From Pledge to Payout: A Defining Year for the Loss and Damage Fund

*A fund exists when money reaches the people it was built for. By that test, the Loss and Damage Fund is still becoming real, and the road to Antalya is where it either does or doesn't.*

In 2022, when the world finally agreed to create a fund for loss and damage, I watched the reaction ripple through the humanitarian data community with a wariness that surprised people outside it. We had seen this film before. A mechanism is announced. The announcement is the achievement. Then the slow years begin: the board seats, the hosting arrangements, the eligibility criteria. And somewhere in that machinery the original promise, that money would reach a fishing community whose coastline has already gone, quietly recedes.

Three years on, the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) is no longer an announcement. It has a board, a trustee, a host country, and, as of COP30, an open call for its first funding requests. That is real progress, and I want to give it its due. But the FRLD is now entering the phase where good intentions meet operational reality, and that phase is unforgiving. The road from Belém to Antalya is the year the Fund stops being an architecture and starts being a payout, or doesn't.

Let me start with the genuine advances, because cynicism is cheap and the people who built this deserve an accurate ledger.

COP30 in Belém stabilised the loss-and-damage architecture around three load-bearing pillars: the Warsaw International Mechanism (WIM) as the policy umbrella, the Santiago Network as the technical-assistance delivery arm, and the FRLD as the financing instrument. More concretely, on the first day of the conference the Fund launched its call for funding requests for the start-up phase, the Barbados Implementation Modalities (BIM). Around USD 250 million is allocated to this first window, with developing countries invited to submit requests for projects in the USD 5 to 20 million range.

That is the moment a fund becomes a fund: when a ministry in Tuvalu or Malawi can actually fill in an application. After years of structural debate, the FRLD finally has a front door.

But the proportions deserve honesty. Total pledges to the Fund stand at roughly USD 750 million. The UNDRR-cited estimate of climate-related loss and damage facing developing countries is on the order of USD 580 billion a year by 2030. The Fund's entire capitalisation is roughly one part in eight hundred of a single year's need. That gap is not a criticism of the Fund, which is a genuine achievement won through years of patient negotiation, but a measure of the distance still to travel. Everything that follows has to be read against that ratio.

The politics of the FRLD are dominated by a word that sounds technical and is in fact existential: replenishment.

The Fund was capitalised through voluntary pledges. Voluntary is the operative term. There is no agreed formula tying contributions to historical emissions, no assessed-contribution model of the kind that funds other multilateral institutions, and no trigger that automatically tops the Fund up as it disburses. Each replenishment cycle is therefore a fresh negotiation, vulnerable to the political weather of donor capitals: an election, a budget squeeze, a change of government, none of which has anything to do with whether a cyclone made landfall.

This is the structural fragility at the heart of loss-and-damage finance. A community whose losses are *irreversible*, land lost to the sea, a glacier-fed river gone, a heritage erased, needs a funding source that is *predictable*, because there is no rebuilding cycle to wait for. This means the most irreversible category of climate harm is, for now, supported by one of the least predictable forms of finance. That mismatch is not an oversight. It is the compromise that allowed the Fund to exist at all, and recognising it openly is simply the first step to strengthening it. I would welcome a conversation at Antalya about more automatic, needs-linked replenishment, building on the voluntary pledges that have carried the Fund this far.

The second sensitivity is institutional. The World Bank serves as the FRLD's interim trustee and the host of its secretariat for an initial four-year period, while the Fund's Board is hosted by the Republic of the Philippines. This arrangement was hard-won and remains contested.

The case for the World Bank is speed and fiduciary infrastructure. It can move money under recognised safeguards without building an institution from scratch. The case against is everything developing countries have learned from decades of dealing with it: high overheads, conditionalities, slow direct-access accreditation, and a governance structure weighted toward the very countries whose historical emissions created the need for the Fund in the first place. There is a deep discomfort in housing a fund premised on climate justice inside an institution many recipients experience as the opposite.

