D&C Days 2025: Key messages
Participants at D&C Days 2025 highlighted the urgency to empower local actors and foster continuous learning, showcased how innovative insurance mechanisms could be game-changers for climate adaptation and emphasised that unlocking private finance for action on climate and nature requires trust, transparency, and a shared understanding. The insights from these discussions were carried forward to COP30 to help influence and inform global climate negotiations.
Development and Climate Days 2025 illustration (Photo: Jorge Martin)
Development and Climate Days (D&C Days) provide a crucial informal space for stakeholders attending the annual UN climate conference (COP30) to come together to share open, honest conversations and ideas about how to tackle climate change and build resilience.
The first part of D&C Days 2025 on Thursday, 30 October, was a day of online dialogue, interaction, difficult conversations and solution-focused sessions. The event brought together 370 grassroots representatives, political leaders, policymakers, negotiators and researchers who discussed the real issues that should be tackled at COP30.
Sessions focused on three central themes that need to be addressed to speed progress on climate change: scaling locally led adaptation (LLA) approaches to climate action, financing resilience, and showcasing innovation for transformation.
The key messages and asks distilled from the day are set out below and were then taken to COP30 to influence climate decisions that recognise the most vulnerable people and parties at the front lines of climate change.
Key messages
Scaling up effective climate action requires an interconnected system that empowers local actors and fosters continuous learning. Scaling up requires three interconnected mechanisms working together. Devolution ensures that decision making moves closer to the local level, enabling communities to participate in risk assessments and policy development.
Decentralisation supports context-specific approaches by investing in national government systems and local capabilities, recognising that one-size-fits-all solutions don't work. Investing in learning systems strengthens local capacities through communities of practice, experimentation, peer learning and collaborative scaling.
Ultimately, people who are already feeling the effects of climate change must not be excluded from climate action; effective and lasting solutions depend on participatory, locally-led action.
Successful interagency collaboration requires a balance of structure and flexibility, grounded in transparency, shared purpose and strategic coordination. Interagency collaboration can be powerful but needs careful navigation. Success depends on finding the right balance between structure (achieved through clear governance systems and agreed protocols) and flexibility, by fostering adaptive cultures and breaking down institutional barriers.
Agreeing a shared purpose is an essential first step: establishing a common goal and cultivating open, honest relationships that allow agencies to understand each other's operational constraints, mandates and practical limitations. Strong governance structures that operate across geographic levels – national, regional and international – have proven particularly effective, especially when supported by clear roles and responsibilities.
Finally, effective collaboration relies on transparent data sharing, ensuring that raw information reaches decision makers to drive timely, coordinated and informed action.
With adaptation finance under strain, quality matters as much as quantity. Ensuring locally led, flexible and system-strengthening approaches is key to sustaining resilience in a tightening funding landscape. We are seeing widening funding gaps and an increasing proportion of private finance largely directed toward mitigation compared to adaptation.
While efficiency and 'value for money' remain important, they must not undermine the principles of locally led adaptation (LLA) or the goal of building long-term resilience. As fiscal and geopolitical pressures grow, funders face the challenge of maintaining accountability without overburdening local actors with rigid monitoring and evaluation demands – recognising that qualitative measures of resilience are as vital as quantitative ones.
We need to innovate to accelerate action on sustainable adaptation. We need to invest in systems and institutions, not just isolated projects, so that climate finance can strengthen existing local development mechanisms rather than fragmenting them.
Building networks across partners, sectors and scales is also crucial to align diverse funding sources and bridge gaps between adaptation, biodiversity and other agendas. Above all, adaptation finance must be co-designed and flexible, empowering national and local actors to learn, adapt and evolve their responses as conditions change.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and innovative insurance mechanisms could be game-changers for climate adaptation. AI can predict cyclone impacts, crop failures and water shortages with unprecedented accuracy.
When insurance companies and lenders use these predictions to design better products, funding adaptation moves from being seen as charity to being recognised as smart financial planning. However, it’s important to note that these emerging tools should supplement existing approaches – they are valuable aids, but not silver bullets.
Community access to climate finance remains a significant challenge, which can leave many communities unaware of available resources or unable to access them.
Too often, funding priorities reflect donor and government agendas rather than the needs and priorities of those most affected by climate change. COP30 should urge governments, climate finance institutions and development partners to empower communities to plan, prioritise and manage climate projects themselves.
