Aishwarya Hansen Joshi, Lead – Strategy and Partnerships at Rabia Transitions and Dr Chantal Naidoo, Founder and Executive Director of Rabia Transitions. Photo: bird story agency
Climate pledges ring hollow if the money arrives on terms that deepen debt and compromise local needs. At COP31, African and other Global South negotiators must demand financing conditions that turn promises into stronger resilience, essential services and dignified livelihoods.
By Chantal Naidoo and Aishwarya Hansen Joshi
10 November 2026
Every COP has two stories. The first is told on the main stage, in pledges and headline numbers. The second is written in the months that follow, in closed rooms, where technical officers turn those pledges into financial terms.
With the world heading toward 2.8 degrees of warming this century, according to the UN’s latest Emissions Gap Report, the Global South needs both stories to be explicit. At COP31, the negotiations must ultimately answer two critical questions. How much real finance emerges and on what terms will they be provided.
Across much of Africa, the inability to answer these questions is yielding dire consequences. In January, floods wreaked havoc across Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe. More than 600,000 people were affected in Mozambique alone, while repairing roads and bridges in South Africa’s Limpopo province is expected to cost around USD 240 million. A month later, Morocco went from seven years of drought to floods that displaced 180,000 people and inundated more than 100,000 hectares of farmland. And El Niño could push another 12 million people in southern Africa into hunger, according to the World Food Programme.
The impact on energy systems has been equally devastating. Zambia and Zimbabwe share Lake Kariba, one of their biggest sources of electricity. After the last drought, the Kariba South power station, built to produce over 1,000 megawatts, has struggled to produce even 300. The authority running the dam has cut water allocations for power generation next year by more than a third. The result is more power cuts for homes, clinics and small businesses, and greater spending on diesel generators.
Each of these disasters land on government budgets already burdened by debt repayments that constrain spending on health, education and resilience. Borrowing is sadly the status quo for preparatory and recovery efforts, which deepens fiscal pressure. Even as we continue to fight for better financing options for disaster preparedness and recovery, we also need to fight for better financing terms. How much difference can terms make? A great deal.
UNCTAD estimates that borrowing on the same terms as richer countries would save developing countries around US$500 billion annually. That exceeds the US$300 billion a year that developed countries have committed to for climate action by 2035. Such savings require no new pledge, although achieving them requires changes in financing practice. They would complement, rather than replace, developed countries’ obligations to provide additional financing for climate responses.
Côte d’Ivoire offers a glimpse of what re-negotiated terms can achieve. In 2024, it replaced expensive debt with cheaper financing offering 15 years to repay and a six-year grace period. That freed up around EUR 330 million over five years without increasing its debt, with part of the savings going towards 30 additional secondary schools the country had already planned.
The COPs do not engage with these finer terms. Once the final COP gavel falls, working groups, or multilateral and bilateral development agencies and UNFCCC operating entities such as the Green Climate Fund are left to thrash out the details. This follows developing countries bracing for the inevitable repeated demand for new plans to access each new mechanism or pledge agreed to. Too often, such plans fail to deliver the needed resources on matching terms, as experience across Africa, India, and Latin America shows.
Three areas offer the Africa Group of Negotiators (AGN) and other Global South finance negotiators a space to influence the way financing terms are set post COP. In this way, justice and dignity hard fought for within the negotiation rooms manifest in the fine print of the agreements that determine how implementation unfolds.
Bringing dignity to climate action
COP31 is expected to define the mandate, functions, and first work plan of the Just Transition Mechanism agreed in Belém. The first work plan must focus on how justice and dignity can be built into the financing process from the start, i.e. due diligence, terms and decision-making processes from the start. Critical to this is recognizing workers and communities as rights holders with a legal claim, rather than as stakeholders with a vested interest in outcomes. The JTM must deliver fair decision-making processes and financing that support essential services and people’s ability to build dignified livelihoods.
Anchor the Climate Implementation Bridge in reciprocity
The Bridge aims to match climate projects with public and private finance, starting in Ethiopia, Fiji, Indonesia, Pakistan and Uzbekistan. Implementing projects on the same terms does not advance just transition. Developing countries do the hard work of planning and then funders often deconstruct into single project processes on single project basis. The AGN could ask that the Bridge advocates for portfolio building which includes income and non-income generative components, and sets out general guidance on the financing terms before engaging funders. This does not obviate individual institutional nuances. Funds must flow, and the terms need to accommodate projects subsidising each other, anticipatory relief clauses when a climate disaster strikes, and commitment to rebuild post disasters.
Support the AGN’s call for regular needs-based GCF assessments
Ensure the guidance given to the GCF at COP31 leads to a collective view of what is needed, in what sequence, and over what timeframes to truly build resilience to emergent and dire climate shocks unfolding. The GCF can lead the finer homework to deliver on COP30 promise of tripling adaptation finance by 2035.
At Rabia, we developed the Principles of Inclusive Finance that tackle the fine print post COP pledges. Why did we do this? To offer guard rails to mitigate the power asymmetries and dependencies that dominate in closed rooms. The principles speak to needs-based finance, dignity in term sheets and risk sharing. Our Just Term Sheet offers practical and legal entry points to translate justice and dignity into the negotiation and term sheet development process. It addresses needs articulation, use of proceeds, source of funds, covenants, disclosures, and repayment clauses.
Financing on just terms is one of several obstacles to responsive climate action, but they directly affect what every dollar pledged can achieve.
At COP31, negotiators should secure a mandate that technical teams can carry into subsequent negotiations, turning commitments to justice and dignity into conditions that finance providers and recipients must honour.
_Dr Chantal Naidoo is the Founder and Executive Director of Rabia Transitions, an independent South Africa-based research organisation working reimagining the financial ecosystem to support just and resilient transitions in the context of low carbon and climate resilient development. _
_Aishwarya Hansen Joshi is Lead – Strategy and Partnerships at Rabia Transitions, where she advances the organisation’s research agenda on just transitions, climate negotiations, and finance for climate action. _
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