Action to curb emissions and bolster resilience to the impacts of extreme weather needs similar urgency to international efforts to lift defense investments, according to the head of next month’s annual global climate change conference. Murat Kurum, Turkey’s environment minister and president-designate of the COP31 summit, delivered the warning on Thursday in Fiji during preparatory talks ahead of the November event.
Defense Budgets Versus Climate Realities in Fiji
Kurum pressed governments to match their military commitments with environmental funding, questioning the logic of massive security spending on a degraded planet. “The same responsibility, same determination, we expect each and every country to show in climate action,” Kurum told reporters in Fiji. “What does it mean to spend 5% for defense if you don’t have a country to live on? What does it mean to defend it?”
The comparison targets recent commitments by North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations. Last year, member states agreed to spend at least 3.5% of national economic output on core defense programs, alongside an additional 1.5% on related areas by 2035. In stark contrast, the European Union warned in a draft document that “there is no scope” for new climate finance commitments at the upcoming COP31 summit.
Faltering Financial Flows and Missing Pledges
Global financial flows directed toward lowering emissions and funding climate adaptation projects are currently faltering. Nations continue to cut overall aid budgets, a trend accelerated by the withdrawal of the United States from global warming mitigation efforts. Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, saw its climate spending fall last year while simultaneously missing a pledge on climate financing.
Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, emphasized the urgency of honoring prior agreements during the Fiji preparatory meetings. Nations “must deliver on existing finance commitments,” Stiell said, while pressing forward with the collective goal of delivering $1.3 trillion annually to developing countries by 2035.
“This is what COP31 can and must do, help convert promises into more real-world results,” Stiell added. Achieving that outcome depends heavily on scaling up, speeding up, and broadening access to affordable climate finance.
Fiji Secures New Funding for Pacific Resilience Facility
Despite broader financial friction, the Pre-COP talks in Fiji secured several new pledges. Commitments targeted the Pacific Resilience Facility, a mechanism established last year to direct funding for climate and disaster projects straight to vulnerable nations in the region.
Fiji’s government pledged $10 million to the mechanism. Lynda Tabuya, the country’s minister for information, environment and climate change, stressed that officials will push nations at the upcoming COP summit to “get climate finance into the hands of the people who really need it.”
Additional international support materialized in Fiji. The United Kingdom pledged $13 million to the Pacific facility, while the Netherlands offered $1.12 million. Denmark and Ireland both doubled their previous commitments. Australia, which previously pledged 100 million Australian dollars ($70 million) to the resilience fund, introduced separate proposals totaling about AU$10 million dedicated to renewable energy and infrastructure protection projects in the Pacific.
Despite these additions, the Pacific fund remains short of its initial target to secure $500 million in commitments by the end of the year, alongside a longer-term goal of hitting $1.5 billion. The facility aims to build disaster preparedness without saddling participating countries with further debt.
With major new funding streams largely constrained, organizers are shifting their strategy toward improving developing nations’ access to existing money. This effort targets vulnerable states across the Pacific, Caribbean, and Indian Ocean, using new support from development banks and partner countries.
“The countries that need the finance the most get it the least,” Australian Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, who serves as COP31 president of negotiations, said in Fiji. “That has got to change.”
To highlight these vulnerabilities, Bowen and Kurum led a delegation on Tuesday that included the heads of the Asian Development Bank and the Green Climate Fund to visit Tuvalu, a climate change-threatened nation in the western Pacific Ocean.
