comes in non-grant forms. More than half of adaptation finance to LDCs specifically is delivered as loans. The countries that most need grants are receiving the most loans.

 

Africa’s paradox

Sub-Saharan Africa occupies a peculiar and painful position in the global climate finance architecture. It receives the largest regional share of approved adaptation finance, approximately 42 percent of all adaptation funding tracked by multilateral climate funds, reflecting the continent’s extreme and well-documented vulnerability. Yet in absolute terms, the amounts flowing to individual African countries remain pitifully thin. 

Top African recipients of multilateral adaptation finance, including Tanzania, South Africa, Mozambique, Niger, Zambia, and Ethiopia, each received more than USD 135 million since 2003, across more than two decades. By any measure of actual adaptation need, this is insufficient. UNEP estimates that developing-country adaptation costs could reach USD 215–387 billion annually. What is flowing represents a fraction of a fraction.

The equity failure deepens for fragile and conflict-affected states (FCAS). Côte d'Ivoire, among the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations, had received just USD 26.1 million in multilateral adaptation finance through 2024. South Sudan, devastated by climate-driven flooding and food insecurity on top of ongoing conflict, had received USD 9.2 million. These are not rounding errors. They are the faces of what climate injustice actually looks like when translated into budget lines.

The water and agriculture sectors dominate what adaptation finance does reach Africa, receiving 50% and 21% of tracked adaptation investment respectively. Sectors of direct relevance to the livelihoods of rural Africans. Yet the chronic shortfall in tracking, in definition, and in disbursement means that even these figures represent a partial and contested picture. There is still no global consensus on what counts as adaptation finance, how to measure it, or how to ensure it reaches frontline communities rather than large-scale infrastructure projects.

 

The economic case they cannot ignore

What is often missing from climate finance debates is not moral argument, there is no shortage of that, but economic self-interest made undeniably clear. A 2024 Bruegel policy brief by Bolton, Kleinnijenhuis, and Zettelmeyer does exactly this, and its conclusions should be read by every finance minister in the G7.

The numbers are stark. Global carbon emissions in 2023 consumed nearly 11% of the remaining carbon budget consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C. Emerging market and developing economies now produce almost 70% of global CO₂ emissions, a share projected to grow. There is no 1.5°C pathway that does not run through the Global South. And the Global South will not decarbonise without financial support from those who caused the bulk of historical emissions.

Here is where the Bruegel analysis becomes politically transformative. The net global benefit of phasing out coal, replacing it with renewables across emerging markets, is estimated at USD 78 trillion in present value terms, more than three times the cost of doing so. But the crucial insight is about who captures those benefits. When a developing country undertakes a costly emissions reduction, less than 3% of the economic gains accrue to that country itself. The rest goes to the world, overwhelmingly to wealthier nations with larger economies exposed to climate-related damage.

This creates a precise and devastating collective-action problem. The United States would capture nearly 30% of all avoided economic damage from global decarbonisation. The EU and China each about 11%. Large, rich countries stand to gain far more from global emissions reductions than the countries being asked to make them. The economic case for massive climate finance transfers from the G7 to developing nations is therefore not charity. It is rational self-interest.

Even the fiscal cost is manageable. Scaling up climate finance to cover coal phase-outs across emerging economies would raise the G7+EU fiscal burden by only 0.3 to 0.6 percent of GDP per year. This is a policy choice, not a capacity constraint. The same bloc collectively spends hundreds of billions annually subsidising fossil fuels. The money is there.

 

The governance problem

Acknowledging the need for climate finance at scale does not dissolve the legitimate concerns about how it is deployed. An important but underappreciated risk, explored rigorously in academic work on the “climate finance curse”, is that large financial inflows, like natural resource revenues, can harm the very economies they are meant to help if governance is absent or weak.

The mechanisms are familiar from development economics: revenue volatility that destabilises macroeconomic management; Dutch disease, where capital inflows appreciate the real exchange rate and crowd out productive manufacturing exports; and rent-seeking and corruption, where large resource flows provide the fuel for elite capture rather than public goods. For Sub-Saharan Africa, which has long grappled with these dynamics through aid dependence, oil revenues, and commodity cycles, climate finance at scale could replicate those failures if not carefully designed.

The good news is that this is not inevitable. The research is clear: countries with strong institutions, democratic freedoms, and low corruption absorb large financial inflows without the adverse consequences. The climate finance curse, like the resource curse, is a governance problem with governance solutions. Sovereign wealth funds can be established to smooth revenue volatility and schedule capital deployment. Finance can be directed toward sectors with high productivity spillovers, renewable energy infrastructure, for example, that generate growth rather than merely distribute rents. Transparency mechanisms, analogous to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, can be adapted to climate finance flows.

The lesson for African policymakers is that the demand for more climate finance and the demand for better institutions are not in tension. They reinforce each other. Building the institutional capacity to manage, track, and report on climate finance credibly is not just good governance for its own sake; it is the condition under which wealthy nations will eventually trust their money to flow at the scale the crisis requires.

 

Lessons from the ground up

Amid the failures of global architecture, local governments and conservation practitioners are quietly discovering what actually works. A study of how Flemish cities finance nature-based solutions (NBS), urban wetlands, permeable pavements, garden streets, bioswales, offers lessons that travel well beyond Belgium.

The research found that financing barriers are not primarily about money. City planners consistently ranked lack of staff capacity and time above lack of budget as their primary constraint. Administrative silos between departments prevent the pooling of resources. Political short-termism, the imperative to show results within an electoral cycle, drives investment toward fast, visible grey infrastructure at the expense of long-term NBS.

Most practically, the study found that financing strategies must match the phase of a project. In the design phase, good integrated spatial plans are as much a political tool as a technical one. They build the coalitions within administrations and among politicians that unlock budget allocations. In the implementation phase, grants are transformative when secured, but they impose administrative burdens and rarely cover the full project scope. Co-financing arrangements between government agencies and utility companies, like Antwerp’s cost-sharing agreement with its wastewater management company, formalise the savings that NBS generate for existing infrastructure. In the maintenance phase, grants disappear entirely, and cities must rely on community partnerships, farmer agreements, and design choices that minimise upkeep costs.

The maintenance insight deserves special emphasis for African conservation practice. Grant-funded projects that produce excellent NBS or conservation outcomes during their funded period routinely collapse afterward because no maintenance budget exists. This is not a failure of project design. It is a failure of the climate finance architecture that funds implementation but not continuity. Addressing it requires building community-based stewardship models from the start, not as an afterthought.

 

What must change

The evidence points clearly toward several interconnected reforms that advocates, policymakers, and practitioners must press for:

Climate finance must be counted honestly: The gap between reported and real climate finance must be closed. All finance should be reported at grant-equivalent value. Loans cannot count toward Paris Agreement obligations at face value. The accounting games that inflate headlines while delivering nothing to frontline communities must end.

Grants must be the default for adaptation: Loans are an inappropriate instrument for countries adapting to a crisis they did not cause. LDCs and SIDS should receive overwhelmingly grant-based support for adaptation and loss and damage finance. The principle that developing countries should not be indebted for surviving climate impacts is not idealistic. It is legally grounded, as the International Court of Justice has now confirmed.

Adaptation finance must triple: The proposed target from LDC negotiations, tripling adaptation finance by 2030, with a 50:50 balance between adaptation and mitigation, is not ambitious enough given current needs; but it is the floor from which advocacy must begin. The existing pattern, in which the top 20 recipients of mitigation finance capture two-thirds of total mitigation flows while adaptation finance is spread more equitably but thinly, must be reversed.

The governance infrastructure must be built: Budget tagging systems, national climate finance tracking frameworks, and institutional capacity within finance ministries are not optional extras for developing countries. They are the prerequisites for accessing larger and better-quality climate finance. Donor countries and multilateral development banks should fund this capacity-building explicitly, not as an add-on to project finance.

The economic argument must be weaponised: Climate justice advocates have long led with moral arguments. They are right to do so. But in a world of constrained political attention and rising nationalism, the Bruegel analysis offers a powerful complement: funding the Global South’s decarbonisation is not generosity, it is economically rational for the wealthy nations that will capture the overwhelming share of avoided climate damage benefits. That argument should be made loudly, repeatedly, and with the numbers to back it up.

 

Closing: the field and the finance hall

The Malawian farmer, for example, watching her crops fail does not need another COP commitment. She needs money. Real money, in the form of grants, arriving on time, channelled through institutions that serve communities rather than extracting from them, used to build resilience that lasts beyond the next grant period.

That is the gap between the promise and the reality of climate finance. It is not unbridgeable. The money exists. The economic case is airtight. The governance tools are understood. What is lacking is the political will to honour obligations that were made, that are just, and that are, it turns out, also in the self-interest of those making them.

The world’s most vulnerable people have waited long enough.

Reference articles

Michael Jakob, Jan Christoph Steckel, Christian Flachsland & Lavinia Baumstark (2015) Climate finance for developing country mitigation: blessing or curse?, Climate and Development, 7:1, 1-15, DOI: 10.1080/17565529.2014.934768 

Watson, C., Schalatek, L. and Evéquoz, A., 2021. Climate Finance Thematic Briefing: Adaptation Finance. Washington DC: Heinrich Boll Stiftung, Climate Finance Fundamentals, (3).

SHADOW, F., CLIMATE FINANCE SHADOW REPORT 2023.

Bolton, P., A.M. Kleinnijenhuis and J. Zettelmeyer (2024) ‘The economic case for climate finance at scale’, Policy Brief 09/2024, Bruegel

Micale, V., Tonkonogy, B. and Mazza, F., 2018. Understanding and increasing finance for climate adaptation in developing countries. Climate Policy Initiative.

de Beeck, T.O., den Heijer, C. and Coppens, T., 2024. Financing climate adaptation in Flemish cities: Unpacking financial strategies and policy dynamics for nature-based solutions. Landscape and urban planning, 248, p.105094.