WHAT HAPPENED TO ADAPTATION AT COP30?

• Negotiations on the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) are progressing slowly: after years of discussions, there is a common framework, but a shared and operational list of indicators to monitor progress is still lacking.
• Parties remain divided on both content and procedure: developed countries want to adopt the indicators quickly, while many developing countries fear new burdens, poor representativeness, and the exclusion of key issues such as gender, finance, and means of implementation.
• The second week opens with a fragmented and still highly political text: contested indicators, tensions over finance and the Baku Adaptation Report, and a real risk that the GGA will remain without a functional structure to guide National Adaptation Plans and global action.

The General Context, from COP28 to COP30

The Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), the “twin” of the 1.5°C goal on the adaptation front, has now moved beyond the conceptual phase, but it has not yet become the operational tool that the most vulnerable countries desperately need. After years of discussions, the United Arab Emirates Framework for Global Climate Resilience was adopted in Dubai, setting seven thematic targets and four cross-cutting dimensions to measure resilience and adaptive capacity. At COP29 in Baku, negotiations focused on how to translate that framework into a list of common, global but flexible indicators, capable of linking global trends with national specificities. Governments began converging on the idea of a “manageable” set of no more than 100 indicators, distinguishing between global indicators and a menu of national indicators, with the possibility of including measures on Means of Implementation (MoI – finance, technology, capacity-building) and social dimensions, from human rights to the participation of youth and indigenous communities. However, the text emerging from Baku already showed the first signs of backtracking: the weakening of gender references and the removal of explicit mention of Common but Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR-RC) hinted at the difficult balance between ambition, climate justice, and political consensus.

Into this already complex context came the intermediate Bonn session (SB62), which the Brazilian COP30 Presidency had identified as a decisive moment to “prepare the ground” on adaptation. The negotiations on GGA indicators were intense but inconclusive: there was no agreement on the final list, with deep divisions over the role of finance indicators, perceived by developing countries as potentially distortive if they shift the burden onto national budgets, and over the degree of political oversight Parties should have over the work of the expert group. The minimal compromise reached was a partial decision text, which preserved the technical mandate but deferred the most political choices to Belém. Experts were tasked with reducing and refining the list to a maximum of 100 indicators, making them measurable and relevant to adaptation, more robustly including aeans of adaptation and cross-cutting issues, and continuing the work in a dedicated workshop before COP30. From over four thousand indicators collected at the start of COP29, to the four hundred discussed in Bonn, we arrived in Belém with just over one hundred indicators and a Baku Adaptation Roadmap in the making — a 2025–2030 operational plan designed to link the Framework, the indicators, and the second Global Stocktake.

How the first week of COP30 went

In Belém, negotiations opened with the goal of turning the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) into a truly operational instrument, but the texts presented by the co-facilitators were judged by many countries to be “too rough” and far from a negotiable basis. Delegations criticized the excessive use of brackets, improper merging of proposals, and numerous elements considered out of place. The Arab Group argued that consensus and coherence are still lacking. AILAC (the Independent Alliance of Latin America and the Caribbean) and other groups acknowledged the facilitators’ effort but emphasized that several inputs are not accurately reflected. The overall impression is that the negotiation is moving forward without a clear structure, and that before any political progress can be made, the document needs to be “put in order.”

The main sticking point remains the list of indicators (downloadable here). The EU and other countries pushing for a strong outcome are calling for the set to be adopted at COP30, even if it is not final, as a “tangible step.” Opposing them are numerous developing countries — including the Arab Group, the LMDC (Like-Minded Group of Developing Countries), and India — which view the list as premature, unclear, and potentially risky because it could create new obligations or an unsustainable reporting burden. The Least Developed Countries, together with AOSIS (the Alliance of Small Island States), have acknowledged the value of the technical work done so far but are requesting methodological transparency, pilot testing, and guarantees that the use of the indicators will remain voluntary. This has led to a dispute over the “disclaimers,” which many groups consider necessary to clarify that the list does not generate obligations or assessment criteria, while other countries fear that too many caveats would undermine the usefulness of the set.

Alongside the central issue of the indicators, the draft negotiating text shows deep divergences in the sections dealing with the use of the indicators after Belém: the Baku Adaptation Roadmap and approaches to adaptation. Positions range from those calling for a clear technical mandate to continue the work after COP30, to those concerned about duplication, additional costs, and an excessive expansion of the mandate of technical bodies. The debate on adaptation approaches appears less central, but resistance remains from countries such as India and the LMDC to including lists of approaches, while others are requesting at least recognition of the diversity of contexts and the need for support for those with limited capacities. Complicating the picture further is the section dedicated to MEL (monitoring, evaluation and learning), where the text remains extremely fragmented. There is no agreement on how the indicators should actually be used to monitor progress: some countries are calling for a clear, Party-driven framework, while others fear that an overly prescriptive evaluation system could effectively become an implicit judgment on the capacities of countries with fewer resources. Here too, the document is filled with mutually incompatible options. Yet without MEL, it becomes impossible to define the connection with the 2028 Global Stocktake, which must assess not only Parties’ mitigation efforts but also their adaptation actions — and could finally do so in a more uniform and detailed way.

