Field Note
After spending more than twenty-five years in climate diplomacy and international development discourse and implementation, I have begun to notice something unsettling. The longer I am participating in these global forums, the less interested I became in the answers. Instead, increasingly and sorely preoccupying with questions that are never asked.
For much of my professional life, I have lived between two worlds.
One is familiar to anyone working in international policy. It is the world of conference centres, international summits, negotiating rooms and ministerial meetings. Here, I participated and keenly observed deliberations on climate finance, adaptation, resilience, carbon markets, just transition, sustainable development and countless other emerging policy issues and challenges. I observed that over the years, the decisions and treaties have become a lot more sophisticated. The declarations became longer and complex. The institutional architecture grew more elaborate and complicated.
Whereas, the other world lies far away from those conference halls.
It is the village cooperatively rebuilding after a flood that was entirely predictable but turned into a disaster of mammoth scale. The small island wondering whether adaptation is simply another word for delaying the inevitable. Some ministry in a climatically vulnerable and economically challenged country trying hard to implement ambitious commitments with a handful of overstretched civil servants and almost no financial means. May be a finance minister battling to balance his/her budgetary allocations between debt repayments, hospitals, schools and climate investments. These are the communities that might have never heard of the Paris Agreement but lives with its consequences every single day.
Over the years, I have come to believe that the greatest weakness of global governance is not that there is lack of knowledge or we are falling short of ambition. We live in an unprecedented age of scientific developments and in almost all areas we have more scientific evidence than ever before. Similarly, there is no shortage of policy frameworks than at any point in history.
What we increasingly lack is the willingness to ask the uncomfortable questions.
For example, are we trying to solve climate change, or are we trying to manage the outcomes of decades of a faulty model of development?
This is perhaps the question I hear least in international climate forums!
Almost every global discussion treats climate change as a discrete policy challenge. Energy is one conversation. Agriculture another. Water, cities, biodiversity and disaster risk each occupy their own institutional policy making spaces. We have become remarkably adept at organising ourselves around sectors. Even though the problems we face are multi-disciplinary and inter-connected in nature.
Many disasters are indeed climate induced but the uncomfortable reality is that disasters rarely begin with the climate. They begin decades earlier. Due to poorly planned cities, weak institutions, degraded ecosystems, neglected infrastructure, distorted economic incentives and political decisions that quietly accumulate risk long before the first flood, drought or heatwave arrives.
Climate change does not create these vulnerabilities from scratch. It magnifies them cause harm to the societies.
Perhaps what we routinely describe as climate vulnerability is, in many cases, simply the inevitable outcome of a development model that has systematically externalised environmental risk, undervalued resilience and rewarded short-term economic gains over long-term sustainability.
If that is true — and I firmly believe it is true — then we are asking climate policy to solve problems that development policy has spent decades in creating. No amount of adaptation finance can compensate for unplanned urbanisation. No early warning system can fully protect communities where governance itself has become the underlying risk. And no resilience strategy can succeed if national development continues to generate new vulnerabilities faster than climate programs can reduce.
Why do we continue financing disasters instead of preventing them?
Its tormenting that every major disaster unfolds following a much familiar script that we almost know by heart. Emergency appeals are launched soon after the disaster strikes. Humanitarian agencies get mobilized along with donors announce relief packages. Reconstruction conferences are convened. Political leaders pledge to “build back better.” Expressions of solidarity fill headlines. Then, almost imperceptibly, attention fades. Until the next disaster.
What remains remarkably unchanged is the system that produced the disaster in the first place. Despite decades of evidence demonstrating that prevention, preparedness and risk reduction holds better economic and social returns but it continues to be ignored by the public policy. Because it competes poorly against the political visibility of emergency response and reconstruction. A flood barrier that successfully prevents inundation generates no popular news item. A strengthened building that withstands an earthquake attracts little attention because nothing happens. A functioning early warning system is judged not by what it does but by the catastrophe it quietly prevents. Success in prevention is measured by the absence of the tragedy. Which is precisely why it remains politically undervalued.
We have built institutions that excel at responding to crises. We have become masters of crisis management but keep on struggling to justify investments in crises that never occur. Budgets expand after disasters but never before them. Political urgency peaks when lives have already been lost. International attention follows destruction rather than preparedness.
