Climate Talks in 2025: Converging Crises, Rising Stakes, and Diminished Returns

Even as 2025 risks becoming a year of deferral on climate action, key moments ahead—from FFD4 in Seville, which aims to reform global finance, to COP30 in Brazil—offer a chance to revive trust, scale ambition, and restore multilateralism’s promise

The world is heading into one of its most crowded and consequential climate calendars in years. Between this month’s UN negotiations in Bonn, the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD4) in Spain’s Seville, and the COP30 summit in Brazil’s Belem, 2025 was supposed to be a year of delivery. Instead, it’s shaping up to be a year of deferral — where political gridlock, global conflicts, and financial shortfalls are threatening to derail progress on the world’s most urgent agenda.

This poses more than just a diplomatic problem. It signals the need for international multilateralism to stay credible in a world increasingly defined by war, resource nationalism, and widening inequality.

June’s climate talks in Bonn were meant to prepare the ground for meaningful action at COP30 in November. What they helped bring out was  a preview of the fault lines that continue to plague global climate diplomacy. The talks began with a procedural deadlock after developing countries—led by India and the G77+China—called for climate finance to be formally prioritised on the agenda – their position rooted in legal commitments under the Paris Agreement and long-standing unmet promises. Developed countries resisted this push, citing economic and geopolitical pressures and the cost of multiple ongoing wars.

And while the developing nations’ push back to this response by developed ones is along expected lines, it is hardly helpful to bring about a resolution. Richer countries have pointed to economic pressures and ongoing conflicts. Yet, it is tough to ignore the developing nations’ argument that without adequate, predictable finance, talk of higher climate ambition is “just rhetoric.”  The Baku-to-Belém Roadmap — a commitment to mobilise $1.3 trillion annually in climate finance by 2030 — is crippled without binding mechanisms, burden-sharing framework among developed countries, and clarity on grant-based versus market-rate finance.

While the recent announcement of a $250 million initial disbursement from the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, could be seen as some progress, it is also woefully inadequate in the face of mounting climate devastation and a reminder of the persistent failure by wealthy nations to provide the scale of finance urgently needed.

The OECD has warned that without systemic reform in 2025, the gap between the development finance needs for poorer countries and the available resources could balloon to US$ 6.4 trillion by 2030. Key funding access barriers for developing nations – including creditworthiness filters, fiscal ceilings imposed by the International Monetary Fund, and slow disbursement by Multilateral Development Banks – need urgent reforms.

Finance, Reform, and a Shrinking Pie

The Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD4), scheduled in July, is supposed to focus on fixing the architecture that delivers climate and development finance. And while expectations remain subdued, the test will be the implementation of the newly launched Sevilla Platform for Action, being put forward by Spain in collaboration with the UN.

While this outcome document was adopted in the absence of the US because the world’s largest economy withdrew from the process having objected to proposed UN involvement in debt negotiations and calls to triple MDB lending, it still holds hope by keeping the focus on what matters. 
It’s perhaps befitting that the conference is being held at a time when temperatures in Seville are expected to hit 47°C — a timely reminder of climate impacts amid the backdrop of mounting global economic pressures.

As it is, developing nations are facing funding challenges including deep UN budget cuts, shrinking aid flows and escalating conflicts. In 2023 alone, developing countries spent $1.4 trillion servicing external debt, with interest payments at a 20-year high -– signalling the need for urgent reforms to the global financial systems to make funds available to tackle climate challenges while ensuring economic growth. This makes the FFD4 conversations more crucial as planned discussions include ways to make public spending more effective and improve domestic revenue collection, strengthening collaboration between multilateral and national development banks and expanding local currency financing.

Beefing up BRICS

These very themes are also likely to come up at the BRICS Summit where the heads of states from major emerging economies are expected to demand fairer, more effective international climate finance and technology transfer. The grouping, which has now beefed up its ranks much beyond the initial members Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa to 11 full members, including UAE, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Egypt, Ethiopia and Iran now represents 40% of the world’s economy.  

The bloc has, for the first time, forged a unified position on climate funding — just months before FFD4 and COP30 — when it approved a joint climate finance framework that calls for reforming multilateral development banks, scaling up concessional finance, and mobilising private capital to support climate action in the Global South. A move that’s even more important in the context of an evident backtracking on climate by European leadership.

French President Emmanuel Macron has openly called for a “pause” in new EU environmental regulations and for delaying the adoption of the bloc’s 2040 climate target at the June 2025 EU summit in Brussels, citing concerns over competitiveness and economic strain. This shift, echoed by other European countries, risks eroding the EU’s credibility as a climate leader just as BRICS is consolidating its influence and presenting itself as an alternative centre of gravity in global climate negotiations, especially at a time of a vacuum created by the absence of US leadership.

This EU stance also signals that Brazil will have a tougher job of building consensus at the COP30.

The Cost of Conflict

Yet, the biggest tectonic shift threatening climate conversations this year is a world in conflict. The wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and now the broader Middle East are not only driving up defense budgets—they are crowding out development and climate finance. Global military expenditure hit a record $2.7 trillion in 2024, with the US, China, Russia and Germany accounting for 60% of the total.

Recent analysis shows that NATO countries alone spent 52 times more on their militaries than they delivered in climate finance to the world’s poorest countries. Militaries themselves are major emitters, responsible for an estimated 5.5% of global greenhouse gases. As defense budgets rise, the fiscal and political space for climate action shrinks.

Wars not only divert resources, they change political appetites. In an era of securitised diplomacy, climate issues are struggling to remain at the top of the agenda.

COP30: Brazil’s Test

Against this backdrop, Brazil has laid out an ambitious agenda for COP30: accelerating renewables, curbing deforestation, advancing energy efficiency, and enabling a just transition. But Brazil’s own officials have also been clear —  without concrete progress on finance, many countries simply will not sign on to higher ambition.

This is a recognition that for much of the Global South, climate action without finance is no longer politically or economically tenable. India, Brazil, AOSIS, and the African Group are aligned in holding the line on finance, equity, and the principle of Common But Differentiated Responsibilities. These meetings — Bonn, FFD4, BRICS and COP30 — are the scaffolding holding up a fragile international consensus on how the world manages climate risk. But if consensus frays and if the financial and political imbalances continue to deepen, the foundations of multilateralism will begin to crack.

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Archana Chaudhary

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