COP31's BRIDGE should be judged by deals closed, not plans written

Türkiye's COP31 Presidency has named Ethiopia, Fiji, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan as the first pilot countries for its Climate Implementation Bridge (BRIDGE) initiative. BRIDGE, delivered with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), promises country-led support to build finance-ready project portfolios, identify bottlenecks, and improve access to existing international support. 

With Pakistan among the first pilots, BRIDGE will be an early test of how such initiatives can support the energy transition in emerging Asian economies, and whether it can advance the multilateral development bank reforms India championed during its 2023 G20 presidency.

It is not a new fund, and COP31 President-designate Murat Kurum has framed scaling it up by 2035 as a practical way to close the implementation gap. With several developing countries having updated their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and adaptation plans, BRIDGE is a natural next step, since progress often stalls when plans must become projects that lenders and investors will finance. The question is what BRIDGE will do that existing institutions do not.

A crowded field

Little of its stated mandate is new. The Green Climate Fund's (GCF) Readiness Programme has approved more than 900 requests across 142 countries as of August 2026, and its Project Preparation Facility funds feasibility work for specific proposals. The NDC Partnership has helped 68 developing countries prepare NDC implementation and investment plans. Multilateral development banks (MDBs) run a joint long-term strategies programme, and a Country Platform Hub launched at COP30 links national platforms with technical assistance and finance.

UNDP has said its Climate Promise: Forward programme will be the delivery backbone of the Presidency's implementation mechanism, and BRIDGE's concept note promises to build on existing mechanisms. Each pilot country already has at least one comparable process, from Indonesia's Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) to country platform proposals under GCF review in Pakistan and Uzbekistan.

Apart from the GCF's grants, which fund preparation directly, these are coordination layers, and another such layer will not change outcomes on its own. Their pipelines are long, but the list of projects reaching financial close is much smaller. BRIDGE will add value only if it fills gaps that none of them covers today. 

Four functions stand out:

1. Joint appraisal: Country platforms bring funders to one table and map who should finance what, but co-financiers can still require separate feasibility, safeguards, and due diligence checks on the same project. BRIDGE could convene willing financiers to agree on a lead appraiser, a shared assessment framework, and an evidence-sharing mechanism, while each institution keeps its own safeguard and approval decisions.

There is precedent for this. Under the Mutual Reliance Initiative, the European Investment Bank, Agence Française de Développement (AFD), and Germany's KfW keep their own rules but delegate most project-cycle tasks, including appraisal, to a lead financier. They have co-financed 95 projects this way. The Asian Development Bank and the World Bank signed a similar mutual reliance framework in 2025. BRIDGE can use the five pilots to test how far such reliance extends to climate funds and other lenders.

The joint appraisal should also bring the Barbados-led Bridgetown Initiative's focus on the cost of capital down to project level, defining which guarantee, local-currency instrument, or concessional layer each project needs. BRIDGE cannot itself underwrite currency risk or political risk, so providers such as the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) and the currency-hedging fund TCX should join the appraisal early. Projects could then reach investors with an indicative financing structure and identified prospective providers. Where revenues cannot support repayment, grants or public funding may be needed.

2. Targeting gaps that existing support does not cover: Adaptation projects without cash revenues, subnational borrowers and state-owned utilities without sovereign guarantees, and small businesses facing high transaction costs. 

Where sovereign guarantees are capped, as under Pakistan's IMF programme, BRIDGE should steer commercially viable projects towards local-currency structures that need no state backing, such as InfraZamin Pakistan's rupee guarantees.

3. Project-level transparency: Reporting should go beyond plans created and projects identified to show where a specific project is stuck, for how long, and who is responsible for moving it forward.

A public tracker in each pilot country should record every project's stage, the institution that owns it, who funded its preparation, and which financier is engaged. Accountability must run both ways. If a project is waiting on a climate fund's accreditation process, a development bank's appraisal queue, or a risk cover provider, that should be as visible as a delay in a host government's ministry.

BRIDGE's effectiveness should then be judged every year against a simple test: how many projects reach financial close with its support, and at what cost of capital. To avoid claiming credit for projects that were already bankable, the tracker should record the stage at which each project entered BRIDGE and how long it took to close.

4. Turning investor interest into commitments: The roundtables that began in New York should seek approved commitments for named projects, recording the provider, amount, and remaining conditions. Priorities should include the guarantees and concessional finance that the joint appraisal identifies to cut each project's cost of capital. Commitment summaries should appear in the country trackers.

Beyond COP31

A network of willing lenders does not guarantee co-financing. Indonesia's JETP involves up to 20 public and private financial institutions, each running its own credit assessment. By early September 2026, approved financing had reached USD 3.92 billion of more than USD 21 billion committed. Co-financing is more predictable when investors agree eligibility criteria upfront with a lead lender that invests its own money in every loan, as under the International Finance Corporation's (IFC) Managed Co-Lending Portfolio Program. Joint appraisal should favour lead financiers that offer such arrangements.

Continuity matters as much as design. Initiatives launched by one COP Presidency often fade under the next. Ethiopia is both a BRIDGE pilot and the host of COP32 in 2027, offering a natural handover and a first annual checkpoint. 

The new collective quantified goal (NCQG) on climate finance, agreed at COP29 in Baku, sets a target of at least USD 300 billion a year by 2035, with developed countries taking the lead. Parties also agreed to pursue efforts to at least triple annual outflows from UNFCCC funds from 2022 levels by 2030. Better pipelines will not deliver that money, but they will decide how quickly it can be put to work. If BRIDGE takes on these four functions, it can help deliver the NCQG, helping committed finance reach projects faster and producing hard evidence on where and why it is not flowing. That would give COP31's implementation agenda real substance, measured in deals closed rather than plans written.

Shantanu Srivastava is Research Lead, Sustainable Finance and Climate Risk; Dr. Saurabh Trivedi is Lead Specialist, Sustainable Finance and Carbon Markets at South Asia at Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA)