When climate finance moves slower than risk

I have started to recognise the exact moment a climate conversation changes. It is when the language moves from aspiration to allocation, from pathways to payment. The room grows careful. Everyone knows what is coming. The future has a price, and the question is who carries it.

In the Middle East and North Africa, this question is no longer theoretical. Heat stretches longer, water feels more contested and storms arrive with the kind of force that turns infrastructure into a memory. We talk often about ambition, and our region has plenty of it. The constraint sits elsewhere. It sits in the plumbing of finance, the channels through which capital is supposed to travel from global commitments to local protection.

On paper, the world is finally mobilising real money. Climate Policy Initiative estimates around $1.9 trillion in climate finance. Yet scale does not automatically translate into reach. The places most exposed still describe a familiar reality: funding that is slow, conditional, and uneven. In too many places, resilience stays a proposal, not a bridge.

A regional briefing that tracks major international climate funds offers a sobering snapshot. It puts total approvals for MENA at about $1.73 billion across 202 projects, with only about $101 million added in the most recent year it covers. These figures do not suggest a shortage of ideas. They show the friction that appears when vulnerability has to be translated into perfect paperwork, strict templates, and long sequences of approvals. This gap is where progress leaks away.

The deeper issue is time. A climate hazard does not wait for a board calendar. Yet fund access can take years, and criteria can feel like a maze built for those who have walked it before. This becomes a sorting mechanism. Some countries learn the route and return again and again. Others remain outside, even when their needs are sharper.

Oman offers one clear illustration of this tension, without turning the story into a single country’s grievance. In the Oman Climate Dialogues convened through the Environment Society of Oman, we have spoken openly about Cyclone Shaheen causing around RO 200 million in damages and Cyclone Gonu costing roughly $4.5 billion in under forty-eight hours. We have also discussed sea level rise at roughly two to three millimetres per year and a decarbonisation bill in the range of $400-500 billion over three decades.

The Green Climate Fund has supported Oman through readiness and project preparation, the early scaffolding that helps countries translate risks into fundable plans. Yet official board documentation records debate around an Oman proposal to strengthen the national multi-hazard early warning system, including disagreement over whether grant financing was justified. Early warning sits at the heart of public safety. If it still must defend itself like a commercial investment, the system is signalling what it values and what it expects countries to absorb.

This is why the region keeps returning to the idea of a new model. MENA needs finance that treats adaptation as protection and protection as value. It needs instruments that strengthen resilience without tightening fiscal space and channels that move fast enough to matter. It also needs regional capital to build vehicles and platforms that fund what is essential even when it is not fashionable.

A trillion dollars somewhere in the world is not success. Success is money reaching coastlines, farms, grids, and cities before the next shock arrives. Climate ambition is present across MENA. The question now is whether the financial architecture will meet it with equal seriousness.