UN Warns: Delaying El Niño Action Will Double the Bill to $73 Billion

What does this change for developing countries?

Not much yet — and that is precisely De Croo's complaint. He called on delegations and major players such as the International Monetary Fund to finance mitigation efforts in the countries most vulnerable to El Niño. The argument: early investment saves lives, protects crops and infrastructure, and costs less money in the long run.

"Not acting is the most expensive climate policy that you could have," he warned.

But the ask is politically heavy. Developing countries want more financial support from richer nations, pointing to their historic responsibility for global warming. Wealthy governments, meanwhile, are wrestling with debt burdens and the costs of various wars. De Croo acknowledged the squeeze without pretending it away.

Crisis on top of crisis

De Croo's case rests on compounding shocks. Developing countries, he argued, have absorbed one blow after another without a pause for recovery.

"Since COVID, they've never had time to recover," he said. First the pandemic, then the economic upheaval of the war in Ukraine, then the closure of the Strait of Hormuz — "and now El Niño, and now the cost of financing."

Each crisis raised the price of the next. The UNDP's work now focuses on getting money to the developing countries worst hit by El Niño and softening that financial blow.

There is a familiar catch, and everyone in the room knows it. These same countries regularly denounce public and private funders who offer help only on terms that bury them in debt.

De Croo conceded the point. "The cost of capital sometimes is high, because there is a high level of uncertainty," he said. His proposed fix is unglamorous: policy reform and stable legal frameworks. "Investment is not coming to places where there is no trust."

The UNDP is already working on this with 47 countries, he said.

He also pitched climate spending as more than climate policy. "Tackling climate insecurity also helps in other types of insecurity," he argued — a claim that sounds expansive, though he offered no figures to back the wider security dividend.

Is it too late?

De Croo says no, with emphasis. "We can still do it," he stressed. "We need to shift much more toward adaptation investments."

Whatever adaptation costs, he added, the price of doing nothing will be "much, much higher."

A skeptic's caveat is warranted here. The $36 billion versus $73 billion comparison is a UNDP estimate, not an audited forecast, and the agency has an obvious institutional interest in the comparison landing hard. The African and Latin American damage figures come from separate bodies using different methods over different timeframes. Treat them as order-of-magnitude warnings, not line items.

Still, the direction of the argument is hard to dismiss. Every dollar of preparation, on the UNDP's math, avoids roughly two dollars of damage. The conference in Antalya now has to decide whether that math is persuasive enough to move actual money — and to whom, on what terms, and how fast.