Assem Mayar
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, in part, 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, its political system, or the legitimacy of its ruling authority. Climate vulnerability, not political alignment, is meant to be the qualifying criterion. This is not an incidental feature of the agreement; it reflects a basic recognition that the physical impacts of a changing climate—droughts, floods, glacial melt, shifting rainfall patterns—do not pause for political transitions, and that 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 to it.
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. Perhaps most tellingly, several adaptation 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 in nature, with only marginal, small-scale funding directed toward the kind of adaptation and mitigation work that vulnerable countries are supposed to be able to access under the global climate finance architecture. Where the annual economic losses of climate change for Afghanistan ranges from USD 550 million to three billion U.S. dollars.
This gap between principle and practice deserves to be named plainly. If the UNFCCC—the body charged with governing the international climate finance system—declines to fund adaptation projects and excludes a country from its conferences on grounds that have nothing to do with climate vulnerability, it is departing from the very framework its member states agreed to. That departure raises a legitimate question about the neutrality of the institution itself, and about whether the current practice of climate finance is being applied consistently, or selectively.
What comes after “whether”?
None of this is to say the practical questions do not matter. They do, and they are questions I have addressed at Afghanistan’s Climate Crisis: A Call for Decentralised and Inclusive Finance. 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, a role they played for much of the past two decades in Afghanistan’s development and humanitarian space. That precedent exists and could be revived for climate finance specifically.
After the mechanism comes prioritization: deciding which adaptation and mitigation measures to invest in first. Afghanistan is not climatically uniform, and a single national template would serve it poorly. The water stress facing the arid south looks different from the flood risk in the northeast, which looks different 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.
Why the sequence matters?
I lay out this sequence deliberately, because it is often skipped over. Technical discussions about mechanisms and priorities can proceed in workshops and reports indefinitely, but 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 who governs it, 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 continued engagement with a climate finance 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—and, ideally, of pushing the international community toward a more principled and equitable application of the very framework it built for countries like Afghanistan in the first place.
Left Behind: Why Afghanistan Cannot Tackle Climate Change Alone (3-minute read)
Afghanistan’s Climate Crisis: A Call for Decentralised and Inclusive Finance (10 -minute read)
Climate and Conflict Sensitivity in Post Conflict Reconstruction (Public Conversation)
The Author
Dr.-Ing. M. Assem Mayar is a climate change expert and former lecturer at Kabul Polytechnic University in Afghanistan. He holds a Master’s degree in Environmental Systems Engineering from Nagaoka University of Technology (Japan) and a Ph.D. in Water Resources Management from the University of Stuttgart (Germany). His research focuses on the economic and security impacts of climate change, and water resources management in fragile and conflict-affected settings. Dr. Mayar is a member of the Climate Security Expert Network and currently works as an independent researcher based in Germany. He regularly contributes to environmental and policy discussions related to Afghanistan and the wider region.
