A small UNFCCC budget fight signals a big climate justice crisis

Daily Maverick

3 days ago

Last month, I sat in a small room in Bonn as negotiators at the UN's midyear climate talks (SB62) haggled for days over something that rarely makes headlines: the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change's (UNFCCC's) core budget.
At the 11th hour, while the closing plenary had already begun and mild panic had set in, negotiators eked out an agreement to a meagre 10% increase for 2026-2027 — well below what the Secretariat says is needed to deliver the promises of the Paris Agreement.
The UNFCCC had proposed a budget increase of 24.4%, which would have allowed it to cover 84% of essential activities. But instead, it will only have enough for 74% of its core work.
To many, this sounds like technical bureaucracy. And judging by chats I've had with friends and colleagues, most people don't think about where the budget for the UNFCCC comes from at all.
But this budget fight cuts to the heart of climate justice — especially for developing countries in Africa, which rely most on a functioning, well-resourced UN climate system to secure fair support for climate finance and a just transition.
Since the Paris Agreement, the UNFCCC's mandate and workload has ballooned — from the Global Stocktake to the New Quantified Goal on Climate Finance, the Global Goal on Adaptation, and Article 6 on carbon markets.
A growing agenda is not necessarily a negative. If anything, it's partially a sign of success. Climate change is a multi-faceted crisis and countries most affected have continuously pushed for ambitious action.
The UNFCCC may not have delivered the scale of finance and action needed, but securing expansive agenda items on finance, adaptation, and loss and damage has been key. It is currently the only platform where countries that are home to the major polluters and majority of the world's wealth have to stand toe-to-toe with the countries that are home to 80% of the world's population and those most affected by climate impacts.
However Party-mandated activities have increased to around 500 events aimed at keeping negotiations moving forward. The core budget that keeps the Secretariat's doors open, and pays for services, supports national delegations and funds capacity-building, hasn't kept pace.
How the UNFCCC funds its work
Countries fund the core work of the UNFCCC just like in other UN bodies, although other actors can donate additional funds for supplementary activities. The UNFCCC uses the UN scale of assessments, adjusted to its membership, to calculate each Party's fair share of the agreed budget, meaning each Party pays roughly according to their GNI.
Parties approve each new budget, and therefore how much they will have to pay. At SB62, the UNFCCC requested a 24.4% increase to cover new mandates and inflation. Instead, Parties settled for less than half that, and the budget shortfall now has to be made up by voluntary donations.
This tension is not new. UNFCCC Executive Secretary Simon Stiell has increasingly warned Parties about the crisis – that chronic underfunding weakens the mechanisms that ensure countries deliver on climate commitments.
The impact is beginning to show, including cancellations of regional climate weeks. But the direction of travel is now particularly concerning. The last UNFCCC budget approved a 19% increase, or roughly two-thirds of the increase requested. A 10% budget increase at SB62 is only half of what was requested and represents a dramatically widening budget shortfall.
From core budgets to voluntary contributions
It's difficult to accept that Parties cannot afford the additional increase when the money the UNFCCC is requesting is essentially pocket change. The Secretariat requested roughly €46-million, or R947-million, per annum.
Those sound like big numbers, but the entire UNFCCC annual budget is only 1.6% of South Africa's modest defence budget. Or less than half of our R2.3-billion VIP protection budget. Or approximately 0.034% of South Africa's annual R2.59-trillion budget.
The amount is so small South Africa could cover it in entirety — even without contributions from all 197 countries. But our actual contribution is €110,000, approximately 0.00004% of our annual budget. Wealthier countries pay slightly more — the largest share ($9.6-million) goes to the US — but that's still only 0.0001% of their $7-trillion annual budget.
It's surreal that the wealthiest countries sit around a table telling each other they 'just can't afford' to spend another 0.00001% on the functioning of a platform they all say is 'essential' to climate action.
As negotiators from small island states and least developed countries raised in budget negotiations, current practice has increasingly become that countries agree at COPs to big decisions, signalling ambition and action to the world and solidarity with one another — only to convene six months later in a small, sparsely attended room in which countries say they can't afford the big decisions they agreed to when the world was watching.
Yet, the same countries who argue UNFCCC increases are unaffordable often offer large voluntary donations. In 2024, Japan voluntarily gave an extra $11.8-million to the UNFCCC, 300% more than the $2.9-million Japan owed. Many countries have done the same.
In 2023, Spain offered an extra $7.9-million and Germany gave an extra $6.9-million. In 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic and unprecedented global spending increases, wealthy countries still managed to volunteer an extra $10.6-million.
Those voluntary contributions can be earmarked for specific activities, although this is not always made public. So effectively, wealthy countries are pushing back on the compulsory core budget and instead opting to provide budget that they can earmark.
They may prefer to have this flexibility for their own political and administrative reasons. But this shift gives them increasingly more influence over which of the underfunded mandates they wish to save, and which should languish in obscurity — another form of soft power in an already unfairly stacked playing field.
The UNFCCC's legitimacy — especially for Africa — depends on whether it works for those with the least capacity to influence powerful blocs behind closed doors. Meanwhile, underfunding slows implementation of decisions that matter most for climate-vulnerable nations.
A symptom of a bigger multilateral malaise
The UNFCCC's struggles echo what's happening throughout the UN system, where budget shortfalls are even more extreme — as much as 20% of the UN's budget and 7,000+ UN jobs could be cut. The Trump administration and its allies have certainly escalated this crisis, but it is not new. Increasingly, critical global public goods are left to the mercy of voluntary donations which can be shaped by donor priorities, not shared needs.
To some degree, the reason the UNFCCC hasn't faced a much bigger crisis is the whim of one billionaire — Mike Bloomberg has offered to pick up the US's tab for 2025 despite Donald Trump's decision to exit the Paris Agreement. But should the integrity of the only global multilateral platform dedicated to the largest crisis facing our planet rest on wealthy individuals?
It's impossible to separate this from the wider climate finance crisis. The world's wealthiest countries have long dodged or fudged their contributions to global climate finance goals, and haggled over peanuts while dedicating 20 times those amounts to military spending and fossil fuel subsidies.
Even where funds do flow, they come with strings attached and often favour mitigation investments over the adaptation priorities of African countries. This tiny UNFCCC budget fight is the institutional side of that same coin.
A quiet fight that deserves more noise
If the UNFCCC weakens, African countries lose one of the few spaces where their collective voice can put pressure on big polluters, demand fair access to finance and highlight their adaptation priorities.
Climate justice advocates cannot afford to only watch over the big-headline negotiations. The fight for the UNFCCC is also in the tiny line items buried in 60+ pages of budget proposals.
The credibility of the institution — and the fairness it offers the most climate vulnerable — will be written between those lines. And the rooms discussing them shouldn't be so sparse. DM