On the Road to Antalya, the World Is Mobilizing Everything Except the Money

The road to COP31 has been crowded. In the weeks before the summit opens in Antalya, the calendar has filled with conferences, declarations and finance forums, each one promising delivery. In the same weeks, scientists confirmed that human warming helped bring down the Himalayan slope that killed around 1,400 people in Nepal and Tibet in late August. The cause is now settled. The money is not. This is the pattern of climate diplomacy: a world that convenes at remarkable speed yet cannot move finance at anything close to it. It is the real test heading into Antalya.

The researchers found that decades of warming had thinned the region’s glaciers and thawed the permafrost that once held the bedrock together, and that the collapse came in the warmest weeks on local record. An earthquake a decade earlier may have weakened the mountain, but warming, not chance, was the decisive factor.

One warning in the report deserves attention. Some of the risks now emerging in the world’s high mountains, the scientists noted, are starting to exceed what early warning and adaptation can contain. Nepal had systems in place. The surge was simply too large and too fast.

This is the frontier where prevention ends and only recovery remains. Recovery is the purpose of loss and damage finance, and precisely the money that fails to arrive.

Nepal did what the system asks. It approached the UN Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage and described its claim accurately, a matter of responsibility rather than charity, from a country responsible for barely a thousandth of global emissions.

What it has received in return is a schedule. The fund has yet to release a single payment to any nation since its creation, and its first disbursement has slipped to December, even as members of its own board call for an emergency session.

The amount Nepal requested would scarcely dent a mid-sized city budget. Yet the mechanism built to provide it could not act in the weeks it took to convene three conferences. A relief fund that answers an emergency with a meeting date has ceased to be one.

None of this is for want of activity. The road to the summit has been busy, with a finance week in Istanbul, forums for chief executives in Baku, a gathering of Pacific leaders, and the presidency’s own agenda, capped by a Climate Implementation Bridge. There is movement everywhere, almost none of its capital leaving a wealthy account for a poorer one.

The broader record explains the skepticism. The rich world promised 40 billion dollars a year for adaptation and delivered roughly 26, then answered the shortfall with a larger goal at Baku, 300 billion a year and a notional 1.3 trillion. Raising a target no one met, with no baseline and no named contributor, is not ambition but presentation, and the gap between commitment and payment now runs to hundreds of billions each year.

The more useful question is not the size of the next pledge but the delivery of the last. Much of the committed money stays inside the intermediary institutions that administer it, behind conditions poorer governments cannot meet. Finance sent directly to national and local bodies reaches people faster and at less cost. It is widely accepted and seldom done, because the system was built for donors’ comfort, not for those in danger.

A summit serious about implementation would concentrate on unglamorous but decisive work. Auditing money pledged but never sent. Removing the procedures that make a grieving country hire consultants to claim what it is owed. Ending the loan terms that force exposed nations to borrow through their own recovery. One analysis warns the summit will be judged on whether its pledges become action on the ground. None of it makes a headline, which is why it keeps being deferred.

The consequence of failure is already documented. Pakistan financed its recovery from the 2022 floods largely through loans, and now carries debt for a disaster it had no part in causing. Turn enough relief into debt and the result charges the affected for harm they did not create. Grants break that cycle. Loans entrench it.

New Zealand is not a distant observer. Its own glaciers in the Southern Alps have lost close to a third of their ice since 1977 and are thinning far faster than a generation ago. The same processes that failed above Nepal are at work, more slowly, above the West Coast.

The irony is close at hand. Türkiye expects the summit to lift its tourism season, with its coast anticipating some 150,000 visitors. Yet only weeks before the delegates arrive, that same coast was fighting wildfires that destroyed homes and farmland, with officials saying they were battling not only the flames but the weather itself. The host was already living the emergency the summit exists to address.

That is the wake-up call worth carrying into the hall. What Antalya is worth will not be measured in visitor numbers, but in whether the money at last reaches those it was meant for, before the next mountain fails or the next coastline burns.

-Asia Media Centre

Banner Image - From left to right: UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell, Türkiye’s Minister of Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change and COP31 President-Designate Murat Kurum and COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago during the COP31 preparatory press conference in Istanbul, 12 February 2026. Image Credits - United Nations Türkiye.