Union Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Shri Bhupender Yadav, addressed the Baku High-Level Dialogue on Adaptation during the UNFCCC CoP30 in Belém, Brazil, on 20.11.2025. He expressed gratitude to the CoP Presidency for convening the dialogue and acknowledged the work of the UNFCCC Secretariat. The Minister highlighted India’s efforts and experiences in accessing adaptation finance, the barriers faced by developing countries, and the global steps needed to raise adaptation ambition.
In his intervention, the Minister highlighted the urgent need for scaled-up adaptation finance as the global gap widens. Marking the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, the Minister underscored the importance of Article 7.6, which emphasizes support for developing countries in taking effective adaptation action. He noted, “The 2025 Adaptation Gap Report estimates that developing countries will need between $310 and $365 billion annually by 2035, while current flows are around $26 billion only”.
The Minister stressed that a predictable, scaled-up, grant-based and concessional financial support is essential. He expressed concern that the Glasgow Climate Pact goal of doubling public adaptation finance from 2019 levels to around USD 40 billion by 2025 is likely to be missed if the trend continues. “It will take nothing less than a global collective effort to increase climate finance to the levels articulated in the Baku to Belém Roadmap to $1.3 trillion”, he emphasized.
Despite these challenges, the Minister reaffirmed India’s strong domestic commitment to adaptation. He stated that India continues to mainstream adaptation through national and state-level planning backed by domestic resources. He informed, “As a percentage of GDP, India's adaptation-relevant expenditure increased by 150% over 7 years from 2016-17 to 2022-23”. Internationally, he emphasized, India has strengthened its ability to access climate finance through readiness support and institutional capacity-building of accredited entities.
Highlighting barriers to adaptation finance, the Minister pointed to the complex and slow processes associated with multilateral climate funds. He noted factors like high transaction costs, limited institutional capacity delays, absence of clear revenue streams and inadequate risk-sharing instruments constrain private finance. The Minister urged the global community to address these systemic hurdles.
Shri Yadav reaffirmed India’s principled view that adaptation must be country-driven, gender-responsive, inclusive, and rooted in science and traditional knowledge. He referred to community-led and innovation-driven pilot projects in climate-resilient agriculture, water management, and ecosystem restoration, noting that these initiatives show strong results but remain “small in scale due to limited finance, technology, and capacity”.
The Minister highlighted India’s initiatives such as the National Innovations in Climate Resilient Agriculture and the National Adaptation Fund on Climate Change, which have successfully supported climate-resilient crops, soil restoration and improved water-use efficiency, whole safeguarding livelihoods. “These efforts point to significant untapped potential”, he stressed.
Highlighting the key takeaways on Adaptation from the Summit, the Minister stressed that CoP30 must deliver a clear political message that “adaptation is not an optional add-on but an essential investment.” He reaffirmed that adaptation and mitigation are “complementary pillars of the Paris Agreement,” and that progress on the Global Goal on Adaptation must remain country-driven and nationally determined. Looking ahead to CoP31, he stated, “indicators should remain voluntary, non-prescriptive, and subject to national interpretation, and frameworks must avoid creating additional reporting burdens and respect diverse national contexts.”
Shri Yadav stressed that a shift from expert-driven discussions to structured Party-driven engagement will allow countries to assess feasibility, identify capacity needs, and understand how proposed approaches align with national planning before wider application. Going forward, the Baku Adaptation Roadmap should look beyond indicators by enhancing sharing of information, good practices and experiences, and, by supporting developing countries in addressing persistent challenges and gaps, he added.
The Minister underlined the importance of strengthening the National Adaptation Plan (NAP) process, noting that its formulation and implementation “is dependent on the support provided for adaptation.” He called for enhanced readiness support, streamlined access to financial mechanisms and reduction in transaction costs for developing countries. A stronger enabling environment, he said, would help scale locally proven solutions, integrate risk assessment into planning, and accelerate investments in agriculture, water security, resilient infrastructure and ecosystem-based approaches.
Shri Yadav reiterated, “Adaptation Finance must improve in both quantity and quality and must be provided through grants and not debt-creating instruments”. He stated that global ambition will ultimately be judged by “real improvements in the resilience of communities, ecosystems and economies”, and that CoP30 and CoP31 must together strengthen trust, implementation and cooperation to raise adaptation ambition at the required pace.