This means establishing decentralised and flexible funding systems that provide direct access, long-term support and technical assistance – while ensuring that women, Indigenous Peoples and local communities have a fair and equal voice in how climate finance is designed and delivered.
There should be laws and legislations that allow communities to participate in setting apart funds for climate adaptation, but also for the needs they have directly in the communities
– Leah Muthoni Kimotho, assistant programme manager at the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK), during a D&C Days 2025 session
Trust-based grant making can shift power dynamics in development and climate action by recentring communities as decision makers and positioning funders as enablers rather than directors. Rooted in the ideas of the commons and citizen innovation, this approach views development as a collective and creative practice that emerges from people's lived realities.
When funders trust local expertise and make themselves accountable to communities, they foster adaptive management, ensure adaptation remains locally led and prevent extractive relationships. The growing move toward community-led, trust-based approaches reflects a necessary departure from rigid, donor-driven models toward participatory, flexible and co-created systems.
Trust-based financing is based on mutual confidence, relationship-building, flexibility and peer learning, underpinned by strong local governance mechanisms that enable communities to design and implement their own solutions.
Philanthropies are uniquely positioned to enable locally led adaptation by taking risks, acting flexibly and investing patiently – qualities often constrained in traditional funding systems.
Great potential for philanthropic support lies in bridging the gap between community innovation and institutional finance, creating the trust, time and space for local actors to lead. Philanthropic funds can provide multi-year, flexible, core finance, supporting networks of local and Indigenous communities and reducing the administrative barriers that hinder community access to funds.
Successful community-led finance models, such as savings schemes and co-governed city funds in Zimbabwe, already demonstrate accountability, flexibility and scalability, offering strong models for blended investments from philanthropy and public finance.
Full illustration from Development and Climate Days 2025. You can also access the image on IIED's Flickr channel, where it can be enlarged (Illustration: Jorge Martin)
For the Global Goal on Adaptation to be effective, it must balance standardisation of indicators with local relevance so that it can become both globally coherent and genuinely grounded in the communities it aims to serve. We need greater global consistency in how adaptation progress is measured. Without it, countries are "comparing apples to oranges," making it impossible to assess collective progress.
Achieving this consistency means developing standardised frameworks that establish clear methodologies, comparable disaggregation levels and agreed baselines, so that everyone measures change in the same way. At the same time, these systems must remain flexible enough to incorporate local perspectives and realities, ensuring that indicators can be translated to the subnational level.
This requires providing local actors with the necessary resources, staff and technical capacity to collect and use data effectively.
We don't want another layer of reporting – what the GGA should be [doing] is building on existing mechanisms – systems already exist – and make decisions on resilience and adaptation
– Lina Yassin, climate policy researcher at IIED, during a D&C Days 2025 session
Unlocking private finance for action on climate and nature requires trust, transparency and a shared understanding between local actors and the private sector, using data and different types of finance to bridge the gap between grassroots initiatives and investment capital.
We must move on from thinking of the private sector as consisting solely of large multinational corporations and instead recognise its diversity: from financial institutions and impact investors to corporations, small and medium enterprises, farmers' organisations and village savings groups reinvesting in sustainable practices.
To engage these varied actors in locally-led action, data and evidence are essential: strengthening the capabilities of both local actors and the private sector to work with different types of data and evidence can enhance transparency, support local priorities and attract private funding.
Effective collaboration also depends on speaking a shared language, translating between business terms like "return on investment" and local development priorities, investing in capacity building on both sides, understanding each other's contexts and identifying effective ways to achieve shared goals.
The climate crisis isn't waiting for anyone, and neither can we. It takes too long to produce reports and assessments while communities are already experiencing climate impacts. Indicators and data are valuable for showing progress, but they don't rebuild infrastructure or protect lives.
The time for analysis has passed – it's time to implement decisions. We must work smarter, accelerate action and demonstrate the real impact of adaptation finance. This can be achieved through ongoing assessment of risks and trade-offs to ensure we’re making the right adaptation investments, in the right places, at the right time, informed by knowledge, science, and evidence.
Organising partners
This year’s event is organised in partnership by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre (RCCC) with DanChurchAid, the Global Resilience Partnership (GRP) and the Wellcome Trust, with additional support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands via the Generating Ambition for Locally Led Adaptation (GA-LLA) programme.
