ANTALYA, Türkiye, Nov. 10 (Xinhua) -- With only four years left to deliver on the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, delegates at the ongoing 31st United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP31) have called for closing the climate finance gap and securing climate justice for developing nations.
COP31, which opened Monday in the Turkish coastal city of Antalya, runs through Nov. 20. The gathering has drawn representatives from nearly 200 countries and regions, focusing on shifting climate efforts from setting targets to implementing concrete solutions.
"We really need the actions and implementation, no more talk," Mohammad Nurunnabi, chair on education for sustainable development of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, told Xinhua on the sidelines of the opening ceremony.
Nurunnabi noted that only 15 percent of the Sustainable Development Goals are on track, and that many nations fail to submit proper national statistics to track their climate initiatives, making genuine progress impossible to assess.
He also warned that while Global South countries make a very limited contribution to global emissions, climate financing from the Global North is "shrinking significantly every year," urging rich countries to take responsibility for the trillion-dollar gap.
Abdul Awal Mintoo, Bangladesh's minister of environment, forest and climate change, said that poorer countries are paying the heaviest price for greenhouse gas emissions largely generated by rich nations.
"Our people are suffering very heavily because of the river erosion, coastal inundation, and saltwater intrusion," Mintoo told Xinhua, highlighting the urgent need for adaptation funds to rehabilitate vulnerable communities.
He urged developed countries to honor commitments to mobilize at least 300 billion U.S. dollars a year for developing countries by 2035 and called on all actors to scale total climate finance to at least 1.3 trillion dollars annually by that year.
"That contribution was not obligatory on anybody," Mintoo said, outlining his primary goal for COP31. "We want to make sure that all the rich countries who are responsible ... take the obligation to pay for it."
To overcome these overarching funding hurdles and execute projects on the ground, some officials are pointing to alternative economic structures. Saiful Adib bin Abdul Munaff, acting group CEO of the Malaysian Green Technology and Climate Change Corporation, said that while many environmental initiatives succeed in their pilot phases, scaling them up remains a key challenge.
"Increasingly, what we are seeing is the role of blended financing," Munaff told Xinhua, saying successfully launching larger programs now requires creatively aligning multiple stakeholders, combining government grants with private financing, insurers, and even crowdsourcing. ■
