COP31 president-designate Murat Kurum has launched the Climate Implementation Bridge, aimed at converting national climate plans into investment-ready projects. Civil society groups question whether another vehicle is what’s missing.
Kurum set out the initiative in his third letter to parties, dated 25 August, ahead of the Antalya summit in November. He placed the Climate Implementation Bridge, known as BRIDGE, at the centre of the Action Agenda, the implementation track that sits alongside the formal negotiations.
The stated aim is to help countries move from stated priorities to investment-ready project portfolios, by “strengthening project preparation, institutional capacity and access to finance”. Kurum said scaling BRIDGE by 2035 offers “a practical mechanism for closing the implementation gap”. He was explicit that it creates no new fund and no new financial mechanism, describing it instead as an open invitation to build coalitions.
The pipeline problem is real
Many developing countries have updated nationally determined contributions and adaptation plans that go nowhere. Harjeet Singh, founding director of the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation, said those countries are “hitting a wall of high capital costs, sovereign debt distress, and limited technical bandwidth to structure complex climate investments”.
Singh warned that framing the problem around bankability carries a risk of its own. Adaptation, loss and damage, and social protection rarely look commercially bankable to private investors, he said, yet they are the most urgent needs for vulnerable communities. BRIDGE works only if non-revenue-generating projects get equal weight alongside clean energy infrastructure.
Scepticism from civil society
Tasneem Essop, executive director of Climate Action Network, which brings together more than 1,300 civil society organisations, said similar matchmaking initiatives have come and gone without shifting finance at scale.
“We remain sceptical because the real underlying barriers to climate finance are not being recognised or addressed,” Essop said. She listed debt burdens, the cost of capital and the preference for loans over grants, which pushes borrowing countries deeper into debt.
Essop argued that developed countries should first show how they will meet existing obligations, including the Baku-to-Belém Roadmap to $1.3 trillion by 2035. Creating another vehicle with its own rules risks further fragmentation and opacity, she said.
The think tank E3G said BRIDGE must tailor itself to individual country needs and “support rather than duplicate already existing initiatives”. Those include the NDC Partnership, UNDP support on NDC costing, and facilities such as the Asian Development Bank’s ASEAN Catalytic Green Finance Facility.
The gap in the letter
Kurum’s letter puts electrification, renewables, efficiency and power sector decarbonisation at the centre of COP31’s clean energy agenda. It contains no pledge to phase out or phase down fossil fuels. The presidency prefers voluntary targets, most notably lifting electricity to 35 per cent of final energy consumption by 2035, and stresses these create no new obligations.
Singh said that omission undermines the rest. “Focusing on electrification, waste, and project pipelines is welcome, but dodging the phase-out of coal, oil, and gas makes the math of staying within 1.5°C impossible,” he said.
COP31 runs on a split leadership model. Türkiye holds the formal presidency, hosts the summit and leads the Action Agenda, while Australia’s Chris Bowen presides over the negotiations.