Climate finance is also on the table

It is in the chapter on adaptation finance that the negotiations reveal their most political and divisive nature. The chapter on Means of Implementation (MoI), which is closely linked to the GGA indicators, has become one of the most sensitive areas of negotiation. Many developing countries are calling for specific indicators on finance, technology, and capacity-building, considering them essential for giving credibility to the entire GGA, while several developed countries reject the idea that the indicator set should include measures of financial flows or access to funds. This divergence is turning the Means of Implementation into the real bottleneck of the negotiations: for some groups, without adequate means of implementation, the GGA risks remaining an aspirational framework with no operational capacity.

Developing countries are insisting that the new post-2025 financial architecture include a clear, predictable target, with a significant share of the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG agreed at COP29) dedicated to adaptation. This is not a minor detail: current flows, after peaking in 2022 (≈USD 27 billion), fell in 2023 to around USD 26 billion, far from the commitment to double them by 2025 compared to the 2019 level (≈USD 20 billion). They are even further from the actual needs, estimated by the 2025 Adaptation Gap Report at USD 310–365 billion per year by 2035, i.e., 12–14 times higher than current volumes and even exceeding the total value of the new global financial goal.

Developed countries, on the other hand, continue to prefer a vaguer approach, lacking binding targets and without a dedicated sub-goal. The NCQG is proof of this: USD 300 billion per year by 2035 for all climate action (mitigation + adaptation), with no internal breakdown. In practice, this setup risks crystallizing the current imbalance: today, adaptation receives only 26% of international climate finance, mostly in the form of debt (≈58% of flows in 2022–2023), with non-concessional loans growing at 7% per year. In short, the financial situation for adaptation should improve, but it is actually worsening year after year.

On the private finance side, the margins remain equally limited: compared to the national priorities outlined in NAPs and NDCs, UNEP estimates a potential of around USD 50 billion per year by 2035, i.e., just 15–20% of the needs. Currently, only about USD 5 billion per year is being mobilized, and many of the proposed instruments—insurance, blended finance, and PPPs—risk reducing the financing gap but not the funding gap, effectively shifting costs onto households and public budgets in developing countries and creating a potential “adaptation investment trap”.

It is in this context that several groups link the credibility of the entire Global Goal on Adaptation to the presence of adequate, predictable, and largely concessional Means of Implementation, calling for a massive increase in public finance (at least USD 120 billion per year by 2030, according to the “tripling the doubling” proposal by developing countries), as well as higher quality and simplified access to funds. They also call for consistency between the GGA, the NCQG, and the Baku–Belém Roadmap to 1.3T, which aims to bring total climate finance to USD 1.3 trillion per year by 2035.

This is where the tension in the negotiations arises: for developing countries, setting GGA indicators without defining how adaptation will be financed risks making the entire process meaningless. This is where the tension in the negotiations arises: for developing countries, setting GGA indicators without defining how adaptation will be financed risks rendering the entire exercise meaningless. For developed countries, on the other hand, keeping the financial discussion within the framework of the NCQG, without specific commitments, is the only politically acceptable compromise. The result is technical progress that is constantly slowed by political debate: many delegates openly acknowledge that the battle over finance is beginning to overlap with that over indicators, slowing the entire process at precisely the moment it should be accelerating toward the political week.

Finally, rights, gender, and CBDR-RC (Common But Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities) remain among the most overlooked issues in the text. Many groups, particularly several Latin American countries, call for indicators to fully reflect cross-cutting considerations: the vulnerability of at-risk groups, inclusion of children and youth, persons with disabilities, Indigenous peoples and traditional knowledge, gender, and human rights. The inclusion of a reference to people of African descent is supported by Colombia, AILAC, and Grupo Sur, but contested by AOSIS. 

Politically, many developing countries insist that the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR-RC) and Article 9.1 on finance be clearly reflected in the preamble and operative sections, as requested by LMDC, the Arab Group, and the African Group, while several developed countries resist in order not to alter the architecture of the Paris Agreement. The discussion on indicators intersects directly with these issues: some, such as the inclusion of data on national budgets or financial taxonomies, raise strong concerns in the Global South because they are perceived as potential additional burdens. The result is a still-precarious balance between the commitment to recognize rights, equity, and national context diversity, and the fear that such references could turn into implicit obligations or unagreed evaluation criteria.

For now, the prevailing impression is that, amid underdeveloped texts, procedural frustration, and deep differences over the role of indicators, the negotiations are still stuck in a preliminary phase, and that unlocking them will require a difficult political compromise, on which the second week of COP30 will be decisive. During the closing plenary of the technical work on Saturday, Bangladesh requested the floor to express its regret over this negotiating table, where high expectations had been placed.

Article by Anna Pelicci, head of the Italian Climate Network delegation at COP30 in Belém.

Cover image: photo by CAN International