ISTANBUL – South Asia is preparing for COP30 in Brazil not as a passive participant but as a region already living the climate emergency. Cyclones, floods, and record-breaking heat waves have become routine across the subcontinent, underscoring the urgency of global climate action.
Despite contributing less than 9% of global greenhouse gas emissions, South Asia bears nearly one-third of climate-related losses worldwide, according to the World Bank. Over the past two decades, disasters such as floods, droughts, and cyclones have affected 750 million people. The World Meteorological Organization warns Asia is warming almost twice as fast as the global average, fueling extreme weather that has claimed tens of thousands of lives.
“South Asia enters COP30 with glaciers retreating, deltas drowning, and heat extremes threatening 1.8 billion people,“ said Zakir Hossain Khan, CEO of the Change Initiative think tank. He stressed that adaptation must not lag behind mitigation and called for grant-based climate finance, transparent funding mechanisms, and innovative solutions like Debt-for-Nature and Climate Swaps to ease economic vulnerability.
Khan highlighted India’s responsibility as a major G20 emitter to expand renewable energy and technology transfer, while Least Developed Countries such as Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives need predictable, non-debt-creating finance for adaptation and loss-and-damage recovery.
At COP29 in Azerbaijan, developed nations pledged $300 billion annually by 2035 for vulnerable countries, with a long-term goal of $1.3 trillion. “The real work at COP30 is to turn that headline into architecture,“ Khan said, urging simplified access and direct community-level funding.
He warned that fragmented negotiations could weaken South Asia’s leverage. “If South Asia negotiates as individual emitters, it will lose; if it acts as a unified climate-vulnerable bloc, it gains power,“ he said, citing shared ecosystems like the Himalayas, Sundarbans, and Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin as opportunities for cooperative governance.
Beyond finance, Khan called for technology access for renewables, early-warning systems, and climate-smart agriculture. He advocated a shift from exploiting ecosystems to recognizing them as “rights-bearing systems,“ making river health and delta protection constitutional priorities.
Failure at COP30 could lock South Asia into a 2.3°C warming trajectory, triggering infrastructure collapse, food and water crises, and mass displacement of up to 40 million people by 2050. “For South Asia, climate ambition is not a diplomatic preference; it’s a survival requirement,“ Khan warned.