COP31: What Antalya Owes the Islands

COP31 opened in Antalya on Monday, and the first dispute was, predictably, over money.

What Antalya was meant to deliver

Antalya was billed as the “implementation COP”, a summit of fewer declarations and more decisions. It was meant to turn Belém’s commitment to triple adaptation finance by 2035 into something that could be tracked, to launch the Climate Finance Work Programme, and to settle how progress on adaptation would be measured. Under the hosting deal, it would also give small island states a dedicated session on their finance needs.

From obligation to goodwill

Measured against that mandate, the opening day said a great deal. A proposal to give the tripling of adaptation finance its own item on the formal agenda failed to win consensus, after developed countries, led by the EU, the UK and Japan, opposed it. It will instead be “discussed under other items”, which is the language of negotiation for a priority that has been acknowledged and then left without a home of its own. Meanwhile, the climate finance needs of small island states, which this presidency promised to put at the forefront, have been left to a session in the Action Agenda, designed as a platform for pledges to the Pacific Resilience Facility.

That distinction matters more than it first appears, because the negotiated text is where obligations are written and the Action Agenda is where goodwill is displayed. When the needs of the most exposed states go into a pledging session and not into the decision text, what is on offer is not entitlement but discretion: finance that depends on the generosity of those most responsible for the crisis, announced from a stage and open to revision at the next budget cycle.

“The negotiated text is where obligations are written; the Action Agenda is where goodwill is displayed.”

What tripling is worth, and what it leaves out

The numbers show what is at stake in that arrangement. Depending on the baseline, which Belém conveniently left unstated, tripling means somewhere between US$85 and US$120 billion a year by 2035. UNEP’s latest Adaptation Gap Report puts developing countries’ needs at around US$305 billion a year, so even full delivery would cover only 20 to 29 per cent of what is required once inflation is taken into account. Nor is delivery on track: international public adaptation finance rose by just US$1 billion in 2024, to roughly US$28 to 32 billion, which is still short of the US$40 billion promised at Glasgow for 2025. Flows to least developed countries and small island states have fallen since their 2022 peak. And because the target sits within the wider US$300 billion finance goal, lending by the multilateral development banks and mobilised private capital both count towards it, so much of what is reported as adaptation finance may well come as loans.

“Even if every promise were kept, more than 70 per cent of the need would remain unfunded.”

That US$305 billion is a staggering number, yet it is entirely possible when set against what the world already chooses to spend. World military expenditure reached US$2,887 billion in 2025, which means the full annual adaptation need of developing countries is roughly a tenth of what was spent on militaries in a single year. In the IMF’s latest count, for 2022, explicit fossil fuel subsidies alone more than doubled from US$500 billion in 2020 to US$1.3 trillion, which is more than four times the adaptation need, spent keeping fossil fuels cheap. The money exists; what is missing is the decision to treat adaptation as something owed.

Interests, costs and replication

So I return to the questions I ask of any arrangement. Whose interests does it serve? It lets wealthy parties be seen responding to vulnerability without conceding that adaptation finance is owed. What does it cost, and to whom? Island communities carry the cost, paying for sea walls and relocation through debt while pledges are still being counted. How does it replicate itself? Each COP that treats SIDS as a session and not as a constituency with claims makes it more normal to see our survival as a matter of charity, revisited every year.

And what happens to people? They are shown, once again, that their crisis is something to be managed on their behalf, not something they have the means to transform.

Which small islands?

It is also worth asking which small islands this arrangement actually serves. The SIDS session speaks for all small island states, yet its pledges go to a facility whose membership is limited to Pacific Islands Forum countries. The Caribbean, which this year formed its own negotiating bloc, has been focusing part of its financing efforts on Article 6 carbon markets. When each region has to build its own instrument and compete for the same pool of pledges, how visible a region is comes to depend on how close it sits to whoever holds the presidency. The collective claim that gives AOSIS its weight in these negotiations is then broken down, without anyone saying so, into a set of separate regional appeals.

Not a question of money

The question, then, is not whether adaptation can be paid for, but why it is not, and none of the obstacles is a shortage of money. The first is discretion: as long as adaptation finance is treated as goodwill, it competes with every other budget priority in donor capitals, at a time when military budgets have grown for eleven consecutive years. The second is debt: much of what is counted comes as loans, so small states end up paying to protect themselves from a crisis they did not cause, which narrows the very fiscal space they need in order to adapt. The third is design: the instruments that could fund adaptation at scale, from solidarity levies on shipping and premium flights to the reform of fossil fuel subsidies, have been championed by a coalition in which Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda and Kenya sit alongside France and Spain, yet they remain a long way from the scale the need demands. To call adaptation unaffordable is therefore not an economic finding but a political position, and it is one the islands have every reason to contest.

The test for Antalya

The Pacific Resilience Facility is a Pacific-owned mechanism and deserves to be properly capitalised. But adaptation funded at donors’ discretion is crisis management, not development, and on these numbers more than 70 per cent of the need would remain unfunded even if every promise were kept. The test for an implementation COP is not how much is pledged on the day but whether anything is owed by the end.

References

• United Nations Environment Programme (2026) Adaptation Gap Report 2026: Ready? Not. Nairobi: UNEP. Link
• UNEP Copenhagen Climate Centre (2026) ‘As world heads for overshoot of 1.5°C, adaptation is too slow’, 4 November. Link
• Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (2026) ‘Global military spending surges’, press release, 27 April. Link
• Black, S., Parry, I. and Vernon, N. (2023) IMF Fossil Fuel Subsidies Data: 2023 Update. Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund.
• Earth.Org (2023) ‘Global fossil fuel subsidies hit record $7tn in 2022, says IMF’, 25 August. Link
• Pereira da Silva, L.A. et al. (2025) ‘Global Solidarity Levies to Finance the Low-Carbon Transition: From Theory to a Practical Negotiation Tool’, Policy Brief No. 49. Milan: IEP@BU, Bocconi University. Link
• SDG News (2025) ‘Global coalition proposes levies on premium air travel to fund climate resilience’, 4 July. Link
• Climate Home News (2026) ‘Africa wants adaptation finance on COP31 agenda, raising risk of a fight’, 28 October. Link
• Down To Earth (2026) ‘COP31 adopts climate finance work programme; proposals for adaptation funding, trade measures dropped’, 10 November. Link
• UN News (2026) ‘COP31 opens in Antalya: Can climate promises finally deliver results?’, 9 November. Link
• Malay Mail (2026) ‘“Get serious”: COP31 opens in Antalya with leaders under pressure to tackle climate crisis’, 9 November. Link
• The Climate Watch (2026) ‘COP31 opens amid dispute over funding to help vulnerable countries adapt’, 10 November. Link
• Minister for Foreign Affairs, Australia (2025) ‘COP to be hosted by Türkiye with Australia leading negotiations’, media release. Link
• Pacific Islands News Association (2026) ‘Pacific Pre-COP31 provides strong starting point for COP31’. Link
• Pacific Islands Forum (2025) Agreement to Establish the Pacific Resilience Facility. Link
• Carbon Pulse (2026) ‘Caribbean bloc endorses Article 6 as implementation lever on eve of COP31’. Link
• Carbon Brief (2025) ‘COP30: Key outcomes agreed at the UN climate talks in Belém’. Link
• Natural Resources Defense Council (2026) ‘International Climate Finance Goals Tracker’. Link

Related Saltwater Insights writing

• Hippolyte, D. (2026) ‘When a Decade Is “Lost”: A Reflection on the World Bank’s 2026 Outlook’. Link
• Hippolyte, D. (2026) ‘The One Where the Development Movie Plays on Repeat’. L​ink