The interim period exists precisely so this can be revisited. The four-year clock and the agreed performance conditions mean COP31 and COP32 sit squarely inside the window where the question of transition to an independent secretariat becomes live. I do not think the answer is ideological. It is operational. Does the hosting arrangement let money reach vulnerable communities quickly and with low transaction cost, including through direct access rather than only through intermediaries? If the World Bank arrangement delivers fast, low-friction, country-owned disbursement, the case for disruption weakens. If it reproduces the slow, intermediary-heavy patterns recipients know too well, the case for independence becomes overwhelming. Either way, the test is delivery speed to the last mile, and that is measurable.

Now to the part of the debate I care about most, because it is where my work and this fund collide.

Every fund must decide who is eligible and on what evidence. For loss and damage, that decision is morally loaded and technically treacherous. Define eligibility too narrowly, limiting it to sudden, attributable, headline catastrophes, and you exclude the slow-onset, recurrent, grinding harms that do the most cumulative damage to the poorest. Define it loosely and you invite the accusation that the Fund cannot demonstrate that money tracked to need.

Both horns of that dilemma are, underneath, a data problem. To access the Fund, a country has to substantiate its loss and damage. Substantiation means records: disaggregated, sub-national, credible records of what was lost, where, to whom, and how often. And here is the cruel asymmetry I have written about before: the countries with the greatest loss-and-damage exposure are frequently the countries with the weakest loss-and-damage data systems. The places most in need of the Fund are the least equipped to prove it.

I have lived inside this asymmetry. The legacy systems many disaster-prone countries still run, built for retrospective record-keeping, were never designed to generate the high-resolution, internationally comparable evidence a global fund demands. This is exactly the gap that DELTA Resilience, the Disaster and Hazardous Events, Losses and Damages tracking system replacing DesInventar, and the Global Disaster-Related Statistics Framework (G-DRSF) were built to close: no-threshold recording, sub-national disaggregation by sex, age and disability, and statistical standards that make a national loss record legible to an international board.

The implication for the FRLD is direct and, to me, urgent. Investment in national loss-and-damage data systems is not a parallel technical agenda. It is part of the Fund's own delivery infrastructure. A fund that disburses against evidence, while doing nothing to help the most vulnerable countries generate that evidence, will systematically route money toward the better-documented and away from the genuinely-most-harmed. It will reproduce, in the disbursement of justice finance, the same visibility bias that distorts every other climate-finance channel.

This is precisely why the Santiago Network for Loss and Damage matters more than its modest profile suggests. Its mandate is technical assistance, helping countries identify needs, build capacity, and prepare for direct access to the Fund. With more than twenty requests for assistance already lodged, it is becoming the on-ramp between a country's situation and the Fund's front door.

Whether it becomes a bridge or a bottleneck depends on speed and substance. If the Santiago Network helps a vulnerable country stand up the loss-tracking and proposal-development capacity it needs to make a fundable, well-evidenced claim, beginning with the kind of data ecosystem maturity assessment that tells you what a country can actually report, it closes the gap between pledge and need. If it becomes another slow accreditation gauntlet, it widens it. The COP31 review of the Network's performance should be judged by one question. Is it measurably shrinking the distance between the communities facing irreversible harm and the money meant to reach them?

I am, on balance, more hopeful about the FRLD than my opening wariness might suggest, but my hope is conditional and it is entirely about execution. By the time delegates gather in Antalya in November 2026, the Fund will have something it has never had before: a track record. The first BIM funding requests will have been received and, ideally, the first approvals made. We will finally be able to ask empirical questions instead of structural ones.

How long did it take from request to disbursement? What share went through direct access versus intermediaries? Did money reach slow-onset and recurrent harms, or only the photogenic catastrophes? And did the countries with the weakest data systems get help to compete, or were they quietly screened out by the evidence bar?

Those are measurement questions, and I will measure them. Because what ultimately defines a fund is not the pledge but the payout: its speed, its destination, and whether it reaches the people whose losses can never be undone.

A pledge is the beginning of a promise. A payout is that promise kept, reaching a community that has already lost what cannot be recovered. The work between Belém and Antalya is to carry the Fund from the first to the second, and that journey, from commitment to delivery, is the most important one it can make.