H.E. Ambassador André Aranha Corrêa do Lago

COP30 President

Belém, Brazil

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Dear Mr. Corrêa do Lago,

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Congratulations on your upcoming COP presidency. On behalf of the Improved and Equitable Access Network on climate finance, we are counting on your leadership to help meet our collective obligations and protect future generations. That is why, at the first meeting of the Network, we are writing to urge COP30 to maintain support for countries affected by climate change, conflict and high levels of humanitarian need. 

We represent countries that are some of the most vulnerable to climate impacts, and are also affected by armed conflict and high levels of humanitarian needs. This is no geographic accident. Our people are vulnerable to climate impacts in large part because the crises in our countries make it extremely difficult to anticipate, absorb, and adapt to climate hazards - as does a glaring gap in available resources. 

Between 2014 and 2021, some states facing the most severe crises received just $2 per person in climate finance from some of the world's largest climate funds - compared to $162 per person for their non-crisis peers. We have long been calling for this gap to be closed, including most recently, in 2024, when governments representing 300 million people living in conflict- and crisis-affected states wrote to the heads of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, the UN and the presidents of COP28 and COP29, with a concrete target for increased finance and political willpower to address this issue. 

The Network was launched at COP29 last year, following the Baku Call on Climate Action for Peace, Relief and Recovery (Baku Call), to emphasise the urgent need to support the most climate-vulnerable countries and answer these challenges with a united voice. The Baku Call identified the Baku Climate and Peace Action Hub as a platform to support the Network.

 
We welcome the leadership Brazil showed during its G20 presidency in tackling the deeper structural drivers of vulnerability and fragility, including food insecurity. This focus - on building sustainable and resilient systems that strengthen the adaptive capacity of populations to climate change - will be critical to building our countries' resilience. Only through supporting countries to become more stable and prosperous can people become climate resilient. 

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To that end, as you prepare to convene the international community in Belem later this year, we urge you to:

• Keep Climate, Relief, Recovery and Peace Day on the agenda at COP30. This thematic day has become a critical part of the COP agenda, rallying political and financial commitments to help address the funding gap facing climate-vulnerable countries affected by conflict and high levels of humanitarian need. This includes the Peace, Relief and Recovery Declaration at COP28, and the Baku Call on Climate Action for Peace, Relief, and Recovery at COP29. Several activities are being planned for Belem as part of these processes.

• Continue to champion resilience, recovery and development as our collective guiding  ambition. COP30 is an irreplaceable moment to bring the agenda forward, to align the needs of climate-vulnerable and conflict-affected countries with global development objectives, and to support these places to move beyond coping with crises, and towards long-term climate resilience. This is not only a job for the COP30 presidency alone; we need to build on existing coalitions to move from pledges to action.

• Ensure that countries facing conflict and high levels of humanitarian need, including small island developing states and least developed countries, are kept front and centre of efforts to scale up climate finance. These countries will need an estimated $41.5 billion per year by 2030 to adapt to and mitigate climate change - but this is 280% higher than current spending, and 110% higher than existing commitments to scale up climate finance. Discussions at COP30 must continue to engage with the need for climate finance to flow to the countries that have been underserved by the international system until now.

We know that the COP30 Presidency will be vigorous in its efforts to leave no one behind in the fight
against climate change, and we stand ready to support and work with the Presidency to keep this issue high on the agenda in November and beyond

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Yours Sincerely,

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H.E. Bihi Iman Egeh

Minister of Finance for the Federal Government of Somalia

Inaugural Chair, Improved and Equitable Access Network

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On behalf of representatives of countries attending the first strategy meeting of the IEACF Network (Republic of Burundi, Republic of Chad, Republic of Iraq, Sierra Leone, Federal Republic of Somalia, Timor-Leste and the Republic of Yemen).

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