New Delhi: The COP30 presidency on Wednesday unveiled the ‘Baku to Belém Roadmap to 1.3 Trillion’, a blueprint to mobilise at least USD 1.3 trillion every year by 2035 to help developing countries address the growing impacts of climate change and accelerate their transition to cleaner economies.
Follow Energy Watch on X
Coordinated under the COP30 President’s Council on Economics, Finance, and Climate, the roadmap brings together proposals from more than 25 economists and climate policy experts, including Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Nicholas Stern, Joseph Stiglitz, Mariana Mazzucato, Avinash Persaud, and José Alexandre Scheinkman, who chaired the council at the request of COP30 President-Designate André Corrêa do Lago.
One of the proposals highlights how remittances and migration can serve as key stabilisers for developing economies affected by climate shocks. Professors Harrison Hong, José Scheinkman and Jiangmin Xu found that a typical extreme-weather event can reduce GDP growth by one percentage point, increase debt-to-GDP by 1.4 percentage points, and raise sovereign spreads by 80 basis points. Their study proposes cutting remittance transfer fees — currently between 3 percent and 6 percent — to strengthen resilience. A 50-basis-point reduction in remittance costs, they estimate, could improve bond yields in high-risk countries by 5–10 basis points.
The authors also propose “debt-for-adaptation swaps”, in which creditors accept modest haircuts of 5–15 basis points to finance public adaptation projects. Such swaps, they argue, can reduce climate vulnerability while lowering default risk in developing countries.
Professors Patrick Bolton and Alissa Kleinnijenhuis, in their analysis, estimate that decarbonising the power sectors of developing countries outside China would cost about USD 465 billion annually between 2025 and 2035. Their plan calls for international climate finance to cover all phase-out costs for fossil fuel plants and a quarter of phase-in investments in renewables, amounting to around USD 124 billion a year, equivalent to just 0.3 percent of the combined GDP of high-income countries, excluding the United States.
They argue that the world cannot meet its climate goals without large-scale emissions cuts in developing economies, where replacing fossil generation with solar and wind is both technologically feasible and economically viable.
A separate proposal led by Professor Juliano Assunção and the Climate Policy Initiative/PUC-Rio calls for a new Reversing Deforestation Mechanism (RDM) to complement existing REDD+ and Tropical Forest Forever Facility frameworks. Designed as a results-based system rewarding verified carbon removals, the mechanism could, if implemented fully, remove up to 2 gigatonnes of CO₂ equivalent annually in its first five years. At a carbon price of USD 50 per tonne, the mechanism could generate USD 100 billion a year to support forest restoration and long-term conservation efforts in tropical countries.
The roadmap also proposes new systems to improve transparency and effectiveness in global carbon markets. Economists Rohini Pande, Robin Burgess, Maryam Farboodi and Lucy Page have developed MARVIN — the Measurement and Accounting of emissions, Risk mitigation and Verification Institution — to provide unified standards for emissions accounting, verification and risk management, using a mix of satellite data and econometric analysis.
Complementing this is the Climate Coalition framework proposed by Catherine Wolfram and her team at Harvard and MIT, which envisions a coalition of countries aligning carbon pricing and trade policies across carbon-intensive sectors such as steel, cement, and aluminium. By setting minimum carbon price floors and applying border adjustments, the coalition could cut global greenhouse gas emissions by around 1.5 percent annually, roughly equivalent to Canada’s total emissions, while raising up to USD 200 billion per year in revenue.
Addressing the long-standing divide over loss and damage, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Greenstone propose a Global Climate Grand Bargain linking compensation for vulnerable nations with mitigation commitments. Their model, based on a FAIR (Foreseeable, Automatic, Immediate, Regular) mechanism, would deliver predictable payments equivalent to USD 737 billion annually through universal basic income, community block grants and insurance programmes.
Funding would come from international taxation, including the OECD’s Pillar 2 corporate tax and a proposed billionaire minimum tax, which could jointly raise USD 500–550 billion each year. Participating countries would also be required to adopt carbon pricing mechanisms, making climate compensation directly tied to mitigation efforts.
Mariana Mazzucato and Ulla Heher argue that nationally-led country platforms can serve as mission-oriented hubs aligning finance, policy reforms and industrial strategy to deliver on climate goals. Such platforms, they say, should act as implementation centres connecting national development priorities with international finance, enabling climate and industrial policy to reinforce each other.
To expand access to private capital, Vera Songwe, Moritz Kraemer and Winston Fritsch call for new financial instruments beyond blended finance, which they say will be insufficient to meet the USD 1.3 trillion annual target. They highlight the Inter-American Development Bank’s ReInvest+ initiative as a scalable example: a blended finance model that acquires performing green loans from local banks and reinvests the proceeds in new climate projects. The first USD 1 billion transaction is expected to be completed before the end of Brazil’s COP30 presidency in 2026.
Follow Energy Watch on LinkedIN
The Baku to Belém Roadmap frames the USD 1.3 trillion annual target as an attainable goal if the world can align public and private capital, share financial risks fairly, and create mechanisms that deliver both climate and development benefits. The COP30 presidency said the plan will be presented to the UNFCCC Subsidiary Bodies and the Leaders Summit ahead of COP30 in Belém, Brazil, in 2026.