COP30 in Belém entered its decisive phase this week with a clear, recurring message from negotiators, technical bodies, and adaptation experts: global climate ambition will not translate into meaningful progress unless power, finance, and decision-making shift toward the local level.
The President of COP30, André Corrêa do Lago, set the tone earlier this week by urging countries to harness the capacity of cities, regions, and communities to drive resilience and improve lives. In harmony, the Global Center on Adaptation (GCA) reinforced the same principle with the launch of its flagship publication Stories of Resilience, which shows that locally led adaptation delivers stronger outcomes but remains severely underfunded. Together, these interventions underscore a turning point in climate governance, one with significant implications for Africa.
Speaking at the High-Level Ministerial on Multilevel Governance, Corrêa do Lago framed the discussion bluntly: climate action, he said, “starts at the local level,” where the daily realities of water shortages, extreme heat, inadequate housing, and fragile infrastructure converge. He pointed to new initiatives such as the Plan to Accelerate Multilevel Governance and the operationalization of the Coalition for High Ambition Multilevel Partnerships (CHAMP) as evidence that local governments are no longer peripheral actors but central pillars of implementation. These frameworks, he argued, embed local leadership into global climate commitments at a moment when national targets often falter at the point of delivery.
The release of the Yearbook of Global Climate Action 2025 reinforced this picture. According to the report, 95 percent of countries now engage cities, businesses, and civil society actors in their climate plans, signaling a shift from rhetorical inclusion to structural involvement. However, the same assessment notes persistent gaps in finance and institutional capacity, particularly in regions where vulnerability is highest. For Africa, the findings capture a dual reality: local participation is rising, but the means to sustain it remain insufficient.
GCA’s Stories of Resilience expands this narrative from governance to practical outcomes on the ground. The report draws lessons from community-led adaptation efforts across Africa and Asia, demonstrating that resilience strengthens most rapidly when decision-making is devolved to the people confronting climate risks. However it also delivers a stark reminder: less than 17 percent of global adaptation finance reaches the local level.
At the same time, the global adaptation finance shortfall has widened to between US$187 billion and US$359 billion annually, even as droughts, floods, coastal erosion, and crop volatility accelerate across much of the developing world.
For African countries already contending with climate shocks that affect food security, urban development, and public health, the report’s case studies offer a roadmap for what works. In Homa Bay, Kenya, residents mapped more than 21,000 households themselves, producing the country’s first integrated, climate-resilient development plan anchored in hyperlocal knowledge.
Similar People’s Adaptation Plans are now shaping investment decisions in Zambia, Senegal, and Rwanda, where communities are negotiating directly with national agencies and international financiers. These processes invert the conventional flow of planning, placing risk identification and priority-setting in the hands of those who experience impacts first.
The report also spotlights the fragility of local financial ecosystems. Inclusive Financial Service Providers, microfinance institutions, cooperatives, community credit networks, collectively lend more than US$1.5 trillion each year to low-income populations worldwide. Yet climate-related losses are eroding their solvency.
In Pakistan, for example, 40 percent of local lenders have cut lending and a fifth have stopped entirely due to climate-driven defaults and asset losses. The implication for Africa is clear: without blended finance mechanisms that de-risk these institutions, the very financial channels that sustain informal economies and rural livelihoods will weaken further under climate stress.
Both Corrêa do Lago and GCA agree that adaptation finance cannot rest solely on public budgets. While public funds remain essential, they must increasingly be used to unlock private capital, extend credit to vulnerable communities, and build financial systems capable of supporting long-term resilience.
Philanthropy also appears in the discussion as a catalyst for shifting power. As the report notes, funds such as the Climate Justice Resilience Fund have invested tens of millions of dollars in community-run initiatives, transferring decision-making authority rather than imposing programme designs from above. This approach, GCA argues, accelerates systemic change precisely because it is rooted in fairness rather than paternalism.
As negotiators in Belém debate the contours of a Global Goal on Adaptation, GCA is calling for a “Global Breakthrough on Adaptation Finance” that would guarantee at least half of all adaptation funding flows directly to local actors through predictable, transparent, and inclusive systems. Such a breakthrough would reshape the landscape for African countries, where local governments routinely carry the operational burden of climate response without commensurate access to finance.
Taken together, the COP30 presidency’s message on multilevel governance and GCA’s evidence on locally led adaptation mark a growing convergence: climate solutions must be built from the bottom up, supported by national policy alignment but driven by local insight.
In Africa, where climate impacts are spatially uneven, socio-economically layered, and heavily mediated by community structures, this shift is more than a conceptual adjustment. It is a practical necessity. The continent’s resilience will depend on the degree to which international commitments are translated into resources that strengthen local institutions, elevate community knowledge, and reshape financial systems to withstand climate volatility.
In Belém, the global conversation on climate action is turning toward where it matters most: the places where people live, work, farm, build, and adapt. This new emphasis is an opportunity to anchor climate ambition in grounded, community-led realities, and to demand the finance and governance architecture needed to bring those solutions to scale.
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