The ministers on the panel made Alvarado Quesada’s point in concrete terms. Their countries have done the planning and are ready to invest. What they need now is finance on the scale of the risks they face.

For the Kyrgyz Republic, a high-mountain country, adaptation is “a strategic socio-economic priority,” said Minister of Natural Resources, Ecology and Technical Supervision Akyl Toktobaev. He called for predictable, grant-based concessional finance and for a shift from responding to climate risks to preventing them. That means investing in resilient infrastructure, early warning, water management and restoring mountain ecosystems, while creating the conditions to attract private capital.

Mozambique has faced more than 75 extreme climate events since 2000, and cyclones in 2024-25 alone affected more than 1.8 million people. With debt at around 72% of GDP, “ourselves alone we cannot do enough,” said Carla Louveira, Deputy Minister of Economy and Finance. She said ARISE grants can turn adaptation priorities into projects ready for investment without adding to the state’s debt.

In Malawi, which shares both a border and its cyclones with Mozambique, Minister of Natural Resources Patricia Wiskes described ARISE as “an opportunity… to change how we structure our economies.” Agriculture is “our backbone,” she said, but farmers who rely on rain keep losing their crops to drought and floods. The program will fund irrigation and water harvesting so farmers can grow more than one crop a year. It will also fund climate-resilient infrastructure and aquaculture. “We are landlocked, but we are not a water-poor country,” she said.

Sierra Leone’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change Jiwoh Emmanuel Abdulai said the country’s proposal came out of consultations across the country. It puts early warning and stronger local value chains first for farming and fishing communities. “It’s people that are affected by climate change,” he said, and communities must see themselves “as partners… as opposed to beneficiaries.”

Bangladesh’s State Minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change Shaikh Faridul Islam spoke for coastal communities facing super cyclones, saltwater getting into their drinking water, river erosion and too few cyclone shelters. He called for “a proper diagnosis for every area” so that investment fits local needs. He pointed to Bangladesh’s own efforts, including a target of 10,000 MW of solar within five years and a campaign to plant 250 million trees. But, he said, some things remain “beyond our control.”