COP30 must turn climate talk into measurable action—Here’s why failure is not an option, especially for India

After years of promises and pledges, the planet is struggling with the much harder task of delivery. Two major studies—State of Climate Action 2025 by the World Resources Institute and the UNEP’s Adaptation Gap Report 2025—highlight this gap. While planet-warming emissions continue to rise, efforts to adapt to a changing climate are lagging far behind the required pace.

To adapt to the climate emergency, developing countries will need between $310 billion and $365 billion every year by 2035, according to UNEP research. Against this need, wealthy nations provided just $26 billion in 2023, down from $28 billion the year before, said the global environment agency. This gap of 12-14 times current funding reveals a basic fracture. Money meant to protect the most vulnerable from rising seas, extreme rains and deadly storms simply isn’t arriving.

Ten years after the historic Paris Agreement, the Belém summit must set shared indicators to convert the pledged Global Goal on Adaptation into something quantifiable. For example, one might want to know how many people early-warning systems cover, how water security is improving or how fast degraded ecosystems are being restored. Adaptation will be fuzzy and difficult to fund unless global communities agree on such indicators.

For India, this moment presents both a threat and an opportunity. Having positioned CoP-30 as an ‘adaptation summit,’ India’s diplomatic credibility hinges on two primary outcomes.

First, it must show unambiguous routes to evaluate if adaptation initiatives actually work by moving beyond vague commitments to real accountability. Second, it must indicate ways to secure reliable grant-based funding for vulnerable countries that do not pile on more national debt. Adapting to the climate catastrophe can no longer play second fiddle to cutting emissions. It must stand on equal footing with mitigation as the world’s main line of defence.

India’s case goes beyond the ethical high ground. It is home to 17% of the world’s population, but has produced only 4% of the planet’s historical emissions. Himalayan glaciers are retreating, threatening water supplies for hundreds of millions; coastal areas face rising seas and stronger cyclones; farming systems struggle with unpredictable monsoons and record heat. India’s adaptation plan should show how climate resilience could create profitable enterprises in agriculture, water management, heat protection and public health that can link various social-safety nets aimed at climate risk mitigation.

The hurdles are admittedly formidable. India and other emerging economies will be pressing for more equitable terms, which mostly means more grants for community projects such as coastal protection, and public-private blended finance for large-scale infrastructure. The argument is simple. Everyone gains from resilience, which should not rely solely on borrowing. The credibility of the global talks will depend on how quickly rich countries respond at Belém.

Adaptation actions call for consistent and predictable investment, which is why climate finance has become the central fault line in global negotiations. The developed world has yet to fulfil its $100 billion yearly promise to support poorer nations. The post-2025 financial objective on this front needs to be bigger, more equitable and more dependable.

The Belém summit offers an opportunity to link finance with performance. Both recipients and donors will come to trust in the application of climate finance if funds are linked to well-defined and verifiable results, like more robust flood defences or restored ecosystems. This openness might also appeal to private investors, who often steer clear of adaptation efforts since outcomes are hard to trace.

The Belém imperative is about fulfilling rather than announcing new objectives. This means aligning national adaptation strategies with global standards to monitor and compare results. It means reforming financial systems for predictability, so that nations can plan multi-year resilience programmes instead of scrambling for sporadic project funding.

As climate negotiators gather in Belém, the Amazon itself offers a lesson. Forest systems don’t adapt through isolated fixes but through connected resilience—roots that anchor soil, canopies that regulate rainfall and diverse species that can act as a buffer against shocks. Human adaptive systems should mirror this connection, linking financing to planning, planning to action, and action to clearly visible outcomes.

For India, CoP-30 is an opportunity to help define the rules that will govern long-term resilience funding and measurement. The country’s task is to lead this integration and prove that a developing nation can champion adaptation not as a burden imposed by climate injustice, but as an investment in shared prosperity.

For the people of India and hundreds of millions more around the world, failure is not an option the planet can afford.

The author is an independent expert based in New Delhi, Kolkata and Odisha. Twitter: @scurve Instagram: @soumya.scurve.