As global climate impacts intensify, adaptation remains dramatically under-funded – while regional governments increasingly shoulder the responsibility for resilience on the ground. On November 11, 2025, the RegionsAdapt Progress Report 2025 “Financing Adapation Where Change Happens: Scaling subnational action to close the gap” was launched at COP30, in Belém, Brazil, offering an in-depth look at where regions stand today on adaptation finance – the challenges they continue to face, the solutions they are already implementing to fund climate-resilient territories, and the key recommendations to scale up action and investment where resilience is built.

RegionsAdapt,Regions4’s flagship climate initiative, supports regional governments in implementing climate change adaptation strategies since 2015. Pioneering collaboration among leading regions, it boasts 80+ signatory members, impacting over 300 million citizens, mobilizing global efforts in climate adaptation. 

Drawing insights from 41 reporting RegionsAdapt members, the report presents 11 subnational stories that demonstrate how strategies addressing both biodiversity and climate finance can drive effective climate actions. From carbon revenue to devolved, these stories illustrate how leveraging climate finance can yield positive outcomes for both nature and communities.

Read the Report

Key Findings at a Glance

Adaptation finance is failing the frontline. Communities least responsible for the crisis are already suffering the heaviest losses. Yet adaptation finance remains severely inadequate: developing countries alone face adaptation costs of up to US $365 billion annually by 2035, yet in 2023 only about 3.4% of global climate finance was directed to adaptation. Even less reaches the subnational level -where adaptation happens closest to communities, ecosystems, and critical infrastructure.

Regions as the Missing Link in Climate Finance

Subnational governments – regions, provinces, states – manage the infrastructure, land use, water, health, rural and urban systems where climate impacts are already manifest. They operate at the interface of global ambition and local delivery. Yet international adaptation finance continues to flow primarily via national channels, limiting regional access, constraining innovation, and reducing the scale of what is possible on the ground.

This report reveals three dynamics:

1. Regions are already acting — scaling municipal efforts, shaping cross-sectoral adaptation, mobilising their own-source revenues.
2. Structural barriers persist in some regions — weak mandates, low creditworthiness, data/monitoring deficits, and project preparation bottlenecks .
3. Scaling requires system change — dedicated windows for subnational access, institutionalised multilevel governance, project-prep ecosystems and transparency in tracking flows.

Regions in Action

Across the world, subnational governments are not waiting on the sidelines. They are leading innovation, mobilising diverse resources, and shaping context-driven solutions to build resilience. RegionsAdapt members are applying tools such as green budgeting, fiscal transfers, private sector partnerships, and just resilience models, while strengthening the institutional and policy frameworks needed to ensure adaptation finance reaches the frontline. Below are some of these stories, showing how regions are already activating finance in practice:

• Québec’s carbon-revenues model: CA$400 million+ directed to adaptation and resilience.
• Catalonia’s Climate Fund: over €500 million invested in 81 projects since 2021.
• Andalusia’s green-budget tagging: €1.17 billion of its 2023 budget allocated to climate-relevant spending.
• Kenya’s FLOCCA programme: devolving climate finance to 47 counties through a performance-based model.
• Paraná’s ecological fiscal transfers: R$10 billion redistributed to municipalities, safeguarding 4+ million ha of forests and water reserves.
• São Paulo, Basque Country, Pastaza & Zamora Chinchipe, Gauteng: all proving that regions can innovate — when empowered.

#RegionsVoice: Inspiring Regional Stories

Several stories from the RegionsAdapt Progress Report are also featured in our Case Study Database and our RegionsVoice campaign. Discover a selection of these stories below, and visit the full RegionsVoice campaign page to explore them all.

A Call to Action for COP30 and Beyond

To translate regional readiness into scaled action, COP30 must deliver three critical system shifts:

• Institutionalise subnational roles: Embed regional governments within NDCs, NAPs and national adaptation strategies — recognise them as full partners, not just implementers.
• Expand direct access: Create dedicated adaptation-finance windows for subnational governments; simplify procedures and fit finance to regional realities.
• Build project-prep ecosystems: Fund early stage design, risk assessment, capacity-building, data/monitoring and pipeline development — so adaptation becomes bankable and scalable.
• Track subnational flows: Ensure transparency, disaggregation and accountability — so finance matches risk and need, and so subnational action is visible and valued.
• Invest in just, nature-positive resilience: Adaptation must centre people, equity, indigenous knowledge, ecosystem functions and biodiversity — not just infrastructure.

With the support of