As of its 9th Board meeting (B9) held on 8-10 July 2026 in Mandaluyong City, Philippines, the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) still has yet to disburse any money.
Under its first funding program the Barbados Implementation Modalities (BIM), a total of USD250 million would have been given to developing countries to support their actions to address climate-related loss and damage. With B9 scheduled to be where the first set of country proposals would be approved, there was an air of optimism heading into this meeting.
After three days, all the optimism disappeared as the Board ran into the core issue of the FRLD: the lack of sufficient finance. A total of USD2.8 billion is requested by 176 proposals from the BIM, far exceeding its budget.
Furthermore, not all proposals have been fully processed – including that of the Philippines, despite being submitted before the deadline of 15 June 2026 – due to the lack of capacity of the FRLD Secretariat to fairly and comprehensively assess all requests on time.
After days of intense discussions, half of which took place behind closed-doors, the Board decided to delay the start of approving the first set of proposals to its next meeting (B10), which will take place on 15-18 December, also in the Philippines.
In a way, this delay is necessary to ensure a fair, full, and equitable assessment of all proposals – including that of our country – and ensure that the FRLD’s available resources would support projects that genuinely respond to loss and damage, reduce climate vulnerabilities of communities, and demonstrate innovative solutions that could be scaled up and replicated.
Yet we criticize the FRLD for its lack of foresight regarding the BIM. They should have expected this influx of proposals from developing countries, considering the worsening impacts of the climate crisis. They should have built up the capacity to process all funding requests.
But we should never forget the elephant in the room: the lack of finance. Even with the additional USD92 million for the BIM, even if all USD826 million of pledged funding are converted into actual money, they still are nowhere near enough to respond to the needs of the climate-vulnerable world.
We also criticize the lack of transparency of this Board meeting. Including the informal Board meeting that took place on 7 July, there were about 16 hours of this meeting that happened behind closed-doors, which is actually more than the estimated 15 hours that was fully open.
While we understand the sensitivity of some of the topics being discussed, including those involving the processes of the World Bank as the FRLD’s interim Trustee, this is an unacceptable way to conduct this meeting. The most vulnerable countries and communities deserve to be sufficiently informed in real-time of the discussions that would impact their safety from climate extremes and pursuit of sustainable development.
We demand for developed countries to drastically increase their payments to the FRLD to meet the needs of the climate-vulnerable world, including more urgent conversion of pledges into disbursable funding. Polluters must pay.
We call on the government of the Philippines, as the Chair of the ASEAN and the FRLD Board host, to be the lead champion of proposing for L&D finance to be formally added into this year’s agenda of the UN climate negotiations (COP31) in Antalya, Turkiye. This is a necessity to ensure that the L&D issue would not be forgotten again in the minds of Parties, especially of developed countries that need to fulfill their obligation under the Paris Agreement to scale up resources to address L&D.
But we cannot just wait until these calls at the global level are met. The government must still act at the national and local levels, especially with a Super El Niño and super-typhoons still to come.
We demand for Congress and the BBM administration to have a 2027 national budget that is actually responsive to the needs of the Filipino people in addressing the climate crisis. This budget should not inflate the presented numbers where most of the money for climate action are actually the traditional gray infrastructure projects. Domestic finance should go to genuine climate solutions, especially those that can help address loss and damage – nature-based solutions, livelihood recovery, and increased agricultural resilience, among others.