Mafalda Duarte, executive director of the United Nations' Green Climate Fund, said Nepal’s flood disaster and Europe’s wildfires should force attention back onto the cost of climate change. Speaking in Koror on Sept. 2, she warned that many countries do not understand the world faces tipping points from which it cannot go back.
Who Gets Left Waiting
"We see globally climate change dropping in terms of priorities, with other things – conflicts and shocks – taking priority," Duarte told AFP. That line says plenty about how power works when disaster hits. The money moves fast for emergencies the powerful choose to treat as urgent. Climate, she said, gets treated as something the world can afford to delay. "We see when there is will, that finance is mobilised to respond to emergencies. For some reason, we don’t see the same type of response to climate – as if we can afford to wait," she said.
The Green Climate Fund was established by the UN to help developing countries deal with the impacts of climate change, and it has invested US$19 billion across 134 developing countries. That’s the official machinery. It still depends on states deciding whether to pay in, and the latest signals from the rich world are blunt. The US withdrew from the fund in January, and Britain halved its contribution in May.
The People at the Bottom Pay First
Duarte said the devastation caused by the Nepal flood disaster should push political focus back to climate change. "I would hope that this, plus the heatwaves this summer, plus the wildfires... These things are now happening everywhere. This is not a phenomenon of developing countries," she said, pointing to the deadly fires and heatwave across Europe. The damage is spreading, but the burden still lands hardest on places with the least room to absorb it.
Duarte was in Palau for the annual summit of Pacific island leaders, who see climate change as their biggest security threat. Pacific governments reacted with dismay on Sept. 2 to a UN report that found the world would fail to limit global warming to 1.5 deg C above pre-industrial levels, hastening climate impacts. The report reads like another warning from the top of the system. The people living with the consequences already know the score.
What the Institutions Deliver
"It always surprises me as to how we can have so much information, and can act so little," Duarte said. "We cannot give up hope," she added. The line lands in a world where institutions keep producing reports while the crisis keeps moving faster than their procedures.
The fund is increasing its work on adaptation in the Pacific, and has doubled its investment in the region in three years to US$1 billion. Duarte also acknowledged frustration among small countries trying to access the fund, though she said the process has sped up to an average of nine months. Nine months. For communities facing floods, heatwaves, and wildfires, that’s the tempo of bureaucracy, not survival.
Marshall Islands climate envoy Tina Stege, the Pacific’s envoy for COP31, said on Sept. 2 that "urgent and concrete" progress was needed to improve access to climate finance for small island states. She said a separate UN "loss and damage" fund, agreed on four years ago to help developing nations respond to climate disasters, was "an empty bucket." That’s the shape of the promise: a fund on paper, a bucket with nothing in it, and island states still waiting for the machinery of global power to move before the water rises again.