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At stake this COP31: A yardstick for adapting to a warming world
If countries fail to launch the task force behind the 59 Belém indicators, a full count of how the world is adapting could slip to 2033.
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Reducing emissions slows climate change. Adaptation means coping with the change already here. For years, no yardstick existed to determine whether adaptation efforts were succeeding. The Belém indicators are a first attempt to fix that. At COP30, the 2025 United Nations climate summit in Brazil, countries adopted 59 ‘Belém Adaptation Indicators’ to track progress towards the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA).
The indicators address some of the most practical questions in a warming world: Will the next flood come with enough warning? Will a rice farmer have seeds that survive a delayed monsoon? Will local health centres be prepared for a week of 45°C heat?
What is the Global Goal on Adaptation?
It is the adaptation counterpart to the 2015 Paris Agreement’s temperature goal. Article 7 of the Paris Agreement sets a shared aim to enhance adaptive capacity, strengthen resilience, and reduce vulnerability to climate change, alongside the Agreement’s goal, set out in Article 2, of holding warming to well below 2°C.
The problem was that ‘well below 2°C’ is measurable, but ‘more resilient’ is not. Emissions are measured in tonnes, while resilience depends on local risks, institutions, budgets, and history, leading to the argument that adaptation should be judged country by country.
After Paris, the GGA remained an idea for six years, with little machinery behind it. This began to change in stages. At COP26 in 2021, countries launched a two-year Glasgow–Sharm el-Sheikh work programme to understand what the goal should mean in practice.
Adopted at COP28 in Dubai in 2023, the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience set 11 targets to be achieved by 2030. Seven thematic targets covered water, food, health, infrastructure, livelihoods and poverty, ecosystems, and cultural heritage. The remaining four followed the adaptation cycle: assessing risks, planning, implementing, and monitoring and learning. The Belém indicators adopted at COP30 measure progress against these 11 targets.
If the GGA is the destination, the UAE Framework is the map, and the Belém indicators are the milestones.
Also read: Ahead of COP31, an impasse over when the next big climate warning comes and who pays for it
What are the Belém Adaptation Indicators?
They are the first globally agreed set of adaptation indicators under the Paris Agreement. Seventy-eight United Nations-appointed experts filtered about 10,000 indicators and shortlisted 100 in September 2025. Following negotiations, a final list of 59 was agreed upon. These cover food systems, water, health, ecosystems, infrastructure, and vulnerable communities, as well as cross-cutting issues such as governance, equity, and the means of implementation (including finance, technology, and skills).
Two caveats are built into the decision. The indicators are voluntary and non-prescriptive, allowing countries to choose which ones to report, and they create no new financial obligations.
Why it matters for India
For India, the indicators are anything but abstract. Nearly half of the country’s workforce depends on agriculture, much of it rainfed. Heatwaves are growing longer and more frequent across north and central India, with some even lasting more than six days against a national average of 2–4 days, and coastal states such as Odisha and Andhra Pradesh face cyclones almost every year. Each of these risks maps directly onto the UAE Framework’s targets on food, water, health, and infrastructure.
India has also made notable efforts. Ahmedabad’s Heat Action Plan, launched in 2013, was the first of its kind in South Asia and has since been adapted by many other cities and states. Odisha’s cyclone preparedness, which helped evacuate almost a million people ahead of Cyclone Phailin in 2013, is widely cited as an example of early warnings reaching the last mile.
A common set of indicators makes it possible to recognise these efforts internationally and assess progress consistently, while highlighting how much work remains.
But measurement cuts both ways. Tracking who benefits from heat plans, crop insurance, and early warnings can reveal gaps between districts and social groups. However, India alone is not responsible for addressing these gaps. It has long argued that adaptation in developing countries depends on financial support from wealthier nations, which bear greater responsibility for historical emissions. Yet this funding has consistently fallen short of what was promised. If indicators measure only national efforts without accounting for the support received, every shortfall may appear as a domestic failure. This would place the burden of accountability on countries least responsible for the climate crisis, while letting nations that have failed to deliver on their financial commitments escape scrutiny.
Where it falls short
As the indicators are an agreed package rather than an operational measurement system, several weaknesses stand out.
First, the process was rushed and political: the final list departed sharply from what experts had proposed and emerged late. Many indicators still lack clear definitions, methods, and data sources, leaving countries unsure what to measure and how often.
Second, reporting is voluntary, so coverage may be patchy, particularly in the poorest countries, where data systems are often weakest.
Third, there is the finance gap. COP30’s call “for efforts to at least triple adaptation finance by 2035” has drawn a cautious response, as even optimistic projections fall short of the hundreds of billions of dollars needed annually.
Finally, counting is not the same as coping. A number indicating the ‘share of people covered by early warnings’ reveals little about whether an alert reached a migrant worker without a local phone number, highlighting the need for equity in data collection.
What happens next?
COP30 also launched the Belém–Addis Vision on Adaptation, a two-year process running to COP32 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The process has two strands: a technical task force refining the methods behind the indicators, and countries sharing their experiences testing them. Countries can begin testing the indicators through their national adaptation plans and transparency reports, which they file under the Paris Agreement to account for their climate action.
The process has already stumbled. At the mid-year UN climate talks in Bonn in June 2026, adaptation negotiations stalled over who sits on the task force and over references to tripling adaptation finance, and ended without agreement.
If the task force is not launched at COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye, which runs from November 9 to 20, the indicators risk missing the second global stocktake, an inventory of global efforts to evaluate the world’s collective progress towards achieving the purpose of the Paris Agreement, leaving the world without a full assessment of adaptation progress until 2033.
The Belém indicators have given adaptation a common language but not yet a working measure. Their real test is whether they can show if warnings reached the village, seeds survived the monsoon, and health centres withstood the heat, and who failed to pay for it when they didn’t.
The author heads the Climate, Environment and Sustainability sector at the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy (CSTEP), a research-based think-tank. Views expressed are personal.
