LDYC’s COP30 Stories Catalogue

Reaction To The Baku-Belem Roadmap to $1.3 Trillion Report

COP29 betrayed our hopes and expectations from a conference held in the spirit of multilateralism. With an enormous gap between the climate finance needed on the ground and the funds delivered by developed countries, COP29 was an opportunity to begin redressing the injustice faced by the most vulnerable countries and communities, which have done the least to cause the climate breakdown we are enduring today. Yet while developing countries requested $1.3 trillion per year, the final agreement committed just $300 billion annually by 2035. To make it worse, the final outcome shifts responsibility onto actors such as the private sector—entities that have never signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change or the Paris Agreement and that, in many cases, continue to exploit both the planet and its people. As of June 2025, only USD 788 million has been pledged to the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) by 27 contributors. Current pledges are merely a drop in the ocean relative to the needs of developing countries. Furthermore, the new goal doesn’t explicitly include loss and damage. Reaction to the report of the “Baku to Belem Roadmap to $1.3 Trillion” As young people from frontline communities, we welcome the ambition and the commitment to a shared just and sustainable future echoed by the “Baku to Belem Roadmap” report. Yet, as young people who will inherit the triple planetary emergency —climate crises, biodiversity loss, and pollution—and the financial systems meant to address this, we raise serious concerns about the direction this roadmap points to.  The report outlines a broad framework to mobilize $1.3 trillion from all actors by 2035 to developing countries, focusing on 5Rs: Replenishing, Rebalancing, Rechanneling, Revamping, and Reshaping. It spans across mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage and just transition and emphasizes putting the most affected communities at the heart of our climate response. Yet, it fails to reaffirm the moral and legal obligation of developed countries to provide new, additional, accessible, predictable, grant-based and at the scale required finance to developing countries, well established under the UNFCCC regime and the Paris Agreement. It blatantly fails to show that the roadmap should be filled in maximum proportion from public finance by the developed countries, in order to realize it. It barely recommends that developed countries achieve manyfold increases in the delivery of grants and concessional climate finance and work together on a delivery plan and communicate their intended contributions and pathways toward achieving the at least USD 300 billion goal by 2035. Much of the focus is on the private sector and climate finance is framed merely as an investment. We are gravely concerned about centering the private sector as the main source of climate finance in the roadmap, thereby granting the polluter countries a pretext to shift their responsibility and burdening developing countries, already drowning in debt. Climate finance, especially on loss and damage, should be guided by reparation and solidarity to achieve climate justice. The reliance on markets, loans and risk instruments will only exacerbate the systemic pattern of debt burden, rather than developed countries paying according to the fair share of their historical emissions and capacity. For many vulnerable nations, loss and damage is a matter of survival– undermining the right to life, development and climate action. The roadmap places importance on the need to tackle loss and damage. However, no concrete commitments or strong recommendations are made.  Today’s young people and the generations that follow will bear the brunt of the climate crisis’s most severe consequences. The IPCC warns that children who were ten years old or younger in 2020 are projected to experience nearly four times as many extreme events by 2100 under 1.5 °C of global warming, and almost five times as many under 3 °C. By contrast, someone who was 55 in 2020 would not face any comparable increase in their remaining lifetime under either warming scenario. The necessity of engaging vulnerable communities, including women and girls, children and youth, persons with disabilities, Indigenous Peoples, local communities, migrants and refugees, among others, is recognized within the roadmap. However, there are no recommendations on their meaningful participation and co-design of solutions.  Reforming the global financial architecture must not mean privatizing climate responsibility. Moreover, climate finance mobilized through new and innovative channels, such as levies, should be directed through multilateral climate funds like the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) and the Adaptation Fund, to ensure equitable access and support their replenishment. Overall, the roadmap risks continuing a system where the poorest face the heaviest cost of the crises that they didn’t cause. This has to change. (The statement draws on our two submissions to the roadmap.) Quotes “This report overlooks a critical sixth action front on finance that the Roadmap implicitly depends on: Reneging. Developed countries continue to retreat from their commitments to provide public climate finance, shifting the burden onto private sector involvement. In response, we call for the implementation of global solidarity levies and other forms of taxation targeting the extractivist class, to ensure climate action and reparations are publicly funded and equitably delivered.”Nicolas Gaulin, Global Coordinator  “The roadmap fails to emphasize the core obligation of developed countries to provide predictable and adequate climate finance to the developing countries”Eva Peace Mukayiranga, Training Working Group Coordinator  “Every dollar of public finance delayed is another home lost, another community uprooted. The Baku to Belem Roadmap shows that it is possible to deliver trillions to tackle the climate crisis with urgency—but it doesn’t hold developed countries accountable to pay for the damage already done. Instead, it draws heavily on the private sector, risking reinforcing debt burdens for the many, while serving the profits of the few.” Shreya K.C., Advocacy Working Group Coordinator 

Debt Relief to Support Loss and Damage Finance — Now!

“Loss and Damage” refers to the climate change impacts that go beyond what communities can adapt to. Within the Loss and Damage Youth Coalition, we believe there is no climate justice without dedicated finance for Loss and Damage, especially given that the least wealthy in 2019 accounted for only 12% of total greenhouse gas emissions. Despite contributing the least to the problem, developing countries are bearing a disproportionate share of its consequences. Many are falling into a “debt trap” as they take on loans to repair the devastation caused by climate change estimated between $100 and $500 billion annually 2 , often at the expense of their education, healthcare, and economic development. Different reports show that even with the current policies in place, global warming is likely to. exceed 1.5°C, which means an increase in more severe floods, droughts, sea level rise, food loss, loss of lives and other impacts to the frontline communities. The climate crisis coupled with the current flaws in the global financial architecture that favors developed countries and penalized poorer nations through high cost of capital, high interest rates, short maturities and other factors that only increases the debt distress of vulnerable countries. As we are in a critical time, where countries are exploring new innovative sources of finance along with identifying efforts to reform the MDB/IFIs, it is essential that these reforms truly meet the needs and priorities of developing countries, both in scale and access to climate finance. We stand in solidarity with the Turn Debt into Hope campaign and the Jubilee report commissioned by Pope Francis to call on leaders to give back hope to those bearing everyday the impact of climate change while not responsible by : Providing A debt for nature swap that allows to transfer debt repayment into loss and damage, adaptation, or mitigation projects Debt cancellation for countries facing debt distress to increase fiscal space for recovery and resilience. A reform of the MDB/IFIs to ensure that developing countries are not stuck in a vicious cycle of debt in order to recover from climate shock. Additionally, Loss and Damage Finance provided to developing countries should only be in the form of grants not loans to ensure that climate justice does not come at the cost of deeper indebtedness.