From Promise to Delivery: Scaling Up Adaptation Finance for Those Most at Risk (CARE’s COP31 Policy Paper)
THE CLIMATE CRISIS IS ACCELERATING FASTER THAN POLITICAL WILL TO ADDRESS IT.
Across the world, communities are facing increasingly severe droughts, floods, storms, heatwaves, wildfires, ecosystem degradation, and other climate impacts that threaten lives and livelihoods. Climate change is not a future threat: people and communities are already living with its consequences, and the costs of inaction are rising every year. Climate change is intensifying the impacts of El Niño in many regions, as rising temperatures and a warmer atmosphere can amplify associated heat, drought, and heavy rainfall extremes, placing additional pressure on already vulnerable communities.
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) 2026 Limiting Overshoot Report has formalized what we have long seen coming: Parties have not stayed on track to meet the commitment of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C, with profound and increasingly severe impacts expected as a result. Every fraction of a degree avoided reduces the risks of poverty, hunger, displacement, biodiversity loss, economic disruption, and irreversible loss and damage. While adaptation is essential, it cannot keep pace with unchecked warming. Climate action must be grounded in both the best available science and the lived realities of communities most affected by climate change, ensuring that decisions are evidence-based, inclusive and responsive to local contexts.
This work comes at a time when multilateralism is under increasing pressure, and the international climate process is struggling to deliver the scale and speed of action required. Growing distrust between Parties continues to hinder progress, with negotiations too often becoming stuck in debates that pit adaptation against mitigation. Yet these are not competing priorities. Mitigation is essential to limit current and future climate risks, while accelerated adaptation action is critical to protect people and ecosystems from the impacts that are already occurring and those that can no longer be avoided.
The international community has never had a clearer mandate to act. The United Nations’ General Assembly (UNGA) endorsed, by a large majority, the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) landmark Advisory Opinion on climate change, reaffirming that governments have obligations under international law to act effectively on climate change, protect the climate system, and address the harm caused.
COP31 should turn commitments into concrete implementation and measurable results. Building on the decisions adopted at COP30, including progress on the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), renewed commitments to triple adaptation finance, implementation of the Gender Action Plan (GAP), and advancing the just transition, the international community must now demonstrate that these outcomes will translate into tangible improvements for vulnerable communities.
CARE International recognizes the need for private finance in climate action. Private finance should be viewed as complementary to, not a replacement for, public climate finance. Public climate finance remains essential, particularly for adaptation, loss and damage, and support to vulnerable and fragile countries and communities where private investment is often limited. As climate finance commitments under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement are obligations agreed between countries, CARE International believes that international climate negotiations must continue to prioritize ambitious, predictable, and accessible public climate finance that reaches the local level and communities most affected by climate change.
COP31 KEY DEMANDS:
- CLIMATE FINANCE: Developed countries must provide a clear and credible pathway to deliver the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) of $300 billion annually by 2035 and significantly scale up predictable, accessible, and predominantly grant-based climate finance.
- ADAPTATION: Parties must close the adaptation finance gap and move from frameworks to implementation, ensuring finance reaches vulnerable communities and supports locally led, gender-responsive adaptation.
- GENDER: Parties must fully implement the Belém Gender Action Plan, with adequate resources, accountability, and meaningful participation and leadership of women’s rights organizations and women-led groups.
- LOSS AND DAMAGE: Developed countries must urgently scale up predictable, public and predominantly grant-based finance for the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage and ensure direct, accessible support reaches affected communities.
- MITIGATION: Parties must accelerate implementation of ambitious 2035 NDCs aligned with 1.5°C and deliver a just, orderly, and equitable transition away from fossil fuels, with increased support for developing countries.
COP31 Policy Paper
CARE International