Exploring Power Asymmetries in SB64 Climate Negotiations

The 2026 Bonn Climate Change Conference (SB64) wrapped up its mid-conference stretch with adaptation, climate finance, and the fossil fuel transition all billed as top priorities heading into COP31 in Antalya. Listen to the speeches and you’d think these issues carry equal weight. Look at how each is actually moving through the negotiating system, and a different picture emerges.

The energy transition has exit options. When the formal UNFCCC process stalls, this agenda keeps finding other ways forward. In April, 57 countries convened in Santa Marta, Colombia, deliberately outside the treaty process, to work on managing fossil fuel decline and building clean energy pathways at a pace multilateral consensus hasn’t reached. Energy-security anxiety, sharpened by tensions around the Strait of Hormuz, is now doing more to drive transition urgency than equity arguments ever did. And trade policy, particularly the EU’s carbon border adjustments, is letting advanced economies set transition terms unilaterally, prompting India and the broader G77/LMDC bloc to push for those measures to be addressed inside the UNFCCC framework instead.

Adaptation has no comparable escape route. It depends entirely on the same consensus machine that keeps converting urgency into dialogues, workshops, and indicator frameworks rather than binding finance. The gap is not subtle: roughly $32 billion in international adaptation finance reached developing countries in 2024, against an estimated need of $310–365 billion annually by 2030. Most of what does arrive comes as loans, not grants — finance that can deepen the very vulnerability it’s meant to address. The Belém Adaptation Indicators, meant to eventually link finance to measurable outcomes, are still being built, deferring delivery further.

This is the real story of SB64: not that one issue is ignored while the other is championed, but that one track can build coalitions and bypass deadlock while the other remains hostage to a process that keeps offering process in place of capital.

As negotiators head toward COP31, the question worth watching isn’t who talks about adaptation and the transition the most — it’s who gets the leverage to make their priority move, and who’s left waiting on consensus.

Read ARI’s full policy brief on the power dynamics shaping SB64.