Adaptation Finance Gap Hits $420 Billion, COP31 Opens in Antalya, Pano AI Bets on Drone Partnership, and More

Editor’s Note: My apologies to paying members for not posting the regular members-only feature last Thursday (November 5). I fell ill and was unable to complete the article in time. It will be published this Thursday (November 12) instead.

A COP30 pledge to triple adaptation finance by 2035 would cover just 20% to 29% of developing countries’ needs, according to the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) latest Adaptation Gap Report.

Inflation will lift annual needs from US$305bn in 2024 prices to US$420bn by 2035, UNEP’s calculations show. In contrast, the promise made at last year’s UN climate summit to triple international adaptation finance would deliver only US$85bn to US$120bn a year.

“At climate COP31 in Türkiye and beyond, nations must focus on intensifying efforts to achieve the COP30 Global Mutirão aspiration of tripling adaptation finance by 2035 – while understanding that they will need to go even higher to save lives, avoid losses and damages and protect economies,” wrote Inger Andersen, UNEP Executive Director, in the report’s foreword.

International public adaptation finance from developed to developing countries ranged between US$28.2-31.7bn in 2024, the report adds — up just US$1bn from 2023. The slow growth puts the Glasgow Climate Pact goal of achieving roughly US$40bn of adaptation finance by 2025 in doubt. However, the latest data shows multilateral development banks (MDBs) expanded their adaptation lending in 2025, which could still close the shortfall. In 2025, MDB adaptation finance to low- and middle-income countries rose 31% to US$34.6bn. Poorer countries are also increasing the amount of climate finance they supply to one another, with contributions rising to US$9.6bn in 2024 from US$3.8bn in 2019.

Private capital mobilized for adaptation doubled to US$3bn between 2019 and 2024, largely supported by guarantees and loss-absorbing sweeteners provided by public financial institutions. UNEP warned that adaptation intent across these flows is “highly variable”, and estimates private finance may narrow the gap in public-oriented needs by only 15% to 20%. Private adaptation financing remains predominantly targeted at the private sector’s own needs, rather than in support of public climate-proofing goals.

Least Developed Countries and Small Island States face adaptation needs of US$40bn to US$50bn a year, equal to 3% to 4% of their GDP. Relative to the size of their economies, that is twice the burden of upper-middle-income developing countries. Flows to these countries remain below their 2022 peak.

“When we fail to invest in adaptation today, we risk paying a much higher price tomorrow. And that price is not only measured in dollars. It is measured in lives lost, homes destroyed and futures taken away,” said Mattias Söderberg, Global Climate Lead at the philanthropy DanChurchAid. Earlier this year, the organization blasted rich countries for allocating only small shares of climate finance to adaptation.

The 2025 Adaptation Gap report said public adaptation flows reached US$26bn in 2023, with needs of US$310-365bn a year by 2035.

The Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) said tracked adaptation finance reached US$69bn in 2024, up about 7% a year since 2019. Private flows fell to US$3.8bn from US$8.6bn in 2023, but are still higher than in 2019. Transport is the sector seeing the most growth in adaptation financing, with flows more than tripling to US$6.7bn. In contrast, finance for disaster-risk management has barely budged, inching up to US$8.6bn from US$7.7bn. (CPI)

Private financial institutions are struggling to scale adaptation finance because they cannot turn climate priorities into deals they can package and price, a new UN-backed paper supported by the Global Environment Facility says. The paper identifies four “information flows” that, if improved, could speed progress: physical risk data, committed capital tracking, adaptation impact indicators, and evidence of financial performance. Recommendations include weaving physical risk data into existing credit metrics used by financial institutions and having governments fund hazard and exposure data as a public good. (UNEP FI)

Adaptation investments primed for deployment represent a US$460bn annual opportunity in a world warmed above 2°C, according to the McKinsey Global Institute. But that covers just 40% of the US$1.2trn needed every year to protect vulnerable communities to rich-world standards. Moreover, some two-thirds of the deployable market concerns solutions for high-income countries — such as cooling, stormwater management, and integration. The US$690bn labeled hard-to-deploy could be unlocked via cost-cutting innovations, stronger policy and market incentives, and smarter revenue and financing structures to make adaptation investments ‘bankable’. (McKinsey)

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) will launch a global adaptation bond at COP31, in an effort to channel private capital into rural climate resilience. IFAD President Alvaro Lario will unveil the instrument at an event co-hosted with the OPEC Fund. The agency has yet to disclose its size and contractual terms. Small-scale farmers grow a third of the world’s food yet receive less than 1% of climate finance to date. (IFAD)

Outgoing European Central Bank (ECB) President Christine Lagarde urged Europe to establish a public-private reinsurance scheme as part of its new climate resilience framework, warning that future climate shocks may prove harder to bounce back from without an appropriate safety net. In an ECB blog, Lagarde said only about a quarter of European catastrophe losses have historically been insured, and that the bloc’s economic health is at risk from worsening floods, droughts, and heatwaves. (ECB)

