Why South Asia Is Still Waiting for Climate Loss Funding

When a home is washed away by floods, or a farmer watches an entire season's crops fail because the rain no longer comes when it used to, there is little comfort in knowing that help is still being negotiated in a boardroom thousands of miles away.

For people living on the frontlines of climate change, recovery cannot wait for bureaucracy.

That is why the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) was created: to help countries recover when climate disasters leave them with losses they cannot prevent or afford to bear. Yet this month in Manila, instead of deciding who would receive support first, the Fund decided that everyone could wait a little longer.

South Asia has been waiting since the Fund was created. But this month, the question of who should be first in line became more complicated. Spain is confronting destructive wildfires, while much of Europe has endured an exceptional summer heatwave. These countries will never draw from the Fund, but their increasingly visible climate vulnerability is likely to shape the global conversation about who should.

To start with what happened in Manila.

Board members had been expected to approve an initial set of four projects this week. Instead, they pushed that decision to December. The reason was arithmetic, not politics. The fund's first call for proposals drew close to 180 submissions worth an estimated 2.8 billion dollars, against just 250 million dollars the fund had to give away – eleven times too little.

In its post-meeting press release, the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage described the Manila meeting as "another important milestone" in operationalising the Fund. It said the unprecedented 176 funding requests from 119 developing countries, worth around US$2.8 billion, showed the scale of global need. The Board said it had deferred funding decisions until December to allow for a "fair, transparent and equitable" assessment of all applications, while increasing the amount available under its first funding round from US$250 million to US$342 million.

That shortfall lands hardest in Asia Pacific, which alone asked for 751 million dollars across 49 applications, more than a quarter of everything on the table. On Friday, the board tried to close the gap by releasing an extra 100 million dollars, stretching the total pot to roughly 350 million dollars against 2.8 billion dollars in requests.

Numbers are easier to argue about than families, so here is who is actually standing in that queue, and who hasn't had the chance to join it.

Bangladesh is one of them. Its proposal covers flood damage in the country's north, where rivers keep eating the land and the people who farm it keep losing their homes to it. Pakistan, hit by monsoon flooding for a second year running in 2025, has not submitted a proposal at all. Neither has India. Commentators in Pakistan's own press are already asking why.

People inside the room did not hide their frustration. “The vulnerable against the vulnerable,” is how Isaac Glassie-Ryan of the Cook Islands described a process that forces desperate countries to compete for scraps. Milagro Matus of Belize reminded the room that every proposal is a name, a family, a life upended, not a line item. Harjeet Singh put it more bluntly: two years after the fund was created, it has not put a single penny into the hands of anyone suffering.

Four thousand miles northwest, Spain became an unplanned case study in exactly what this fund was built to address, even though it will never apply for a cent of it.

Just last week, a wildfire near Almeria killed at least 12 people this month and left 23 more missing. The fire did not arrive out of nowhere. Spain has just lived through its hottest June on record, part of a pattern that made last year the European Union's worst wildfire season ever measured, with more than a million hectares burned. Europe is heating up twice as fast as the rest of the planet, with France, Belgium and the Netherlands recording 3,700 excess deaths during June's heatwave alone.

The pattern is not confined to Europe. New Zealand had its own version in January, when a fortnight of storms dumped more than 200 millimetres of rain on the upper North Island in a single day, and landslides killed nine people, six of them in one slip at a holiday park in Mount Maunganui. Scientists say a warmer, wetter atmosphere is why.

None of this is comparable to South Asia's scale, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

Close to two billion people depend on a monsoon that has turned lethal for two years running. Pakistan's 2025 season alone killed more than 1,000 people, including 275 children, left 6.9 million people affected, and displaced close to 3 million more, barely three years after floods in 2022 had already put a third of the country under water and upended the lives of 33 million people.

The question is simple, even if few are willing to answer it for fear of what it might reveal: Does the money meant for Buner, Pakistan, and northern Bangladesh now must stretch to cover Almeria, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam as well? Or does it simply shrink, as donor governments turn inward and choose to repair their own roofs before helping anyone else repair theirs?

New Zealand's own pledge offers a small, concrete test of that fear. Simon Watts promised NZ$10 million at COP29, tied explicitly to the Pacific, part of a NZ$1.3 billion package that mostly stays in the Pacific too. New Zealand's climate finance was already concentrated close to home. Now that the country has its own storm damaged towns to rebuild, it may get smaller still.

The delay in Manila matters because it is about more than four projects. It is yet another test of whether the international community can keep its promise to those least responsible for climate change as its consequences become impossible to ignore at home. Every wildfire in Europe and every flood in New Zealand will strengthen the political pressure on governments to prioritise domestic recovery over international climate finance. That instinct is understandable. It is also precisely what this Fund was created to counter.

But if the Fund becomes another institution that asks the world's most climate-vulnerable countries to wait while the Global North looks inward, it will have failed before it has truly begun. For the most vulnerable, particularly those in South Asia, the question is no longer whether climate disasters will keep coming. They already are. The real question is whether international solidarity will arrive before the next one does.

-Asia Media Centre