From Plans to Projects: Closing Climate Adaptation’s Delivery Gap

Developing countries have, by and large, done their homework on paper. By 2025, 143 of 154 developing countries had a National Adaptation Plan process in place, a remarkable institutional achievement that reflects two decades of international effort to embed climate resilience in national planning. Yet a new policy brief from the CMCC Foundation – Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change argues that the world has reached an inflection point: the bottleneck is no longer the absence of plans, but the absence of delivery. Titled Accelerating Adaptation Delivery: Why the Adaptation Accelerator Hub and the NAP Implementation Alliance matter now, and produced in support of the Italian Ministry of Environment and Energy Security, the brief frames the challenge in starkly practical terms. The conversation, it says, is shifting from how countries plan for climate adaptation to how they actually deliver and pay for it.

The numbers behind that shift are sobering. According to the brief, developing countries may need between 310 and 365 billion US dollars a year for adaptation by 2035. Against that projected requirement, international public adaptation finance stood at just 26 billion US dollars in 2023. Even if flows grow substantially in the coming decade, the gap between what is needed and what is available will remain enormous, which makes the efficiency of every dollar spent a matter of first-order importance. It is precisely this arithmetic that pushes the question of implementation to the centre of the climate agenda in the run-up to COP31 in Türkiye, where implementation, including on adaptation, is expected to be a central theme.

Marta Ellena, lead author of the brief, distils the problem into a single sentence: developing countries know what they need to do to adapt to climate change, but the hard part is turning that knowledge into projects that will actually be financed. The brief describes this as the missing middle, the space between identifying a national adaptation priority and developing a project or programme that is sufficiently well prepared to secure finance and be implemented on the ground. A ministry may know that a coastline needs protection or that an agricultural region needs drought-resilient water systems, but converting that knowledge into a costed, technically specified, investment-ready proposal requires a chain of capabilities that many countries are still building.

Crucially, the brief insists that money is only one part of the problem. Coordination failures across national and sub-national governance structures can produce weak project proposals in the first place. Weak proposals, in turn, struggle to attract finance. And without finance, countries cannot improve the institutions, data systems and monitoring frameworks needed to prepare stronger proposals in the future. This circular trap, in which each weakness reinforces the others, helps explain why the proliferation of adaptation plans has not translated into a proportional surge in implemented projects. Breaking the cycle requires intervening at several points of the delivery chain simultaneously rather than treating finance, capacity and governance as separate problems with separate solutions.

Anna Pirani, co-author of the brief, describes the alternative as a country-driven process that strengthens an integrated delivery chain linking national priorities, technical preparation and investment pipelines. Such a chain, she notes, is expected to mobilise financing and implementation and then deliver measurable results. The emphasis on country ownership is significant. Previous generations of adaptation support have sometimes been organised around donor priorities or stand-alone pilot projects that never scaled. An integrated delivery chain, by contrast, starts from a government’s own adaptation priorities and works backwards to the technical preparation and investment structuring needed to make them real, with results that can be measured and reported.

Two recent multilateral initiatives are positioned as the machinery for doing exactly this, and the brief examines both in detail. The first is the Adaptation Accelerator Hub, launched under Italy’s 2024 G7 Presidency. The Hub is country-facing and plays a coordination role among G7 partners, helping governments translate their own adaptation priorities into coordinated, investment-ready programmes. Its logic is that when major donor economies align their support around a single country-led pipeline, rather than each running parallel channels, the transaction costs for recipient governments fall and the quality of project preparation rises. The Hub effectively operates at the level where national priorities meet international finance.

The second initiative, the NAP Implementation Alliance, was launched under the COP30 Action Agenda by Brazil and works at system level. Where the Hub focuses on individual countries, the Alliance aims to improve coordination among the full cast of actors that determines whether adaptation projects move from concept to construction: governments, technical partners, climate funds, development banks and investors. The distinction matters because adaptation finance flows through a fragmented landscape of multilateral funds, bilateral donors and private lenders, each with its own requirements, timelines and reporting formats. A system-level alliance that harmonises these actors addresses one of the quiet but persistent frictions that has slowed adaptation delivery for years.

Perhaps the brief’s most important analytical claim is that these two platforms should be read together as complementary pieces of the same delivery chain, rather than as separate, competing initiatives. Ellena argues that the Hub and the Alliance work best in combination: the Hub converting country priorities into investment-ready programmes, the Alliance aligning the wider ecosystem of financiers and technical partners that those programmes must ultimately pass through. In the crowded field of climate initiatives, where overlapping mandates and duplicated structures are a chronic complaint, the framing of two platforms as sequential links in one chain is itself a design choice worth watching. Whether that complementarity is communicated clearly to governments and funders will, the brief suggests, shape how much value either initiative delivers.

The brief also issues a caution about how success is measured. Bankability, the capacity of a project to attract commercial or near-commercial investment, cannot be the only yardstick of adaptation progress. Many of the activities that matter most for protecting vulnerable populations, including institutional capacity building, climate data and information services, social protection systems and direct support for particularly exposed communities, may not generate commercial returns at all. These functions remain essential to effective adaptation, and the brief is explicit that they will continue to require grants, concessional finance and public investment. In other words, a delivery chain optimised purely for bankable projects would systematically under-provide for the people most at risk, and the architecture now being built must leave room for public and concessional money alongside private capital.

As negotiators and observers look toward COP31 in Türkiye, the brief identifies several markers that will indicate whether the delivery agenda is gaining traction. The first is how far a country-level pilot advances, providing an early test of whether the Hub model can genuinely move a national priority through preparation toward finance. The second is how clearly the respective roles of the Adaptation Accelerator Hub and the NAP Implementation Alliance are communicated to governments, funds and investors, since ambiguity about mandates could dissipate the very coordination both were created to provide. The third is the growth of the project portfolio linked to finance, the most concrete measure of whether the missing middle is actually being filled. CMCC contributes to this agenda as a science-policy partner to the Italian Ministry of Environment and Energy Security, translating climate knowledge into evidence-based strategy for international climate processes, and the brief benefited from contributions by the UNDP team supporting the G7 Adaptation Accelerator Hub. What is at stake is larger than any single initiative: with adaptation needs measured in the hundreds of billions and current flows an order of magnitude smaller, the world cannot afford for well-made plans to remain on shelves. The task now, the brief concludes, is to build the delivery systems that turn them into results.

Subject of Research: Implementation and financing of National Adaptation Plans in developing countries

Article Title: Climate adaptation’s delivery gap: Turning national plans into action

Article References: Climate adaptation’s delivery gap: Turning national plans into action. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: climate adaptation, National Adaptation Plans, adaptation finance, developing countries, CMCC, Adaptation Accelerator Hub, NAP Implementation Alliance, COP31, G7, project bankability, climate policy, concessional finance