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Financing climate resilience has often been framed as a balancing act between the rights of future generations and the urgent needs of current generations.
As world leaders prepare to gather in Türkiye for COP31, this logic must be reconsidered. Investing in resilience must be viewed as an essential investment in the security and well-being of current generations, as well as a necessary obligation to the future.
The question is not whether public finances can accommodate climate action, but whether they can withstand the costs of continued inaction.
Energy security, AI governance and shifting geopolitics will inevitably compete for attention, but these factors must not obscure the need for urgent action on climate change.
Governments need to demonstrate conviction, not simply through statements of ambition, but through investment decisions that recognize the connection between climate resilience and fiscal stability.
That requires looking beyond the immediate budget cycle to the costs to be counted in the future.
Countries must look to fix the roof now before the rain arrives, rather than papering over the cracks when it’s too late (and too costly).
The cost of climate inaction already appears on government balance sheets through public health expenditure, lost output, disrupted systems and higher financing costs.
Recent impacts, compounded by El Niño effects, offer a sharp reminder of the disruption communities face. These also offer a warning of what countries will face in the coming years and decades, with climate impacts compounding existing hazards and vulnerabilities.
When public infrastructure fails, or essential services are interrupted, governments cannot simply decline the bill. They must respond, often while contending with the wider economic consequences of the same event.
This is why treating resilience as an optional addition to public spending is a false economy.
Investment designed to protect infrastructure and maintain essential services should be assessed against the costs it can help avoid and the wider social and economic benefits it can deliver.
Having served as Finance Secretary for the Government of India, I understand the difficult choices facing finance ministries. Every claim on public resources must compete with other priorities.
The case for climate investment must therefore be laid out in terms finance ministers will heed: protecting the public purse, sustaining economic activity and reducing exposure to future costs. Climate policy and fiscal responsibility should not be presented as binary choices when their objectives are so closely connected.
That connection also demands a shift from strategies to delivery. Climate strategies can provide a strong pathway towards resilient infrastructure, but they are not the destination.
Countries arriving in Antalya with bankable projects embedded in capital budgets will be better positioned than those still stuck in the strategy phase.
Past COPs have driven countries to develop national strategies; now, as we approach COP31, countries must strive for strategies translated into investments, rather than strategies treated as achievements in themselves.
Public financing, however, cannot meet the full scale of the challenge, with the U.N. Environment Programme estimating developing countries need $365 billion annually in adaptation finance in 2035. Private capital must be part of the response.
Multilateral development banks can help bridge the public-private divide. Our financial strength, long-term investment perspective and range of financing instruments enable us to address investment barriers, share risks appropriately and help mobilize private capital.
That capacity can help connect public priorities with private investment. The objective should not be to crowd out commercial finance but to make it possible for private capital to support the resilient infrastructure countries need.
MDBs have played an important role in supporting countries' energy transitions. Applying similar focus and collaboration to climate resilience will be equally important in mobilizing investment at scale.
Our role also begins before a project reaches investors. Working upstream with finance ministries, we can help governments shape meaningful climate policy and provide performance-linked climate finance.
Policy, budgets and financing should reinforce one another. A strategy disconnected from the capital budget will struggle to become infrastructure; financing disconnected from national priorities will struggle to deliver the intended results. Bringing these elements together is central to turning ambition into action.
As we look ahead to COP31, hopefully governments and private sector actors will arrive with an earnest ambition to engage and enact the steps necessary to turn climate strategies into climate action.
Doing so now will mean less financial pain in the long run. Financing climate action is not a luxury. It is indeed a fiscal necessity.
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