In climate politics, it is easy to treat COP summits as a travelling show: intense media noise, careful drafting marathons, and then a quick shift to the next crisis. In this episode of DevelopmentAid Dialogues, host Hisham Allam talked with Paulo C. De Miranda about when these summits stopped being just diplomacy and started to matter for people, balance sheets and fragile communities.

Paulo, Chairman and Co-Founder of DEEP and a senior executive in impact management, argued that COPs only truly mattered “when they shape real investment decisions,” when declarations coming out of Belém or Dubai “flow into budgets, balance sheets and investment mandates” instead of remaining on paper.

A central thread in the conversation was the gap between climate text and the financial system. Paulo said that the language of COP had improved and the scale of the problem was widely recognised, but he stressed that the world was “still not very close to closing the gap between the climate text and the financial system.” He pointed to the distance between trillion dollar announcements and the much smaller flows that reached communities living with volatility, displacement and compounded risks, and warned against “accounting optimism” that repackaged existing instruments without changing the rules of capital allocation.

Politically, COP30 in Belém also exposed structural hesitation. Paulo highlighted one glaring omission: the failure to name fossil fuels explicitly in the outcome. He called this a critical signal that global politics around the fossil fuel economy “has not broken ties with the past,” despite the technology and resources available to move faster. If something as central as fossil fuel phaseout could not be clearly stated, he argued, it revealed the limits of the deal and showed how issues that should be nonnegotiable – fossil fuels, deforestation, protection of vulnerable communities – were still treated as bargaining chips.

From a development perspective, Paulo argued that COP needed to evolve into something closer to a “conference for sustainable humanity” because, in fragile and crisis affected settings he had worked in, climate change was part of daily survival, not an abstract risk.

Paulo closed with three blunt points: leaders must rewrite the rules of the game around sustainable humanity, finance must treat sustainable living as a core asset, and citizens must own accountability “here and now.” He recalled Georgina, a 10yearold from Tanzania who said she was in Belém to help solve problems she did not cause – a reminder that climate summits should be judged by whether they change incentives, capital flows and accountability for those with the least room for error.

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The United Nations Office for Project Services, widely known as UNOPS, is pushing climate accountability into the core of development work by tackling the most elusive part of its carbon footprint: Scope 3 emissions. In this episode of DevelopmentAid Dialogues, host Hisham Allam speaks with Samantha Stratton-Short, Head of Strategic Initiatives, Infrastructure and Project Management at UNOPS and Manager of the UNOPS Climate Action Programme, about a new methodology designed to map, measure, and manage the emissions embedded in every stage of UNOPS’s value chain.

Scope 3 emissions – those generated by suppliers, contractors, travel and the full life cycle of procured goods and infrastructure – typically account for 70-90% of an organization’s greenhouse gas footprint yet are the hardest to track because they depend on external data and lie outside direct operational control.

“Reducing our direct operational emissions is a core responsibility for UNOPS,” Stratton-Short notes, “but we must go beyond that and measure the emissions of our suppliers, our partners and our implementation activities as well.” This broader view, she argues, “allows us to understand the full climate impact of our work and gives us the ability to influence others, even markets, to adopt new low-carbon solutions.”​

Over three years, UNOPS developed a step-by-step methodology that is compliant with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol but tailored to non-commercial, humanitarian operations and UN values such as inclusivity and stakeholder engagement. “We couldn’t just copy-paste private sector solutions,” she says, pointing to the unique way UN entities operate across more than 150 countries and project types. The result is a materiality framework that, in her words, is “robust enough to be scientifically sound, yet flexible enough for the UN’s complexity,” capable of systematically identifying “the highest emitting areas in our value chain with a specific focus on the delivery of development projects.”​

The stakes are especially high in conflict-affected contexts such as Yemen, Afghanistan or Somalia, where resource scarcity and climate stress already feed instability. Here, the methodology helps UNOPS “prioritize solar-powered infrastructure and green procurement,” reducing dependence on diesel and making essential services less vulnerable to supply shocks and price volatility.

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International development is heading into a crunch moment, and this episode with Professor Raj M. Desai puts numbers, mechanisms, and politics around what “shrinking aid” really means for countries that still depend on it—especially in the context of USAID cuts and the growing push toward blended finance. In this episode of DevelopmentAid Dialogues, podcast host Hisham Allam speaks with Desai, a leading scholar of foreign aid and development finance at Georgetown University and the Brookings Institution, about how the sharp fall in official development assistance is reshaping global development and what options remain for countries trying to close financing gaps.

The conversation opens with Desai’s diagnosis of why aid is falling just as needs spike: long-standing donor fatigue, the fiscal and political aftershocks of conflicts and refugee crises, and lingering budget pressures from the 2008 financial crash. He explains that foreign aid has become an easy political target in many donor countries, with bipartisan support in the United States for shrinking budgets and European donors increasingly redirecting funds to refugee resettlement and security spending at home, tightening the space for traditional development programs and setting the stage for debates on USAID cuts.

Desai then outlines five strategies for countries facing declining concessional flows: mobilizing more domestic revenue, tapping diaspora financing, engaging cross-border philanthropy, expanding the use of blended finance and impact investment, and working more actively with newer bilateral and multilateral donors. He stresses that remittances, diaspora bonds and structured instruments can all play a role, and that newer players such as China, Gulf countries and emerging-economy funds could expand options if recipient governments strengthen their own aid coordination systems and avoid fragmented deals that respond only to short-term shocks like the 2025 USAID cuts rather than long-term development strategies.

In the final part of the discussion, Desai connects the projected collapse of U.S. development assistance—from roughly US$65 billion to about US$10 billion per year by 2026—to the broader need for joint financing frameworks that integrate domestic revenue, philanthropic flows, private capital and official aid around national priorities. He calls for open data architectures, better tracking of cross-border philanthropy, and unified strategies that align domestic resource mobilization, diaspora investment and blended finance, arguing that in an era defined by the USAID cuts and the organization’s dismantling and more volatile financial flows, the future of development finance will depend on combining smarter public oversight with genuine country ownership instead of treating new instruments as a simple fix for shrinking aid.​

Listen to the full episode on DevelopmentAid Dialogues. Stay informed. Stay engaged.

The podcast is sponsored by DevelopmentAid. Procurement notices, funding and grants to opportunities, lists of potential partners, insights into market trends, databases of development professionals, webinars, latest news, and much more. Stay informed and connected.

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