UK bank Barclays is augmenting its process for tracking clients’ exposure to flood risks, Bloomberg reports. Amit Puri, the lender’s Head of Sustainability for business, said the risk screening is a response to increased flooding in the UK as well as concerns about the ongoing availability of insurance for at-risk properties. (Bloomberg)

Warming of 2°C to 3°C could reduce pension funds’ long-term returns by 10% to 30% versus current expectations, analysis by data company Ortec Finance shows. Assuming a warming pathway to 2.8°C by 2100, this drag on performance would manifest by 2050. Australian, Canadian, and US schemes face the steepest losses, while Dutch and Swiss funds look more resilient. (Ortec Finance)

Wildfire costs passed to California ratepayers from utilities climbed from US$488mn in 2019 to nearly US$9bn in 2024, a Stanford Climate and Energy Policy Program report finds. From 2020 to 2026, homeowner insurance premiums rose 84% in response to growing wildfire risk, while the FAIR Plan — the state’s insurer-of-last-resort — now covers about 5% of single-family homes, up from 2%, covering some US$750bn in property value. (Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment)

Climate negotiators arrived at Antalya in Türkiye for the 31st UN climate conference (COP31) needing to rescue talks on the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), after interim talks this summer ended without agreement. The logjam cost six months and cut the timeline for a full adaptation package due for sign-off in 2027.

At the center of the dispute is the composition of 59 adaptation indicators adopted last year in Belém, Brazil. This time around, parties must settle on the makeup of a technical task force charged with defining the methodologies and metadata that underpin them. “These indicators may sound technical and boring, but they can be critical economic tools,” said Gabrielle Swaby, a senior associate at World Resources Institute in a briefing call ahead of the conference. “A standardized metrics framework can provide a transparent evidence base that lets finance ministries and others see what is working and reward resilience”. Türkiye’s presidency wants the indicators to avoid imposing unnecessary reporting burdens on countries.

An agreement on adaptation finance is also being sought, which could test the summit’s credibility. Poor nations want to see an implementation blueprint agreed for the pledge made at COP30 to triple adaptation finance, and the African Group of Negotiators has proposed this as a dedicated agenda item for this conference. “Developing countries are looking for more than a reaffirmation of that goal; they want to see how it will be delivered and the concrete steps towards it,” said Swaby.

This summit could also see the UN-backed Adaptation Fund complete a long-awaited rule change which would allow it to claim a share of the proceeds of international carbon market transactions for spending on climate-proofing projects in the Global South. The fund has allocated US$1.7bn to date, with US$2bn of projects in its pipeline.

COP31 also opens the second Global Stocktake — a health-check of countries’ progress towards Paris Agreement goals — and there are expectations among some parties that adaptation will be considered more rigorously than the first time around.

Florida voters approved Amendment 3 last Tuesday, undercutting the property-tax base that pays for resilient infrastructure and adaptation upgrades across the state. Local governments stand to lose some US$12bn annually from 2030 if no substitute revenue stream is found. Water management districts, responsible for reducing flooding and providing drinkable water, could also be left out of pocket. (Miami Herald)

The US National Weather Service (NWS) has been ordered to restore twice-daily weather balloon launches, reversing cuts imposed by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency in 2025. From mid-March 2025, at least 13 of nearly 100 upper-air sites lost or reduced launches, drawing criticism from former NWS directors. The balloons, launched every 12 hours, measure temperature, humidity, pressure, and wind at altitude. (CBS)

Corpus Christi in Texas voted to impose high fees on industrial companies’ water use following severe drought conditions in the Gulf Coast city. The charter amendment will scrap a program that allowed corporates to pay an annual fee in exchange for exemptions from the city’s drought surcharge. Fines of US$3, US$6, or US$12 per 1,000 gallons will apply when the main reservoir drops below 30%, below 20%, or into a declared emergency, on top of a base of about US$4.50. The measure takes effect after a five-year grace period. (Water Daily)

C40 Cities, a coalition of mayors supporting climate action, has set an end-2027 deadline for all 97 of its members to put effective early warning systems and emergency preparedness plans in place to “protect millions of people from increasingly dangerous extreme weather.” The mayors of Curitiba, Paris, Quezon City, Cape Town, Miami, and Mumbai launched a taskforce to improve cities’ preparedness for shocks and to share best practices. (C40 Cities)

UK lawmakers warned that slow progress on domestic climate adaptation is eroding Britain’s international credibility and harming the public. The House of Commons Energy Security and Net Zero Committee called on the government to publish a single cross-government plan for international climate finance within the next six months, including a dedicated adaptation target. (UK Parliament)

