Behind the geopolitical headlines that dominated last week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, a quieter shift was underway. Climate discussions, where they featured at all, pivoted away from emissions reductions, long the centre of global efforts, towards managing and adapting to climate impacts.
This reframing reflects real and mounting pressures. Climate risks are no longer abstract future threats; they are already affecting lives and economies. Communities are facing worsening heat, food and water stress now, while governments and businesses are confronting infrastructure damage, disrupted supply chains and soaring insurance costs. For a growing number of organisations funding work on climate change, navigating constrained budgets and immediate crises to help address, the case for adaptation is clear and compelling.
Yet Davos also exposed a deeper risk — not simply a shift in climate priorities, but in how development choices are being made under pressure. Adaptation is increasingly being foregrounded as the most immediate response to climate harm, while emissions reduction to mitigate climate change is treated as a longer-term, or more politically difficult priority. The logic has influential backers. Just days before COP30 opened, Bill Gates, a decades-long champion of climate action, published a memo calling for global efforts to place greater emphasis on development priorities over ‘near-term emissions goals.’
The issue here is not the focus on development, nor the growing attention to adaptation; both are necessary and overdue. It is the assumption increasingly embedded in these judgements: that emissions reduction can be deferred and if they aren’t, it will be at the expense of human development.
In reality, without climate mitigation, adaptation becomes a losing battle against accelerating impacts, and development gains are systematically eroded by worsening climate conditions. When pursued together, mitigation, adaptation and development reinforce one another; when mitigation is delayed, progress becomes harder, more expensive and potentially short-lived.
1. A stable climate is the foundation for human development
Poverty alleviation, disease prevention and adaptation to climate impacts demand urgent collective action, but we do not have to choose between addressing them and reducing emissions. These challenges are inseparable.
Scientific evidence underscores how high the stakes now are. Capping global temperature rise to below 1.5C is slipping from reach1, with stated national policies placing the world on track for around 2.8C of warming this century.2 Each increment of warming will intensify human suffering and make development goals both harder and costlier to achieve.
Take health, a priority repeatedly emphasised in recent debates. Under current warming scenarios, the World Health Organisation (WHO) projects 250,000 additional deaths annually by 2050 from heat stress, malnutrition, malaria and diarrhoea; these figures will only grow exponentially with further warming.3 As the world heats up, malaria-suitable zones will spread, putting up to 4.7 billion additional people at risk by 2078.4 Increased investment in vaccines and health systems is critical now, but the progress made risks being fundamentally undermined without simultaneous efforts to minimise warming.
The same dynamic holds for food security. Global efforts to end hunger have stalled since 2019, with 713-757 million people undernourished in 2023.5 Climate change is a major driver: current warming trajectories could push one-third of global food production to fall outside feasible zones by 2080.6 Yields from rain-fed agriculture, constituting 80% of global cropland, could drop 50% by 2060 due to drought.7 With 4 billion people and 75% of the world’s poorest communities dependent on agrifood systems8, this is not a separate ‘environmental’ issue, but the backbone of human development.
Climate change is also a central driver of forced migration, political instability and conflict, the very antitheses of human thriving. By 2050, rising temperatures could force over 216 million people to migrate within their own countries, including 86 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa alone.9 Each 0.5C of future warming is associated with a further 10-20% increase in deadly conflicts.10
Also receiving insufficient attention are the crucial priorities of protecting biodiversity, nature and preventing climate tipping points — the thresholds beyond which planetary systems shift irreversibly, triggering cascading changes across interdependent systems.11 Human wellbeing is inseparable from planetary health; if we allow whole systems to destabilise, we risk losing the very foundations that make long-term resilience possible.
Ultimately, treating climate change as one issue among many competing for attention and resources puts it in a separate ‘bucket’; in reality, it is a cross-cutting threat multiplier that stands to undermine progress across all our shared development priorities.
2. Mitigation efforts are supporting human development now
The view that climate mitigation competes with development priorities also overlooks the ways in which near-term actions to reduce emissions are significantly improving lives.
Electricity access is the cornerstone of development, supporting businesses and productive work, study after dark, refrigeration of food and medicine, and a reduction of the hours spent (predominantly by women) collecting fuel. Achieving it through prolonged fossil fuel dependency actively undermines development outcomes. Clean energy alternatives are not only rapidly expanding electricity access, but also bring employment, economic and health outcomes, all while reducing future risks.
Today, around 730 million people lack access to electricity, 80% of whom live in Sub-Saharan Africa, while over 2 billion people rely on polluting fuels for cooking.12 Indoor air pollution from these fuels causes around 3.7 million premature deaths annually, disproportionately affecting women and children.13 Importing fossil fuels often costs energy-importing developing countries over 5% of GDP annually, resources that could fund health, education and infrastructure projects.14
Meanwhile, renewables are now the cheapest source of energy in most regions, with solar costs having declined by 99.9% since 1975, and are leapfrogging their fossil fuel counterparts. Investment is increasingly flowing to developing markets, with 58% of new solar generation now in lower-income countries.15
Evidence from Systemiq and the World Resources Institute suggests that the green transition will create around 375 million new jobs globally over the next decade, including 150 million through climate-resilience measures, with the highest growth concentrated in the most climate-vulnerable regions.16 These investments are inherently complementary to development, and support sustained productive economies in ways that aid alone often cannot.
