Every discussion of climate finance in Afghanistan eventually collides with a question that is rarely asked out loud: should this country receive climate finance at all? Everything else—how the money should flow, what it should fund, which region should be prioritized—is downstream of that first question. And as long as it remains unanswered, or answered only through silence and inaction, the rest of the conversation is largely academic.
The Paris Agreement was built to avoid exactly this kind of impasse. Nowhere in its text does it tie a country’s access to climate finance to the nature of its government or the legitimacy of its ruling authority. Climate vulnerability, not political alignment, is meant to be the qualifying criterion. This reflects a basic recognition that the physical impacts of a changing climate—droughts, floods, glacial melt—do not pause for political transitions. The people living through them should not be made to pay twice: once through the climate crisis itself and again through exclusion from the tools meant to help them adapt.
In practice, Afghanistan has been treated as an exception to this principle. The country has been kept out of COP annual conferences, where climate finance priorities and pledges are negotiated. Feasible adaptation projects that had already been designed and were ready for implementation have gone unfunded. Several projects that were already underway were suspended abruptly in 2021 and have not been restarted since.
Five years on, the assistance that has reached Afghanistan has been overwhelmingly humanitarian. Only marginal, small-scale funding has been directed toward adaptation and mitigation work. This is the kind of work vulnerable countries are supposed to access under the global climate finance architecture. The annual economic losses from climate change in Afghanistan range from $550 million to $3 billion, according to a 2022 UNEP assessment. This gap between principle and practice deserves to be named plainly. If the UNFCCC declines to fund projects on grounds unrelated to climate vulnerability, it departs from its own framework. That departure raises a legitimate question about neutrality. Is the current practice of climate finance being applied consistently or selectively?
None of this is to say the practical questions do not matter. They do. Once the question of eligibility is resolved, the question of mechanism follows naturally. Under the Paris Agreement’s default model, climate finance is channelled through national governments. Where a government lacks the capacity—or, as in Afghanistan’s case, the recognition—to serve as that channel, UN agencies have historically stepped in as intermediaries. They played this role for much of the past two decades in Afghanistan’s development and humanitarian space. That precedent exists and could be revived specifically for climate finance.
| Key Factors for Climate Finance |
|---|
| 1. Climate Vulnerability |
| 2. Government Legitimacy |
| 3. Capacity for Channeling Funds |
| 4. Project Readiness |
| 5. Adaptation and Mitigation Needs |
| 6. Consistency in Application |
After the mechanism comes prioritization. Deciding which adaptation and mitigation measures to invest in first is critical. Afghanistan is not climatically uniform. A single national template would serve it poorly. The water stress facing the arid south looks different from the flood risk in the northeast. That risk differs again from the glacial-melt dependency of communities in the central highlands. Each region offers distinct, often already-identified opportunities for adaptation measures that could be piloted and scaled.
I lay out this sequence deliberately because it is often skipped over. Technical discussions about mechanisms and priorities can proceed in workshops indefinitely. They cannot substitute for the unresolved question sitting beneath them. Until the international community decides, openly and consistently, whether a climate-vulnerable country remains eligible for climate finance regardless of its government, every technical proposal for Afghanistan risks becoming an exercise in motion without movement.
This is not a comfortable position to arrive at, but it is an honest one. It may be reasonable for Afghanistan to reassess its engagement with a climate finance system. A system that asks it to fulfil its responsibilities alone while offering little in return. Such a reassessment would not be an act of withdrawal for its own sake. It would be a way of forcing the inconsistency into the open. Ideally, it would push the international community toward a more principled and equitable application of the very framework it built for countries like Afghanistan in the first place.
