WSDS 2026 Thematic Track: Roundtable Discussion on ‘Unlocking Climate Resilience Finance to Strengthen Climate Actions in the Global South’
Climate impacts are accelerating across the Global South, disproportionately affecting informal workers, smallholder farmers, women, indigenous communities, and urban poor populations. Rising heat stress, water scarcity, flooding, livelihood disruption, and climate-induced mobility are already eroding hard-won development gains and increasing fiscal and social vulnerabilities. Despite growing recognition of these risks, resilience finance remains critically inadequate, both in scale and in its structuring.
According to the latest UNEP Resilience Gap Report, developing countries will need between US$310 billion and US$365 billion per year by 2035 to implement essential resilience measures, yet international public resilience finance reached only about US$26 billion in 2023, roughly 12–14 times less than what is needed. This persistent gap highlights how far current financing falls short of responding to growing climate impacts across vulnerable regions.
While governments, philanthropies, and development partners are increasingly piloting innovative resilience solutions such as heat action plans, climate-resilient livelihoods, early warning systems, nature-based solutions, and social protection mechanisms, many of these efforts remain stuck and are not been upscaled based on the level required. Persistent gaps in hyperlocal climate risk data, institutional capacity, robust financing instruments, and coordination across public, private, and philanthropic actors limit the ability to scale and embed these interventions into sustained programs. Addressing these barriers is critical to unlocking resilience finance that is inclusive, locally responsive, and capable of delivering long-term climate resilience at scale.
Objectives of the thematic track
This roundtable aims to advance practical pathways for scaling equitable, inclusive, and locally responsive resilience finance in the Global South. Building on the growing urgency to close the resilience finance gap, the discussion will:
- Take stock of what is already working across public finance, philanthropy, multilateral development finance, and blended finance mechanisms in supporting climate resilience outcomes;
- Identify actionable strategies to overcome financing barriers
Through this exchange, the roundtable seeks to generate concrete insights on how resilience finance can be mobilised and structured to deliver long-term, system-level climate resilience for the most vulnerable communities in the Global South.
Key Questions
- Which resilience finance approaches or models are already demonstrating impact in delivering equitable and locally responsive resilience outcomes, and what concrete lessons can be drawn for replication and scale?
- How can successful resilience pilots be transitioned into systemic, financially sustainable, and institutionally anchored sectoral programmes?
About the World Sustainable Development Summit (WSDS)
The World Sustainable Development Summit (WSDS) is the annual flagship Track II initiative organized by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). Instituted in 2001, the Summit series has a legacy of over two decades for making ‘sustainable development’ a globally shared goal. The only independently convened international Summit on sustainable development and environment, based in the Global South, WSDS strives to provide long-term solutions for the benefit of global communities by assembling the world’s most enlightened leaders and thinkers on a single platform. The 25th edition of the annual flagship event of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI)—the World Sustainable Development Summit (WSDS)—will be held from 25-27 February 2026 in New Delhi. The deliberations of the Silver Jubilee edition of the Summit will focus on the umbrella theme of Parivartan: Transformations: Vision, Voices and Values for Sustainable Development.