This is not simply a fiscal shortfall; it is a map of global political will - of who is allowed to live securely and who must learn to inhabit precarity. In this sense, the climate finance architecture represents not a neutral mechanism for environmental repair, but a necropolitical economy - an order of governance that allocates vitality and death through financial flows. Achille Mbembe (2003; 2019) defines necropolitics as the capacity of sovereign power to decide “who may live and who must die”. Within the climate regime, this power is diffused and bureaucratised: exercised not through armies or prisons but through algorithms, credit ratings, and conditional grants. The necropolitical logic of finance lies precisely in its seeming neutrality. Behind the spreadsheets and pledges are decisions that translate into differential exposure to heat, hunger, and displacement. When adaptation funds fail to reach the Sahel, the Niger Delta, or the Sundarbans, it is not a coincidence; it is the slow violence of governance through neglect. Essentially, when viewed through a necropolitical lens, the current climate-finance regime reveals a global system of governance over life. Some lives are inscribed into the ledger of securable futures through finance; others remain in zones of abandonment. The “who gets funded” question becomes, implicitly, “whose life matters”.
The financial architecture of global climate governance reproduces this hierarchy of life. The Green Climate Fund, the Adaptation Fund, and the newly promoted Tropical Forest Forever Facility, launched at COP30, all operate under criteria of “bankability”, “governance readiness”, and “private-sector leverage”. These terms may appear technical, but they are deeply political in nature. They assume that value must be convertible into credit, that legitimate governance must mirror Western administrative rationalities, and that profit is the proper measure of success. In this arithmetic of survival, finance becomes a moral frontier. Those who fit the technocratic language of measurable resilience are funded; those whose ontologies of care and land are relational, oral, or communal are not. Multilateral climate funds and development banks frequently require technical reporting, fiduciary standards, and private sector leverage metrics that exclude the vernacular ecologies of survival that sustain communities like those of the Tiv in Nigeria’s Middle Belt. Community-based adaptation projects, often rooted in Indigenous knowledge, agroecological practices, or communal land systems, are filtered through frameworks designed for profit, scalability, and global bookkeeping. This mismatch means the technical logic of finance frequently fails to respond to local ontologies of survival, together determining which forms of life and knowledge are rendered investable.
For pastoralists, fisherfolk, and Indigenous forest dwellers whose economies and cosmologies resist commodification, these frameworks are structurally exclusionary. Their adaptive capacities - embodied in reciprocity, communal stewardship, and spiritual relationships with ecosystems - cannot be easily priced, insured, or measured in tonnes of carbon avoided. As a result, they appear “unprepared” or “low-capacity” andare disqualified from major funding pipelines. COP30’s discussions on climate-resilient investment readiness reproduce this logic by equating resilience with integration into financial markets rather than autonomy from them. At COP30 in Belém, the operationalisation of the Loss and Damage Fund revealed this tension acutely. While heralded as a breakthrough, the Fund's governance structure privileges contributions from multilateral banks over direct reparative transfers, and its disbursement criteria mirror the same readiness frameworks that have historically excluded frontline communities. The gap between Belém's rhetoric of solidarity and its institutional design reveals how even ostensibly progressive mechanisms can reproduce necropolitical hierarchies when finance remains the primary medium of care.
The language of risk further reveals the necropolitical grammar of finance. Countries are classified according to investment risk tiers that treat conflict-prone, low-income, or institutionally fragile contexts as inherently undesirable. High risk becomes a pretext for inaction. Yet risk, in this context, is not an objective measure of volatility; it is a geopolitical judgment that encodes colonial afterlives - the perception that some territories are too unstable to deserve trust, too unruly to warrant unconditional support. Thus, the very populations most affected by climate collapse are structurally excluded from adaptation funds because their suffering is deemed a financial liability. This calculus transforms the finance gap into a border between the living and the dying. Those with high credit ratings, stable institutions, or geopolitical leverage can build sea walls, modernise irrigation, and insure crops. Those outside must improvise survival in collapsing ecologies. Their lives become the unfinanced remainder of the global climate project. These theoretical dynamics are not abstractions. They take form in lived experience, in the testimonies of those who exist at the sharp edge of climate finance's exclusions. In Nigeria's Middle Belt, particularly among the displaced communities of Benue, the necropolitical architecture of global climate governance becomes tangible, embodied, and named by those it abandons.
Across Nigeria’s Middle Belt, and especially in Benue’s displaced communities, the necropolitical dimensions of climate finance are neither abstract nor distant; this dynamic is tangible. My oral history facilitation and ethnographic immersion amongst displaced farming and herding communities reveal an acute awareness that their lives are visible to global governance systems yet excluded from its circuits of care. They are mapped, yet unfinanced. The people understand their paradoxical visibility: their suffering is “seen” by satellite risk maps, humanitarian dashboards, and donor portfolios. International agencies monitor their movements, measure their soil loss, and classify their villages as “conflict-vulnerability hotspots”. Yet this visibility does not translate into protection. It is a kind of spectral recognition - being known as data but not as persons with histories, desires, and rights. A displaced farming elder in Guma reflected on this paradox: “They come with drones, they take pictures, they promise help, but we do not see the money. We only see the sky looking at us”. His words name the optical necropolitics of global adaptation finance - a profound epistemic violence. Satellites and digital dashboards record suffering as a measurable category of vulnerability, yet never as a claim to justice. The elder’s imagery of “the sky looking at us” condenses this experience of being observed but untouched, calculated but unhelped. This constitutes a haunting inversion of care. The climate-finance regime turns existential loss into quantitative evidence for reports that justify further conferences, while the people themselves remain illegible in the decision spaces where resources are distributed. In this way, the adaptation finance gap is not merely quantitative; it is qualitative. It demarcates not just a shortfall in dollars but the boundaries of legibility. Some lives are supported because they fit the metrics of efficiency, cost-benefit, andreturn on investment. Others drift because their survival cannot be expressed in those terms. As long as climate finance remains tethered to market logic, the world’s most vulnerable populations will continue to inhabit zones of managed abandonment - places where death is tolerated as the price of economic rationality.
