- India plans to establish a country platform, supported by the Green Climate Fund, that will act as the operational vehicle for delivering its first National Adaptation Plan.
- The platform’s early-stage priorities include governance set-up, updating India’s GCF Country Programme, building an investable pipeline, and strengthening capacities across national and state institutions.
- India’s initiative was announced alongside 14 new country platforms launched at COP30, part of a global shift toward coordinated, country-driven climate investment planning.
Fourteen developing countries and regions have announced plans to establish new country-level platforms to strengthen national climate finance. The initiative, launched at COP30, marks a coordinated shift toward country-led investment planning. The platforms, supported by the Green Climate Fund’s (GCF) Readiness Programme, are designed to translate national priorities into investable pipelines and strengthen coordination among government agencies, the private sector, and development partners.
The new platforms will build on the existing Brazil country platform and Caribbean regional platform, making it a total for 16 platforms for this purpose. India is one of the countries that has announced a country platform. The others include the African Islands States Climate Commission (AISCC), Cambodia, Colombia, Kazakhstan, Lesotho, Mongolia, Nigeria, Oman, Panama, Rwanda, the Dominican Republic, Togo and South Africa.
GCF Executive Director Mafalda Duarte said the growing network reflects a shift from fragmented project-based approaches toward systemic planning.
“Country platforms represent a strategic opportunity for countries to bring the whole of government, the private sector, and development partners around one process,” she said. “What began with Brazil’s platform is now expanding into a network of nearly 20 GCF-supported platforms worldwide.”
Countries are expected to use these platforms to harmonise public and private finance, coordinate investment priorities, and speed up the design and implementation of climate projects.
Alongside the 14 new platforms, a Country Platform Hub was also launched to support developing nations and advance tangible, country-led solutions to scale climate finance. The Hub will provide technical connections, learning exchanges, and access to partners, with Brazil and Uganda serving as inaugural co-chairs.
India enters planning stage for its country platform
India, which announced its intention to develop a country platform during COP30, is at an early planning stage. The Government of India is seeking GCF Readiness support to move from conceptualisation to a formal coordination mechanism.
Hemant Mandal, Director for the Asia and the Pacific Region at GCF, told Mongabay-India that India’s platform will be closely linked to its first National Adaptation Plan (NAP), which is currently being finalised. “The NAP provides the overarching framework for identifying adaptation needs, priorities, and policies, while the country platform enables their implementation by aligning stakeholders, mobilising resources, and ensuring coherence across sectors and levels of governance,” he said.
Early priorities include establishing governance systems, updating India’s GCF Country Programme and Readiness Needs Assessment, developing an investable project pipeline, enhancing private-sector mobilisation, and building capacity across national and state institutions.
According to Mandal, India’s platform will be government-anchored, led by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) as the focal ministry for adaptation. Other ministries, such as finance, water, rural development, agriculture, and power, are expected to contribute as sectoral leads.
He said the governance structure would likely include a steering or empowered committee for strategic direction, a central coordination secretariat, and thematic technical working groups involving state governments, financial institutions, private sector actors, civil society organisations, and research institutions.
In practice, decisions would move through a structured process: working groups develop investment plans and project concepts; the steering committee validates priorities; and the National Designated Authority (NDA) issues clearances required for GCF submissions. Accredited entities would then take proposals forward to financing and implementation.
Mandal said India’s country platform is expected to support the development of large-scale investment programmes and accelerate access to international climate finance. Potential project areas include climate-smart agriculture across multiple states, heat-resilient cities, coastal and Himalayan risk reduction, water security initiatives, early warning systems, industrial decarbonisation clusters, and blended-finance facilities for resilience and clean energy.
Sectoral alignment with the forthcoming NAP will be central, with early focus areas likely to include agriculture, water resources, health, disaster management and resilience, mountain and coastal systems, and climate-resilient urban development.
The platform is expected to serve as a unified mechanism connecting domestic public finance, private investment, and international climate funds. Mandal said that while the GCF will support India through readiness funding, coordination processes, and pipeline development, the platform will remain fully country-owned. “The coordinated approach will reduce fragmentation, strengthen policy coherence, and ensure that all climate finance flows support India’s adaptation action and development objectives,” he said.
Challenges in a federal system
Rolling out a country platform in a country as large and diverse as India will involve significant coordination challenges, Mandal noted.
These include balancing national objectives with state-specific priorities, developing high-quality pipelines across regions with uneven institutional capacity, harmonising data systems, and sustaining private-sector engagement across varied markets.
He said the platform’s structure is intended to help address these issues by improving coherence between central and state planning and by ensuring that all regions can access technical and financial support for climate-related investments.
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Banner image: A delegate speaks at the hgh-level event on building cooperation for scaling climate finance at COP30. Image © UN Climate Change – Diego Herculano via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
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