The United Nations has found that developing countries will need at least USD 305 billion annually by 2035 to build resilience and reduce climate risks. However, international public adaptation finance flows to developing countries remain far below this level.

“International public adaptation finance flows reached $28.2 to $31.7 billion in 2024, or just a billion dollars more than the previous year,” the UN wrote, announcing the 2026 Adaptation Gap Report.

Last year, parties to COP30 called for annual adaptation support to be tripled. “Even if this goal is achieved, projected funding of $85 billion to $120 billion annually would cover only 20 to 29 per cent of estimated needs after inflation".

According to the UN, the inherently context-specific nature of climate adaptation policies makes it more difficult for banks, insurers and investors to identify, classify and track adaptation activities within their portfolios.

To address this challenge, the UN published its Adaptation Finance Taxonomy Playbook in June.

“Secondly, investors need to be able to identify projects and measure impacts. To this end, UNEP FI launched the ‘Investors Resilience Challenge’ at COP30 last year alongside fifteen development finance institutions and finance industry groups with the aim of scaling finance for adaptation from both public and private sources,” the UN wrote in a separate document published on Wednesday (November 4, 2026).

According to the UN, multilateral development banks are likely to have significantly increased their financing last year. Meanwhile, financial flows between developing countries have also risen, increasing from $3.8 billion in 2019 to $9.6 billion in 2024.

The UN's World Health Organization (WHO) has also urged countries to scale up six proven climate-resilience measures that, it says, could save 1.6 million lives every year.

"The six prevention measures that WHO wants to see implemented include early warning systems for heatwaves, water and sanitation services that are resilient to climate change, and cleaner household fuels and technologies, for cooking and heating,” said the UN, adding that an estimated 3.3 to 3.6 billion people live in contexts highly vulnerable to climate change.