Ethiopia Presses for Fairer Access to Climate Funds as Multilateral Funds Meet at COP31

Ethiopia has used the UN climate summit in Antalya to press for one of the oldest demands of developing countries: easier access to the money set aside to help them cut emissions and adapt. Speaking at a COP31 side event titled "Multilateral Climate Funds: Working Together for Enhanced Access and Greater Impact", Ethiopia's Minister of Finance, Fitsum Assefa, said access to the funds must expand and the funds must become more effective at financing national climate priorities, according to Ethiopia's Fana Media Corporation on 11 November.

Her role gives the message extra weight. Fitsum Assefa is also Ethiopia's chief negotiator for COP32, and Fana reports that Ethiopia is preparing to take on the COP32 presidency after the Antalya talks, which run from 9 to 20 November. She also stressed the need for stronger international cooperation on climate finance.

The funds themselves are trying to show they can work as a system rather than as separate windows. At COP31, five of them, the Adaptation Fund, the Climate Investment Funds, the Fund for responding to Loss and Damage, the Green Climate Fund and the Global Environment Facility, are co-hosting a shared Climate Funds Pavilion in the Blue Zone. The Global Environment Facility's COP31 programme lists a 10 November session in which the heads of five multilateral climate funds discussed how closer collaboration can respond to country priorities, improve access and mobilise investment.

The pavilion's programme reads like a checklist of the complaints countries raise most often. Joint sessions cover collaboration on project investments, complementarity and coherence behind country-led platforms, access to finance through the funds, a common way of measuring climate results, and adaptive social protection. Each points to the same problem: a country seeking support may face different application rules, accreditation steps and reporting formats for each fund, which strains the ministries least able to absorb the extra work.

The commitment to fix this is not new. In a joint declaration at COP28 in December 2023, the heads of the Adaptation Fund, the Climate Investment Funds, the Global Environment Facility and the Green Climate Fund promised an action plan to enhance access and increase their collective impact. It included more joint capacity building and programming, common indicators and a shared database for climate projects, and harmonised procedures. At the time, the funds said they had together channelled more than USD 32 billion, or about USD 197 billion including co-financing.

What Antalya adds is the presence of a fifth fund, focused on loss and damage, and a future COP host making access a headline issue. For countries such as Ethiopia, where agriculture is exposed to drought and erratic rains, the speed at which approved money reaches projects matters as much as the size of global pledges.

Fana's report does not set out specific proposals or figures from the session, and no new joint commitments were reported in the coverage available. The test will be whether the funds' common language on access becomes simpler procedures that ministries can see, ahead of a COP32 where Ethiopia will be in the chair.

Why it matters

Climate finance only works if it reaches the projects it was meant for. With Ethiopia set to chair COP32, access to the multilateral funds is likely to move from a technical complaint to a central test of whether the system delivers for the countries most exposed to climate risk.