In Abagena Camp, a woman extended the same sentiment to the terrain of everyday governance: “I don’t go to the government to look for help because I know I won’t get anything. They don’t listen to ordinary people like us.” Her statement is not simply about neglect; it articulates a structural epistemic silence - a knowing exclusion where those on the periphery of the metropole are untranslatable within the bureaucratic grammar of finance. A young mother interviewed made the hierarchy of care even more explicit: “Only people who have money can go to them, because without money, you are nothing in front of them.” Here, the necropolitical calculus is laid bare: financial capacity becomes the precondition for recognition, and recognition the precondition for survival. This epistemic exclusion mirrors what can be called the “legibility trap” of global adaptation politics. Projects that are easily measurable or “bankable” are rendered visible to donors, while those grounded in community mutual aid remain illegible. A young farmer who took up arms in a local vigilante group when his village was attacked captured the resulting limbo poignantly: “Here in the IDP camp, we have nothing to do except wait for the government and NGOs. No one has left in search of livelihood elsewhere.” His phrase “nothing to do except wait” materialises what Lauren Berlant (2007) called “slow death”. In this context, it is a temporality of deferred existence where survival depends on sporadic aid. This waiting mirrors the temporal structure of the climate-finance architecture itself: promises of funding are deferred, pledges remain unmet, and lives are suspended between hope and attrition.
A young mother present during my fieldwork engagement further extends this logic of necrofinance to the terrain of broken promises: “There were many promises made by the state government, by leaders, even by some NGOs. They promised peace, food, shelter, and help. But nothing lasted… The promises were like empty words - after the attacks continued, it was every family for themselves”. The affective rhythm of this statement, from “peace” to “empty words”, echoes the movement from COP summits’ grand declarations to the desolation of unmaterialised aid. Another participant observed the same performative care in security forces: “They [the soldiers] come, but their impact is not felt”. Yet another added, “They came, they promised, they took pictures - but they never fulfilled what they said”. These moments reveal a deep affective economy of mistrust and a pervasive survivalist awareness of the state’s and the international community’s performative care. Across the testimonies, this illegibility and performative care coalesce into a shared subaltern consciousness of exclusion. A former vigilante member reframed the plea not as charity, but as justice deferred: “We are pleading - to the government and NGOs - help us. There are many graduates here in this camp, but they are not considered for jobs”. This is not unique to Nigeria. At COP30 in Belém, discussions repeatedly underscored that the vast majority of pledged adaptation finance fails to reach the communities on the front lines of climate collapse. Much of it is absorbed by consultants, intermediaries, and development banks, where risk management routinely supersedes moral responsibility.
In this sense, the finance gap is not a failure of capacity but a deliberate technology of governance, one that manages vulnerability through distance. The Guma elder’s quiet observation, “They don’t listen to ordinary people like us”, thus becomes a global allegory. The subaltern, though hyper-visible in vulnerability indices, remains illegible in the calculus of finance. What emerges, then, is an understanding of climate finance asa system of differential futurity. In the global North, finance is the grammar of anticipation. In places like Abagena, it is the grammar of aftermath - a distant promise that arrives too late, if at all. As such, the necropolitics of climate finance lies precisely here: in its capacity to determine who may adapt and who must merely endure. It is this very hierarchy of futurity that COP30, despite branding itself an “implementation COP” and pledging to move from words to action, has so far failed to disrupt. The necropolitical logic endures in the very infrastructures of finance that define what “action” is permitted to mean. Implementation for whom? Adaptation for what future? As long as adaptation remains tethered to profitability, global climate governance will continue to function as an economy of selective survival. The challenge, therefore, is not merely to close the finance gap, but to decolonise its architecture. Climate finance must cease to operate as a currency of care dispensed from the Global North to the Global South. It must become a reparative mechanism that acknowledges historical responsibility, redistributes power, and affirms the right of all communities, not just those with creditworthiness, to flourish. This transformation confronts formidable obstacles: the geopolitical interests of creditor nations, the structural power of development banks, and the ideological entrenchment of market rationality within climate governance. Yet acknowledging these barriers is not cause for quietism but for strategic clarity about what decolonising climate finance actually requires—not technical reform, but political rupture. Until that transformation occurs, COP30 and its successors will remain haunted by the same moral crisis: a world that can calculate adaptation to the decimal, yet cannot decide that every life is worth protecting.