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In 2021, rich countries vowed to spend more to help poor countries adapt to warming. That goal is unlikely to be met, a new report finds.
Oct. 29, 2025, 8:00 a.m. ET
The amount of financial assistance that rich nations give to poor ones to adapt to storms, heat waves and other perils of climate change is declining, the United Nations warned in a report released on Wednesday.
Wealthy countries provided roughly $26 billion for climate adaptation in 2023, a 7 percent drop from the previous year, according to the United Nations Environment Program. Those nations are now “unlikely” to meet a major pledge to provide at least $40 billion in annual aid by 2025, the agency said. And even that amount is only a fraction of what developing countries may need to cope with worsening climate shocks.
The findings are another sign that global efforts to tackle climate change have noticeably flagged. President Trump is withdrawing the United States from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, in which virtually every country agreed to limit the emissions that are rapidly heating the planet.
While other world leaders are still planning to meet without Mr. Trump next month in Belém, Brazil, for the annual U.N. summit on climate change, those talks are already getting off to a rocky start.
Only about one-third of the countries have met a deadline to update their national plans to curb emissions, the United Nations said in a separate report on Tuesday.
“The overall sluggish progress should send shock waves through every citizen,” said Ilana Seid, an ambassador from Palau who chairs the Alliance of Small Island States, an influential negotiating bloc of vulnerable countries at the U.N. climate talks.
