The Number BRICS Would Not Write Down

The 18th BRICS Summit concluded in New Delhi on September 13, 2026, with a 140-paragraph declaration covering a wide range of subjects, including artificial intelligence, trade, security, and climate change. The theme of this year’s summit was “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation, and Sustainability" [1], yet on the most politically charged climate questions, the document stays silent on how much money developing countries actually need. And it is not that the numbers do not exist. The chance for BRICS to pen it down and make it the voice of the Global South, by just reiterating the $1.3 trillion goal by 2035 as in the Baku to Belem Roadmap, could itself have been a game changer. [2] But it lost the momentum of presenting itself as an alternative voice to the Global North.

What does the declaration say?

The declaration has included climate and related themes in around a dozen paragraphs, but Paragraph 107 is the core climate text. The document talks about the UNFCCC and the 2015 Paris Agreement and also highlights the widely accepted principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities." It has also delved into the fact that emerging and developing economies face large funding gaps and how high debt burdens constrain climate and development investment in lower- and middle-income countries. Then it calls for coordinated action between states to improve debt sustainability, expand fiscal space, and support climate finance to the states that need it. These are all very important, but without any specific quantified goal, they are also very easy to dilute. These are statements without verifiable claims or checks, or, to put it another way, without a number that can be used to put pressure on highly developed countries.[3]

India could have used this year’s summit as a good opportunity to endorse an annual climate-finance figure for developing countries, or a concrete replenishment path for the Loss and Damage Fund that was established in 2022. But it ends with language that remains broad: finance must be “adequate, predictable and accessible”, resources must be mobilised, and cooperation strengthened. These are important words, but they are difficult to measure and are just written like perfect statements.

The silence is more striking because writing the goal would not have been this difficult either. The international climate-finance architecture already carries explicit figures that India’s summit could have echoed and presented as an alternative group supporting the voices of the Global South.

For example, at COP29 in Baku in November 2024, the “New Collective Quantified Goal” was adopted to support climate action in developing countries of at least $300 billion a year by 2035 from developed countries. It was decided simultaneously in the same conference that this will not be enough to scale up climate finance from public and private sources to at least $1.3 trillion a year by 2035.

While these are ambitions, these goals are also far off track. An assessment by NRDC suggests that if climate finance continued as it has been between 2017 and 2023, then international climate finance would reach only around $427 billion in 2035, which is less than one-third of the $1.3 trillion target.

Why would BRICS endorsing the $1.3 trillion have been a big political deal?

BRICS is a large political group created to challenge Western hegemony. It is also no longer a club of five countries. The group has ten members representing 49.5 percent of the world’s population, and with four large emerging developing economies including India, China, Brazil and South Africa, it presents itself as a leading voice of the Global South. That identity gives its declarations outsized political weight.

This makes this a big deal. If the Declaration had explicitly mentioned the $1.3 trillion dollar a goal, the global south expectation would have been given a platform through this. It would have also raised the political pressure on richer nations making it harder for them to treat the $1.3 trillion as just aspirational rhetoric.

Also, not all BRICS members would have faced difficulty in endorsing this figure. While China, India, South Africa and Brazil are major emerging developing economies, Russia, for instance, is not classified as a “developed country” donor under the UNFCCC’s Annex II list, which bears the primary legal obligation to provide climate finance.[4] Also, Moscow has historically aligned with the G77+China bloc on finance principles, focusing on the fact that developed countries must lead in the global climate-finance framework. Therefore, endorsing the $1.3 trillion goal would have imposed no new legal liability on Russia also.

That is why the missing number in the New Delhi Declaration matters. It signals how far BRICS is willing to go in converting Global South rhetoric into quantifiable demands. More importantly, the political conversation around climate would have been higher by putting the number. The group would not merely have been asking developed countries to “mobilize more” finance, but setting out a figure which Global South has been speaking out loudly in COP and could also hold the existing climate-finance system accountable. It would have given developing countries a common political benchmark to carry from BRICS to the next COP and beyond.

[1] https://www.brics2026.gov.in/

[2] https://unfccc.int/topics/climate-finance/workstreams/baku-to-belem-roadmap-to-13t

[3]https://www.bing.com/search?pglt=2083&q=new+delhi+decalration&cvid=f05cc725639641a597dc523d5052e7c7&gs_lcrp=EgRlZGdlKgYIABBFGDkyBggAEEUYOdIBCDMxNDhqMGo3qAIAsAIA&FORM=ANSPA1&PC=U531

[4] https://legalresponse.org/resource/applicability-of-unfccc-annexes-to-the-paris-agreement/

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