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Opinion Piece by Deputy Director of UNEP's Industry and Economy Division, Steven Stone

Adapting, Surviving, Thriving: What can we learn from #FfD4 in Seville?

Sevilla's Royal Alcazar palace

With temperatures soaring well above 40 degrees Celsius, avoiding heat stress was a matter of survival as delegates and dignitaries descended on Seville, Spain for the Fourth UN Conference on Financing for Development. 

The heat outside reflected tensions within – for months, the outcome document was tossed around between negotiators, debating the international financial architecture even as it was being reshaped in real time by geopolitical and economic shocks. 

A decade after Addis Ababa, the world looks a different place:  the era of easy money is gone, and in its place, high costs of capital, debt distress and creeping inflation reign – compounded by growing losses and shocks from extreme weather events and war. 

For many countries, the threat is existential: it is about surviving.  As global average temperatures rise beyond 1.5 degrees, adapting is no longer optional. Like every delegate seeking shade and shelter from the sweltering heat dome over southern Spain in early July, living with extreme heat and weather has become a matter of survival. Yet finance and capital is more expensive, scarce and risk averse – especially for those most vulnerable to a climate crisis they did not cause. 

In this environment, how can countries move from adapting and surviving to thriving? 

Several answers to this question were featured in the FfD4 outcome document, and reverberating around the venue.  

Like the “five asks for FfD4” from UNEP, which outlined a strategy that could align risk and returns for long term resilience and prosperity.  

These asks were direct and simple:    

  • first, rethink and recalibrate private finance so that it provides the life-blood of capital into investments that create fiscal stability and growth in income and employment – without depleting assets or creating vulnerabilities and liabilities.   This means exploring new growth opportunities that may not have existed in the past, and putting the frameworks into place for creating new markets.   
  • second, strengthen and redirect public finance so that it can leverage private capital and set a foundation for sustainable growth in value addition and jobs. This means looking at tools like sustainable budgeting approaches and sustainable public procurement to better understand the value for money proposition of every dollar spent.   
  • third, integrate systemic and environment risk into fiscal, finance and debt frameworks so that decisions reflect costs along the full life cycle of investments, goods and services. This means strengthening and adopting disclosure frameworks such as TNFD for transparency that will cater to new market opportunities for today’s more aware consumers and shareholders.    
  • fourth, invest in the real economy via high impact sectors such as energy, mining, food systems, and mobility—where current patterns of production and consumption generate both value and significant liabilities. We need to shift finance and policy toward sustainable consumption and production models that reduce emissions, nature loss, and pollution while creating jobs and competitiveness.

  • fifth and finally, grow capacities for digital, institutional, and policy innovation across all countries so that growth and prosperity may be shared and mutually beneficial.  This means investing in people and the skills they need to navigate a new century of technology.     

 Within the air-conditioned corridors of the conference venue in Seville, delegates of all walks and stripes created a colorful, living mosaic of ideas for the future: investors, policy makers, researchers, civil society groups, financiers, bankers.   And on stage, heads of state and leaders from the UN and academia acknowledged resilience means being able to foresee and withstand shocks that otherwise risk setting progress and hard-won gains of development back by years if not decades.  How to finance these investments that could reduce risk and bring prosperity, made for a central and recurring theme. 

A decade after Addis Ababa, the world looks a different place:  the era of easy money is gone, and in its place, high costs of capital, debt distress and creeping inflation reign - compounded by growing losses and shocks from extreme weather events and war. 

Meanwhile, outside the venue, life continued apace, with the Seville population moving through the heat in ways that make it bearable – a living testimony to adaptive resilience.  I marveled to see how civic life ebbed and flowed as a function of bearable heat, rising and falling and rising again late in the day.   The cultural heritage of Seville speaks to the adapting and evolving across civilizations, eloquently symbolized by the Royal Alcazar palace with its mosaic of arabesque and Christian gothic architecture laying together side by side, a testimony of co-existence and the many shapes and shades and conceptions of beauty and elegance. 

Which formed a fitting backdrop to FfD4: a mosaic of perspectives and solutions for adapting and prospering in a heat-filled 21st century. Human innovation and ingenuity springs from diversity and encounter, providing the rebound that is needed to overcome mounting risks from a legacy of over-spending, over-polluting, and under-investing in people and in nature. 

There is still time to turn things around, to move from surviving to thriving. But this will require working together on the enabling systems that matter most—above all, finance. Rethinking the purpose of public and private finance, integrating risk and resilience into investment, and building capacities for innovation are not abstract ambitions: they are already being put into practice. 

Together, these asks and associated actions show that the keys to thriving are within reach—if we can navigate with creativity and balance, much like Seville itself, drawing strength from history and diversity while adapting to the new heat of the 21st century.

This opinion piece is adapted from the one published by the GFPN website.

About the Author:

Steven Stone, the Deputy Director of UNEP's Industry and Economy Division (IED), serves as the Chair of the Management Board for the Partnership for Action on Green Economy (PAGE). He has been with UNEP since 2010, previously he has worked as Chief of the Economics and Trade Branch, and then as Chief of the Resources and Markets Branch.

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