What COP31 Owes Bangladesh

In a Satkhira homestead this monsoon, a farmer walks a paddy plot that no longer yields what her father did. The water tastes of the sea, the embankment has been patched three times, and her seed loan is still unpaid. Nothing she did caused this, yet she pays for it season after season. In November, on the Mediterranean coast, the world will again debate who should pick up that bill.

The 31st Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP31) will run from 9 to 20 November 2026 at the Antalya Expo Center in Türkiye. After a year-long deadlock over hosting rights, a compromise struck at COP30 in Belém split the job in two. Türkiye hosts and holds the formal presidency under Environment Minister Murat Kurum, who steers logistics and the voluntary Action Agenda. Australia’s climate minister Chris Bowen serves as “President of Negotiations”, drafting texts and shaping the final decision. A pre-COP in Fiji and a leaders’ event in Tuvalu put the world’s most exposed coastlines at the start of the road to Antalya. Heads of state are going to meet at the World Leaders’ Summit on 11 and 12 November.

The presidency’s headline ambitions are measurable: raising electricity’s share of final energy demand to 35 per cent by 2035, halving the growth in global waste and cutting buildings’ energy intensity by at least a quarter. Sustainable food systems and methane also feature. But these goals sidestep the two issues that soured the last two summits: phasing out fossil fuels and paying for damage already done. Those remain on the formal negotiating table, where Bangladesh’s fate will be decided.

At COP29 in Baku, developed countries agreed to provide at least $300 billion a year to developing countries by 2035, within a broader aspiration of $1.3 trillion annually from all sources. Developing countries had asked for far more. At COP30 in Belém, the “Global Mutirão” decision called for at least tripling adaptation finance by 2035, adopted 59 indicators under the Global Goal on Adaptation, and launched a two-year work programme on climate finance. Vulnerable nations had demanded tripling by 2030; the deadline slipped five years, with no clear baseline.

The arithmetic is sobering. The UN Environment Programme estimates developing countries need roughly $310 billion a year for adaptation by 2035, yet flows remain 12 to 14 times lower. The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage has attracted only modest money and lacks a predictable replenishment cycle. The Belém Mission to 1.5°C is due to report back in Antalya. COP31 is where the promises of the past two years must either acquire a delivery plan or quietly expire.

For Bangladesh, climate change is first an agricultural crisis. Salinity creeps inland along the southwestern coast, flash floods ambush the Haor basin’s boro harvest, and erratic rainfall disrupts planting calendars. Our scientists and farmers have not stood still. Salt-tolerant rice varieties, floating gardens and climate-smart water and soil management show that adaptation works when it is locally rooted. But every failed harvest still pushes another family towards Dhaka’s slums or distant labour markets.

Yet agriculture receives only a small fraction of global climate finance, and smallholders the smallest share of all. The four-year Sharm el-Sheikh joint work on agriculture and food security, agreed in 2022, reaches its endpoint this year. Antalya must not let it close with a report and a handshake. Bangladesh should press for a follow-on arrangement that channels finance directly to smallholder adaptation, especially for women farmers, who carry growing farm labour as men migrate but rarely hold land titles or credit.

Bangladesh’s own numbers make the case. The National Adaptation Plan 2023-2050 identifies 113 priority interventions costing an estimated $230 billion, around $8.5 billion a year. The NDC 3.0 mitigation roadmap adds another $116 billion for 2026-2035. Since 2009, the country has financed hundreds of projects from its own budget through the Bangladesh Climate Change Trust Fund. Few nations of comparable income have shown such commitment.

What Bangladesh cannot accept is adaptation finance delivered as loans. Borrowing to repair damage caused by others is not assistance; it is a second injury. Our negotiators should push for a transparent baseline and near-term milestones for the tripling pledge, a clear grant share for the most vulnerable, simpler direct access to the Green Climate Fund and Adaptation Fund, and predictable replenishment of the Loss and Damage Fund. Money that takes five years to reach a coastal union parishad arrives too late.

Vulnerable countries are routinely forced to choose between spending scarce public money on schools, hospitals and jobs, or on embankments and cyclone shelters. At the UN General Assembly in September, Prime Minister Tarique Rahman stressed that Bangladesh contributes little to global emissions yet bears severe impacts. Climate action and development must reinforce each other through a just transition that builds renewable energy, green skills and social protection. The presidency’s electrification drive can help if it brings the concessional finance and technology transfer that make clean energy affordable in Dhaka, not only in Europe.

Behind every technical debate lies a moral one. Bangladesh accounts for less than half of one per cent of global emissions. Wealthy industrialised nations, and increasingly large emerging economies, built their prosperity on the carbon now warming our rivers and raising our seas. 'Common but differentiated responsibilities' is not charity language; it is the foundation of the Convention. Major emitters owe the world two things in Antalya: credible 1.5°C-aligned emission cuts, including an honest roadmap away from fossil fuels, and finance that is new, additional and adequate. Anything less asks the victims to subsidise the polluters.

COP31 will produce speeches, pavilions and pledges. Bangladesh, with a 23-member committee shaping its position paper, will arrive prepared. But success will be measured in Satkhira, Sunamganj and Kurigram: in whether the farmer walking her salty field next monsoon finds that the promises made in Türkiye have finally reached her soil. Justice delayed is not merely justice denied; it is harvests lost; futures are foreclosed. The bill is overdue. Antalya is where the world must decide, at last, to pay it.