The UN’s climate funds spent a July dialogue asking for more money. The best thing America did was stop sending it.
On July 14, the UN’s Adaptation Committee put fund managers, negotiators, and development bankers on a video call to work through a problem that clearly has them rattled. The money is drying up.
The Green Climate Fund, the Global Environment Facility, and the Adaptation Fund all sent people to explain how developing countries can tap them for cash. What they mostly did was ask for more. The reason they are running short, though, is news that ought to please anyone who pays U.S. taxes. In February 2025, the United States rescinded roughly $4 billion in outstanding pledges to the Green Climate Fund. We were the first country to do it. This spring, the United Kingdom followed, halving its pledge from £1.6 billion to about £815 million.
The people on the call treated this as a crisis. For anyone who works for a living and pays the bills, it looks more like a rescue.
It’s worth being clear about what these funds are. They hand out grants, not loans. Hansol Park of the Green Climate Fund said about 80% of its public-sector adaptation money is grant based, and the Adaptation Fund gives grants exclusively. Grant means gift — no repayment, no return, nothing back. When Washington pledged $4 billion, it was pledging to give $4 billion away and call it climate policy.
Where does the money go? The funds prefer to answer that in their own vocabulary. Ask what they finance, and you get “readiness,” “institutional capacity,” “capacity building,” “accreditation support,” “project preparation,” and “locally led adaptation.” Some of it does buy physical things, water systems and farms and flood defenses. A good deal of it, though, pays to build and staff the offices that write the grant applications in the first place.
The Green Climate Fund has placed outside experts inside developing-country governments, with more on the way. It runs multi-year “readiness” programs to prop up national agencies, with eight approved and 93 countries waiting in line. Over at the Adaptation Fund, staff run proposal-writing workshops and report that the workshops produce stronger proposals, which tells you the process is complicated enough to need a training seminar just to fill out the forms. Roxanne Valentine-Donegan of the Development Bank of Jamaica, one of the few speakers who had actually tried to pull money through the system, said getting it is “genuinely difficult,” slowed by shifting requirements and document-heavy applications.
So the recipients themselves say the system is too slow, too technical, and too expensive to navigate. And the answer on offer is not less paperwork; it is more staff and more workshops to process the paperwork. That is how bureaucracies grow. Every new hurdle becomes the reason to hire someone to help you clear it.
“Institutional capacity” is the polite expression that makes reference to the permanent layer of coordinators, accredited entities, and consultants standing between a donor’s check and an actual project on the ground. The Adaptation Fund alone works through roughly 62 accredited entities. The NDC Partnership, which helps developing countries navigate climate finance, says it has received more than 7,000 requests for support since 2016. Yet after nearly a decade and tens of billions of dollars, the people running this system are still saying they need more funding, more staff, and more capacity. The bureaucracy never seems to reach the point where it decides it has enough.
The Adaptation Fund reported an active pipeline worth about $1.9 billion with an appetite that seems to have no ceiling.
Adaptation Fund specialist Alyssa Gomes said flatly, “We do need more finance.” The Green Climate Fund talked up a board decision that could unlock roughly $4 billion in new programming capacity. No number is ever sufficient, because the demand is set by the funds themselves, not by any budget a taxpayer ever approved.
No number is ever sufficient, because the demand is set by the funds themselves, not by any budget a taxpayer ever approved.
The dialogue ended the way these things invariably do, with appeals for donors to give more, at a faster pace, with fewer strings attached. The honest answer from the American side is already on the record. We are keeping the $4 billion.
Melanie Collette is a senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that champions free markets, property rights, and innovation as the keys to protecting both people and the environment.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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