What you need to understand about climate and development in 2026

One year ago, U.S. President Donald Trump came into office and almost immediately slashed the country’s involvement in international climate diplomacy. The global climate community spent the last 12 months figuring out how to maintain momentum while keeping out of Trump’s way. Countries ultimately showed a willingness to continue working multilaterally, as shown at the 80th United Nations General Assembly in New York and the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Belém, Brazil. But as the European Union and the United Kingdom deprioritized climate to focus on their own military might, it emboldened low- and middle-income countries such as Colombia to demand more definitive action on phasing out fossil fuels. As we yawn into 2026, experts are looking back at the year wondering what progress was made in 2025 on climate finance commitments from the previous year, and how promises made in 2025 will be carried on in 2026. They are also skeptical about how the year’s biggest and most consequential conference — the 31st meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, aka COP31 — will be run effectively by two countries on two different continents. “I wouldn’t say I’m hopeful,” Debbie Hillier, head of the Zurich Climate Resilience Alliance Program at Mercy Corps, told Devex. “But it’s not a disaster.” Here’s what to watch this year. The public finance that’s frozen in time Back in 2024, countries agreed to scale up climate funding to $300 billion per year for low- to middle-income countries by 2035, but so far, there’s very little information on if and how that is happening. “We agreed to this $300 billion dollar a year goal by 2035. But how much of that is going to be public money, how much is going to be mobilized?” asked Joe Thwaites, international climate finance director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC. Since 2015, countries have provided multiyear climate finance goals to create a baseline expectation of support that aligns with the longer-term goal. But now, almost no countries have announced a five-year pledge past 2025. “There is a sense that no one wants to move first and put themselves out on a limb,” Thwaites said. “The COP process can provide a nudge to countries, but at the end of the day, this has to go through their domestic parliaments or congresses.” Experts are also wondering what the follow-up will be to the Baku-to-Belém road map, a financial blueprint published just before COP30 to scale up and mobilize at least $1.3 trillion annually by 2035 for climate action in developing countries. Many expected this to be addressed at COP30, but it was barely mentioned — in part because the road map came out too late for people to digest and discuss it in Brazil, Thwaites said. “The whole Baku-to-Belém Roadmap kind of drifted and disappeared,” Hillier said. “And that’s got to be on purpose. If Brazil really wanted to make this thing happen, they could have made it happen.” During COP30, there was only one 1.5-hour session dedicated to the road map, Hillier mentioned. The Brazilian COP presidency has promised to produce a second report on it this year. One spot that Hillier is hoping to see evolve is the new two-year work program on Article 9 of the Paris Agreement, announced by the Brazilian COP presidency in November. Article 9 concerns the provision and mobilization of finance, and Hillier said she could imagine seeing the Baku-to-Belém road map and the $300 billion goal placed in those talks. “$1.3 trillion is a lot to achieve in 10 years time,” she said.“That’s not just going to happen by accident.” ‘Green-hushing’ and the private sector As public finance remains uncertain, many are looking to the private sector to fill gaps, but that too is precarious. The European Union is coming under “enormous pressure,” said Thwaites, to weaken its climate standards for private finance. Meanwhile, many companies that do work on climate are growing increasingly quiet about how they’re doing it — a phenomenon dubbed “green-hushing.” “A lot of investors and private actors know that climate change is a big problem,” Thwaites said. “If you’re an insurer, you know that climate change is happening. They’re walking a tightrope of not wanting to anger the U.S. government but wanting to carry on making strategically smart investments that are pro-climate and green.” In the past, Thwaites said, companies would maybe exaggerate and brag too much about what they are doing on climate. Now, they’re carrying on doing climate work, but not talking about it, making progress extremely difficult to track. “I’d rather they carried on doing the good work,” Thwaites said. “But it does create a problem if we’re trying to track progress towards climate goals and we don’t actually know what investors are doing, what banks are doing, or what public institutions are doing.” What’s next for 2025’s big issue: Adaptation At COP30, countries agreed to triple adaptation finance by 2035. While a win on the surface, many in the global south were disappointed, arguing that it lacked specifics and would take too long. There is currently no consensus on where the accountability for this goal sits within the UNFCCC framework. Negotiators are eyeing several