When Hurricane Melissa tore through the Caribbean in October 2025, it left a trail of destruction. The Category 5 storm damaged buildings in Jamaica, Haiti and Cuba, snapped power lines and cut off entire neighborhoods from hospitals and aid.Jamaica’s regional tourism, fishing and agriculture industries – still recovering from Hurricane Beryl a year earlier – were crippled.Melissa’s damage has been estimated at US$6 billion to $7 billion in Jamaica alone, about 30% of the island nation’s gross domestic product. While the country has a disaster risk plan designed to help it quickly raise several hundred million dollars, the damage from Melissa far exceeds that amount.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementWhether Caribbean nations can recover from Melissa’s destruction and adapt to future climate change risks without taking on debilitating debt will depend in part on a big global promise: climate finance.[embedded content]Developed countries that grew wealthy from burning fossil fuels, the leading driver of climate change, have pledged billions of dollars a year to help ecologically vulnerable nations like Jamaica, Haiti and Cuba adapt to rising seas and stronger storms and rebuild after disasters worsened by climate change.In 2024, they committed to boost climate finance from $100 billion a year to at least $300 billion a year by 2035, and to work toward $1.3 trillion annually from a wide spectrum of public and private sources.But if the world is pouring billions into climate finance, why are developing countries still struggling with recovery costs?Hurricane Melissa killed more than 90 people across the Caribbean in October 2025 and caused billions of dollars in damage, including in Cuba. Yamil Lage/AFP via Getty ImagesI study the dynamics of global environmental and climate politics, including the United Nations climate negotiations, and my lab has been following the climate money.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementGovernments at the U.N. climate conference in Brazil have been negotiating a plan to get closer to $1.3 trillion by 2035 and make it easier for developing countries to access funds. But the world’s climate finance so far has rested on a shaky foundation of fuzzy accounting, one where funding for airports, hotels and even ice cream stores is being counted as climate finance.Cooking the climate finance booksWealthy nations first promised in 2009 to raise $100 billion a year in climate finance for developing countries by 2020. Whether they hit that target in 2022, as claimed, is up for debate.More in WorldResearchers …