The Pacific island nation of Vanuatu launched a 2026–2035 National Adaptation Plan last Monday, setting out 27 priority actions across nine sectors, including agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and infrastructure. The measures were informed by a comprehensive Climate Risk and Vulnerability Assessment and government and civil society consultations. Vanuatu made headlines in 2025 when it successfully led an effort to clarify states’ legal obligations to combat climate change at the International Court of Justice. (GGGI)

Morocco unveiled a new water security strategy targeting 27bn cubic meters of dam storage and about 1.8bn cubic meters of annual desalination output by 2031, enough to cover 60% of the country’s drinking water needs. Equipment and Water Minister Nizar Baraka told parliament last Monday that 17 large dams are under construction, and desalination capacity has climbed to 447mn cubic meters from 46mn in 2021. A separate flood plan would introduce a new atlas of areas exposed to hazards, together with real-time rainfall monitoring and early warning systems. (The North Africa Post)

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) heads into COP31 without an approved budget for 2027 or a timetable for its next assessment reports, after an October meeting ended in deadlock. The panel runs on about US$9.7mn a year of voluntary national contributions, an allocation under pressure ever since the US quit the body. More than 100 IPCC scientists signed an October 19 letter demanding adequate resources. Talks are resuming in December. (Inside Climate News)

Wildfire tech company Pano AI launched a new program that sends its wildfire detection alerts straight to drone and autonomous aircraft operators, with the aim of speeding up emergency responses to early-stage blazes.

The San Francisco-based company unveiled its Drone Partner Program at the Red Sky Summit on November 4 with four partners. Seneca and Rain build autonomous suppression aircraft, BRINC makes public-safety drones, and Censys Technologies builds beyond-visual-line-of-sight inspection systems for utilities.

When Pano’s cameras detect smoke and pinpoint a fire’s location, the platform alerts the drone operator with the coordinates. The operator then deploys their suppression fleet in concert with emergency responders.

Partners connect through Pano’s Incident API, which the company already uses across its utility deployments. The platform now covers more than 95 million acres in 18 US states. In 2025, Pano issued alerts for 735 vegetation fires and was the first known alert roughly 60% of the time, according to the company.

“Detecting a fire early has always been the first step in an important chain of suppression and response,” said Sonia Kastner, co-founder and CEO of Pano AI. “Our goal is to provide not only a fast accurate alert, but to also facilitate a technology ecosystem responders can build upon, so that the moment a fire is spotted the right resources can see it, reach it, and act on it together.”

Pano raised US$44mn last year in a Series B led by Giant Ventures, with insurers Liberty Mutual and Tokio Marine among the investors.

Grid resilience start-up Overstory launched a risk management platform that pipes its AI wildfire and outage model data directly to utilities’ operational systems. The company’s models are trained on millions of miles of grid infrastructure and are able to predict where ignitions and outages are most likely to start. The new platform pulls satellite imagery, LiDAR, weather, and outage data into a single view, and can calculate the cost of each adaptation and resilience option against the amount of risk it would remove. (Overstory)

Grid-monitoring start-up Nyquis raised a US$6.3mn seed round to build out its wildfire risk monitoring system for utilities. The San Francisco-based company creates substation-mounted sensors that can cover roughly 800 miles of transmission lines, using AI models trained on more than 200,000 simulated faults. The sensors can identify signs of arcing, vegetation contact, and troublesome connections while power keeps flowing. Gigascale Capital and South Park Commons led the funding round. (Nyquis)

Climate intelligence company Ambee and Swiss forecaster meteoblue have joined forces to sell physical climate risk data, starting in India. The deal links Ambee’s ground sensor network with meteoblue’s high-resolution climate models to produce detailed extreme weather forecasts and site-level risk assessments. The companies are also piloting urban heat maps that layer meteoblue’s city climate modeling with Ambee’s air quality, ozone, pollen and vegetation data. (Access Newswire)

The global health initiative Unitaid committed US$10.9mn to SHIELD, a collaborative effort to protect essential medicines, diagnostics, and other health products from rising heat and humidity. Researchers will log temperature and humidity across supply chains in India, Kenya, Nigeria, and Senegal before laboratory testing against 20- to 30-year climate projections. Outputs could include new packaging and storage practices plus updated global guidance on product approval and procurement. (Unitaid)

Sea-level rise drives unequal erosion of global ecosystem service value (PNAS Nexus)

A century of sea-level change in Ireland (1925–2024) (European Geosciences Union)

Extreme heat, local economic performance, and water stress in the MENA Region (Economies)

Manage derailment risks to avoid Hothouse Earth (Environmental Research Letters)

Northern Hemisphere permafrost vegetation is greening but becoming less resilient (Nature Plants)

Thanks for reading!

Louie Woodall
Editor