potential landing spots, including the Article 9 work program. Technical work on adaptation indicators will be a dominant theme throughout 2026, said Hillier. The recent reduction of indicators down to 59 has sparked a rift within the NGO community and among government delegations. Some view the decision to delay the finalization of these indicators until COP32 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as a missed opportunity, while others see it as a pragmatic test drive period. This two-year window allows countries to experiment with the current metrics before refining them in Ethiopia in 2027. “I’m looking at how to refine the [Global Goal on Adaptation] indicators we got at COP30,” Jeffrey Qi, a policy adviser with the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s resilience program, told Devex. “It will need a lot of work to operationalise them and help countries enhance their [Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning] system to report on these indicators. And more work will be needed to refine them so they actually make sense and are methodologically sound.” A pivotal factor in the 2026 adaptation landscape will be the leadership transition within the African group of negotiators, or AGN, Hillier said. Starting Jan. 1, 2026, Antwi-Boasiako Amoah of Ghana will take the helm for a two-year term, succeeding Tanzania’s Ephraim Mwega. This shift is widely seen as a reset for the bloc following a period of internal friction, particularly between major regional players such as Kenya and Tanzania, which at times hampered a unified African voice. “I think the Ghana leadership will be able to bring more countries together to reach common African positions,” said Hillier, referring to the importance of COP32 in Ethiopia for the adaptation indicators. Under Ghana’s leadership, Hillier expects the 2026 agenda to pivot toward a justice-centered approach, focusing on translating technical indicators into practical, grant-based finance mechanisms that recognize Africa’s “special circumstances” rather than adding to the continent’s debt burden. COP31 and the next big thing Following a yearlong stalemate, COP31 in 2026 will feature not one, but two presidencies — setting the stage for a fair amount of confusion and potentially too many cooks in the kitchen. Early communication suggested a clean split — with Turkey leading the action agenda and hosting the physical summit, and Australia heading the formal negotiations — yet Hillier said that these lines have become increasingly blurred. Observers are watching closely to see how the two nations resolve potential friction, especially given their historically different stances on fossil fuel road maps. This split arrangement is designed to leverage Australia’s close ties with the Pacific — which will host a critical pre-COP gathering — ensuring that the existential threats to island nations remain central to the discourse, even as the main summit takes place thousands of miles away. With COP29 focused on finance and COP30 emphasizing adaptation, 2026 could be focused on mitigation. Experts noted that after the failed attempt to secure a binding fossil fuel phaseout road map in Belém, the pressure will be on COP31 to deliver. This effort will be bolstered by a much-anticipated April 2026 international conference in Colombia specifically dedicated to fossil fuel transition. “The fossil fuel meeting in Colombia is huge for two reasons,” said Hillier. “One in terms of the technical way forward, but also politically there’s going to be a lot of focus on it — whether the U.S. manages to squash it, whether it just doesn’t bother.” She also pointed out that the coalition of countries supporting a transition away from fossil fuels is already hefty — boasting around 80 countries. “This isn’t just a coalition of a few small progressive countries pushing against the tide.” Climate beyond the COP This year will be awash in conferences, with the biodiversity and desertification COPs taking place in Armenia and Mongolia, respectively. But experts said that they are especially interested in what goes on outside the typical climate spaces — the Group of 20 largest economies, Group of Seven advanced economies, and smaller gatherings of finance ministers. “A lot of the key financial decisions on the plumbing of the global financial architecture and the reform processes aren't going to be determined by the COP because it’s not within their purview,” said Thwaites. “The COPs set the goals, and they have value because they bring so many countries together and give them voice, but the delivery is going to be determined in a lot of different institutions — public and private.” When it comes to the Baku-to-Belém road map — the primary financial ambition over the next decade, Thwaites said that a lot of the decisions are up to finance ministers. “They don’t typically show up to COP in big numbers like the environment and climate ministries do,” he said. “But they are the ones at the end of the day that make the key financial decisions.” This is also where action at home can be taken, he said. “It’s easy to come up and shout at negotiators. The tougher question is to sit down with members of parliament on the budget committee and explain why it’s important above all the others.”