The Carbon Trust’s work delivering the Transforming Energy Access programme, funded by the UK Government, demonstrates this integrated approach at scale. Since 2016, TEA has supported the creation of over 152,000 sustainable long-term jobs while providing 29.7 million people with improved clean energy access, all while avoiding 4.6 million tonnes of CO2 emissions.
In parallel, Powering Renewable Energy Opportunities, a £100 million UK-funded programme operating across 12 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, is driving renewable energy deployment in off-grid and underserved communities. Combining technical assistance with innovative financing mechanisms, PREO is further proof of the power of integrated programmes to simultaneously expand energy access, create economic opportunities and empower women and most marginalised groups, all while reducing emissions.
3. There isn’t a funding trade-off
Finally, there is no evidence that prioritising climate mitigation diverts resources from key development goals. Both climate and development finance are facing major shortfalls, not because they compete with one another, but because overall political prioritisation has weakened.
Official development assistance (ODA) for education has stagnated globally since 2015 and has fallen by 18-22% between 2023 and 2025.17 Health aid faces similar constraints, with the Vaccine Alliance Gavi projecting a forward funding shortfall of around $3 billion this year, despite growing need.18
Climate finance is not exempt from these trends: the current US administration has cut approximately $11 billion in annual climate finance; the UK, Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and France have all announced significant reductions in the past five years;and the world is far from meeting the annual $6.2 trillion required in climate finance to remain below 2C warming.19
Importantly, these cuts have been driven predominantly by deficit reduction measures and shifting political priorities – particularly towards defence spending, which reached a record $2.7 trillion in 202420 – not competition between climate and development funding.21 ODA cuts affect both climate programmes and health initiatives simultaneously. ODA spending now averages around 0.33% of GDP — well below the UN’s target of 0.7%, — and is expected to decline further.22 This isn't a story of climate taking resources from development; both urgently need increased prioritisation, and there is no indication that reducing spending in one will increase it in the other.
One thing we do know is that outcomes improve when climate and development finance are integrated. This is why development institutions intentionally design blended finance instruments that serve multiple objectives, including resilience, clean energy, infrastructure, nutrition and health. Modelling by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs shows that joint climate-SDG investments save 37-40% of public resources compared to siloed approaches, making these the strongest pathways both for long-term resilience and navigating constrained budgets.23
If cost-effectiveness is a key concern, the biggest mistake would be to delay action to reduce emissions.24 Every tenth of a degree of warming prevented reduces costs across healthcare, agriculture, infrastructure and forced migration – precisely the outcomes prioritised by development advocates.25 Delaying mitigation only means exponentially higher and later adaptation costs, leaving yet less fiscal space for future development assistance.
What next?
In a moment of rising impacts and tightening budgets, the pressures visible at Davos are real. The shift away from prioritising emissions reduction reflects genuine constraints: immediate crises demand immediate responses and climate mitigation’s returns can seem distant or uncertain.
Yet the conclusion being drawn risks misreading the evidence. Mitigation is not a trade-off against development or adaptation; it is the foundation for both. Without it, adaptation becomes an uphill battle against accelerating risks and development gains can prove temporary. Climate finance works most effectively when these strategies reinforce one another. The question facing funders is not which to prioritise – it is how to ensure integration; the prosperity of the world’s most vulnerable people depends on it.
2 Emissions Gap Report 2025 | UNEP - UN Environment Programme
4 Malaria and dengue predicted to affect billions more people if global warming continues uncurbed
5 The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2024
7 Estimating the potential of rain-fed agriculture
8 Employment in Agriculture - Our World in Data
9 Groundswell Report | Global Forum on Migration and Development
10 A practical agenda for addressing climate-related conflict
11 Global Tipping Points | understanding risks & their potential impact
12 Access to electricity stagnates, leaving globally 730 million in the dark – Analysis - IEA
13 Access to clean cooking – SDG7: Data and Projections – Analysis - IEA
14 Science based implementation of 1.5C compatible climate action for LDC and SIDS
15 Global Electricity Mid-Year Insights 2025 | Ember
16 Jobs and skills for a people-centered climate transition
17 Cuts in official development assistance: Full Report | OECD
18 World leaders recommit to immunisation amid global funding shortfall
19 How-big-is-the-Net-Zero-financing-gap-2023.pdf
20 Record military spending threatens global peace and development, new UN report warns
21 The case for development in 2025
22 Cuts in official development assistance: Full Report | OECD
23 State of Blended Finance 2024- Climate Edition.pdf
24 Interactions between climate change mitigation, damages, and adaptation
25 The world faces a two-front battle to halt global warming and address the effects of climate change
