Climate adaptation: the UN puts the shortfall at 'staggering', and the South will foot the bill

According to France 24, the United Nations has just published a report, a few days before the opening of COP31, titled "Are we ready? No." Adaptation financing must, according to the UN, be multiplied by ten, and the shortfall is described as "staggering". In a video, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres sums it up: "the choice is simple: invest in adaptation today or pay the price of catastrophe tomorrow."

What follows is our reading, not an established fact. The dispatch we have is thin: we do not know the exact size of the shortfall, its regional breakdown, and above all which countries are supposed to close the gap. That silence is already telling.

For Guterres's formula, seductive as it is, glosses over one detail: "paying tomorrow" does not mean the same thing for everyone. Rich countries, which burned the most coal and oil, have the sea walls, the insurance and the budgets to absorb the blow. Poor countries, which emitted the least, receive droughts, cyclones and floods with ever-narrower means. The UN speaks of a "price"; we would rather speak of a bill sent to the wrong address.

And that address is no accident. Dependency theory holds that Southern economies were shaped to supply raw materials and cheap labour to the centre, and that debt and conditional loans lock that position in place. Applied here, the idea is simple: a state that devotes a growing share of its revenue to debt service has little room left to build sea walls, early-warning systems or heat-resistant crops. Under those conditions, adaptation finance delivered as a loan, which the report has yet to clarify, would amount to making the victim pay twice: once for the damage, once for the repair.

Kwame Nkrumah, in "Neo-Colonialism", described financial and industrial consortia set up in Africa to seize mineral and agricultural resources, backed by international institutions. The setting has changed, the mechanism less so: the critical minerals of the energy transition are extracted in the South, processed in the North, while adaptation money, for its part, is slow to arrive.

Cabral reminded us that national liberation means freeing productive forces from foreign domination. Transposed to climate: a country that depends on aid, on its creditor and on the price of commodities does not control its own resilience. Multiplying the figures by ten will not be enough if the governance of that money stays in the hands of those who created the problem.

COP31 will show whether Northern governments move from diagnosis to cheques, in the form of grants rather than debt, and without disguised conditions. The UN has made the diagnosis. The question now is who, this time, will hold the purse.