The Road to Antalya: Turning the NCQG Into Real-World Climate Finance

*A finance goal is only as honest as the data that tracks it. On the road to COP31, the New Collective Quantified Goal is about to meet that test.*

When the gavel came down in Baku in November 2024, the headline number was USD 300 billion a year by 2035. It was hailed as a tripling of the old USD 100 billion goal and dismissed, almost in the same breath, as a fraction of what developing countries had asked for. Both readings were correct. But the number was never the hard part. The hard part is what the word "mobilise" hides. Who pays, in what form, on what terms, and how anyone will know whether it actually arrived in a household in Cox's Bazar or the Sahel.

That is the question the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) now carries onto the road to Antalya. COP30 in Belém handed COP31 a goal that has been agreed but not operationalised. A destination, in other words, with no agreed map. The credibility of the NCQG will not be settled by the size of the headline figure. It will be settled by the boring, technical, deeply political business of measurement. And measurement is where I have spent my career.

Let me be precise about what was actually decided, because the public conversation keeps collapsing two different things.

The NCQG, adopted at COP29, sets a goal for developed countries to take the lead in mobilising at least USD 300 billion per year by 2035 for developing-country climate action. Around that core sits a wider, non-binding aspiration (the "Baku-to-Belém Roadmap to 1.3T") to scale finance from all sources to USD 1.3 trillion per year by the same date. The USD 100 billion that everyone still quotes is the *expiring* 2009 pledge, finally met (late, and contested) around 2022. It is the floor we are leaving, not the floor we are standing on.

The trouble is that USD 300 billion is a mobilisation target, and mobilisation is one of the most elastic words in climate diplomacy. A grant is mobilised finance. So is a market-rate loan that a country must repay with interest. So, with enough accounting creativity, is a guarantee that de-risks a private investment that might have happened anyway. When the unit of account is that flexible, the number stops being a measure of support and becomes a measure of reporting technique.

This is not a new challenge. It is the same one I have watched play out at national level for a decade, just with more zeros. What gets counted gets claimed, and the way we count shapes our shared sense of how much progress has been made.

At COP30, the fault line that mattered most was composition. The Least Developed Countries and the African Group pushed for the goal, and especially any "tripling" of adaptation finance, to be anchored in grant-based and highly concessional finance. Developed countries resisted being pinned to public money alone, preferring language that lets loans, private capital, and mobilised investment count toward the target. The result, as analysts noted, reaffirmed obligations in principle while deferring the mechanics.

Why does this matter for a disaster-data specialist? Because the composition question is, at bottom, a counting question with a human edge. If a country facing recurrent floods receives its "climate finance" as loans, the money that arrives to build a seawall today becomes a debt-service line that crowds out the health budget tomorrow. We have already seen climate-vulnerable states spending more on debt repayment than on climate adaptation. A finance goal met largely through loans, even as it adds to a country's debt burden, can be recorded as success while leaving the recipient little better off. That is why the composition of the goal matters so much, and why so many delegations are working hard to get it right.

The honest version of the NCQG would track grant-equivalent value, not face value. That is the actual concessionality of each dollar, net of what gets repaid. That is a methodological choice, and methodological choices are never neutral. They decide whose accounting looks generous and whose vulnerability looks addressed.

This is where the NCQG meets the discipline I know best.

The goal comes with a measurement, reporting and transparency obligation, and COP30's two-year work programme on climate finance, covering Article 9.1 and the wider architecture of Article 9, is, in effect, a mandate to figure out how we will know whether the goal is being met. That sounds procedural. In practice, it is where much of the real work lies.

Consider what tracking USD 300 billion honestly would require. You need a shared definition of what counts as climate finance, so that the same dollar is not double-counted by a donor and a multilateral bank. You need to separate new and additional money from rebadged development aid. You need to distinguish committed from disbursed, and disbursed from actually-reaching-the-ground. And there is the part the climate-finance community consistently underweights: you need recipient-side data good enough to verify that the money did what it claimed to do.