This indeed is the greatest paradox of modern governance. The better we become at preventing disasters, the less visible our success becomes. Until political systems learn to reward disasters that never happen, we will continue financing recovery far more generously than resilience.
Why do we still pretend climate finance exists outside the political economy of development?
The same governments negotiating ambitious climate commitments are also managing debt crises, rising borrowing costs, fragile public finances and the daily challenge of keeping schools open, hospitals functioning and essential public services running. For them, public finance does not come in neatly labelled categories. Every dollar serves the same purpose — keeping the state functioning while responding to growing demands with increasingly limited fiscal space.
This is the political economy that global climate debates often overlook.
For developing countries, climate investments do not compete with emissions. They compete with schools, healthcare, basic infrastructure, social protection and debt servicing. These are choices that governments should never be forced to make, yet fiscal realities leave them with little alternative.
Until climate finance is understood as part of a broader strategy for economic transformation and fiscal resilience, we will continue treating the symptoms rather than the causes. Global forums will keep debating how to mobilize more climate finance while paying too little attention to the structural constraints that determine whether countries can absorb, sustain and translate it into meaningful development outcomes.
Perhaps the real challenge is not financing climate action. It is financing development in a way that makes climate resilience an integral outcome rather than an additional obligation.
Are we sleepwalking into a new era of technological inequality?
We are at the global technological phase where algorithms estimate disaster losses before assessment teams arrive and satellites and remote sensing systems monitor forests in real time. Artificial intelligence now writes policy briefs and digital systems increasingly determine who receives insurance, finance and humanitarian assistance. Its truly an extraordinary technological revolution not merely unfolding itself around us but shaping our thought processes, choices and almost every other aspect of our individual and collective lives.
But these unparalleled technological advancements are creating both winners and losers. May be more losers then winners? What happens to countries that cannot afford AI infrastructure? Who owns the environmental data that increasingly shapes global investment? Who writes the algorithms determining climate and disaster risks? Whose knowledge is excluded because it cannot be digitised? Are the large language models (LLMs) biased against the indigenous knowledge and cultural heritages of most of the developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America because their local knowledge and traditions are not part of western English language dominated knowledge systems? The digital divide is no longer simply a development challenge. It is rapidly becoming a governance challenge. And it has tipped to become a climate justice challenge as well.
Are we preparing governments for the future or preparing them for the past?
Most public institutions in the developing and developed countries are still organized around the logic of the twentieth century. Ministerial setups are thematically organized and driven frequently suffering with the challenges of inter-connectivity and coordination. Climate, agriculture, energy, health, transport, Finance and the list goes. All separate ministries with specific mandates and budgets. The world, however, no longer behaves that way.
Climate change now influences national security and development is a genuinely governance challenge. Artificial intelligence is reshaping labour markets and public administration. Cyber threats can cripple critical infrastructure. Water scarcity is redefining geopolitics and food security depends simultaneously on climate, technology, trade and what not!
The risks are converging. But our institutions are not.
Perhaps the greatest governance gap today is not between developed and developing countries. It is between the speed at which the world's challenges are becoming interconnected and the speed at which governments are adapting to govern them. Unless governments begin redesigning themselves for complexity and broader integration rather than sectors, they risk remaining suitable for solving problems and providing services to the people.
The question behind all the questions
After attending nearly two decades of COPs, serving within the United Nations, advising vulnerable countries across the Commonwealth countries and nations and working directly with communities recovering from disasters, I have reached an uncomfortable conclusion.
Climate change is exposing a failure of governance and the developmental model which has evolved over the period. This development model continues to manufacture vulnerability faster than resilience. It exposes institutions designed for predictable problems confronting a world defined by cascading risks and driven by unpredictability. It demonstrates that technology can deepen inequalities as quickly as it can solve them.
And it reminds us that no amount of sophisticated diplomacy can compensate for weak institutions, fragmented planning and political systems that reward short-term responses over long-term resilience. Perhaps this explains why so many international forums feel increasingly disconnected from the realities they are trying to change. We have become exceptionally good at negotiating agreements. The harder task is negotiating with reality. That conversation is far less comfortable but perhaps that is precisely why it is the one we most need to have.