I have built the recipient side of that ledger. In Afghanistan I mapped over thirty distinct disaster-data sources and negotiated the data-sharing agreements to bring them into a single Humanitarian Spatial Data Centre that supported risk-informed humanitarian response planning. The lesson was unambiguous. A financial flow is only as verifiable as the national system that receives it, which is why I keep returning to the argument that we have to build data systems governments can actually own. Donor-side transparency dashboards are necessary but they are half a bridge. If the country on the other end cannot disaggregate where the money landed, by district, by sector, by who was actually reached, then "climate finance delivered" remains an assertion, not a fact.

This is why I read the NCQG transparency debate as continuous with the disaster-loss debate I have written about before. The same blind spots that keep extensive-risk losses out of global datasets will keep climate-finance outcomes unverifiable in exactly the same places. The geography of invisible losses and the geography of unaccountable finance are the same geography.

One genuine advance in the NCQG package is the mandated biennial high-level ministerial dialogue on climate finance, with COP30 adding a ministerial round table on the goal's implementation. The intent is right. Pull finance out of the technical sub-rooms and force it onto ministers' desks on a predictable cycle.

But a dialogue is only as useful as what it is allowed to produce. If the round table yields communiqués and "reflections," it becomes another venue for restating positions. If it yields verifiable, forward-looking pledges, multi-year commitments a finance ministry in a vulnerable country can actually build a budget around, it changes the planning horizon of climate action.

Predictability is itself a form of finance. A national disaster management authority that knows what is coming over three years can pre-position, can design anticipatory triggers, can commit to multi-year resilience programmes. One that lurches from pledge to pledge cannot plan past the next emergency. The single most valuable thing COP31 in Antalya could extract from the ministerial process is not a bigger number. It is a more *predictable* one, on a published schedule, against which delivery can be tracked.

The NCQG also reopened the oldest argument in the convention. Who counts as a contributor. Developed countries want the donor base broadened to include large emerging economies and the private sector. Developing countries see in that move an attempt to dilute the historical-responsibility principle baked into the UNFCCC since 1992.

I think both instincts contain something true, and the way through is, again, a measurement question rather than a moral standoff. Private capital is indispensable to reach USD 1.3 trillion. No plausible volume of public grants gets there alone. But private finance follows bankable risk, and bankable risk follows good data. Mobilising private investment into adaptation in the places that need it most is not primarily a pledging problem. It is an evidence problem. Insurers, blended-finance vehicles, and resilience bonds all price off historical hazard and loss records. Where those records are thin, which is precisely where vulnerability is highest, capital either stays away or prices in a penalty the poorest can least afford.

So broadening the base, done honestly, has a precondition that rarely makes the cover decision. Invest in the recipient-country data systems that let private and emerging-economy finance see the risk clearly enough to move. Otherwise "the private sector will fill the gap" is a sentence that describes capital flowing to the already-visible and away from the already-overlooked.

When negotiators reconvene in Antalya in November 2026, with Australia steering the negotiations and the Pacific shaping the pre-COP, I will not be reading the communiqué for the size of the number. I will be reading it for four things, all of them about measurement.

First, whether the two-year finance work programme produces a shared accounting methodology that tracks grant-equivalent value and separates new money from rebadged aid. Second, whether the ministerial process starts yielding multi-year, scheduled, verifiable pledges rather than restated ambition. Third, whether the transparency architecture finally treats recipient-country data systems as core finance infrastructure, not back-office statistics. And fourth, whether adaptation, chronically starved relative to mitigation, gets a tracked, ring-fenced share rather than a hopeful adjective.

The NCQG is, for now, a promise about quantity. The work between Belém and Antalya is to turn it into a promise about *verifiable delivery*. That conversion runs straight through the unglamorous machinery of definitions, baselines, and disaggregated national data, the machinery I have spent ten years building in places where it did not exist.

A number agreed in a plenary hall is an aspiration. A number you can track, by country, by sector, by who was actually reached, is a commitment. The road from Baku through Belém to Antalya is the road from the first to the second. We should judge COP31 by how far down that road it travels.

What gets counted gets funded. On the NCQG, we have finally agreed how much. We have not yet agreed how to count. That is the work of Antalya.