BRICS New Delhi Declaration Pushes Global South's Claim to Shape Green Transition Rules

The 2026 BRICS New Delhi Declaration has placed the climate crisis squarely within the wider debate over who governs the global economy, calling for a more representative international order and reform of global financial institutions. Its central claim is that the Global South should not remain a rule-taker in a green transition it is still expected to finance.

For three decades, climate diplomacy has largely proceeded on the assumption that the crisis can be addressed without disturbing the economic order that helped produce it. The declaration challenges that assumption by tying climate action to debt, trade, technology, minerals and fiscal space.

The existing bargain has long been questioned. Developing countries are pressed to decarbonise faster, adapt to disasters they did little to cause, protect forests and build clean-energy industries, while servicing debts accumulated under an unequal financial system.

Nepal illustrates the difficulty. The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage has treated climate-induced loss and damage in Nepal not as a future risk but as a present emergency. Even so, vulnerable countries are often left searching for money after each disaster, frequently by taking on more debt.

The Loss and Damage Fund was intended to correct this injustice, but it risks becoming another example of delay unless it receives adequate, predictable and grant-based finance. The UNFCCC describes it as a mechanism to assist particularly vulnerable developing countries with economic and non-economic loss and damage. A promise without money, however, amounts to another form of postponement.

The BRICS language did not appear in isolation. It echoes long-running campaigns for public, grant-based and non-debt-creating climate finance, and for stronger adaptation finance and a workable Just Transition mechanism, which have moved debt, finance, adaptation and justice from activist demands into formal climate politics.

Adaptation is not a soft addition to mitigation. A farmer protecting a watershed, a coastal community restoring mangroves or a village changing cropping patterns is doing climate work as vital as any solar park. Forests, wetlands and biodiversity function as infrastructure that holds water, protects soil and sustains livelihoods.

The New Delhi Declaration gives adaptation a political footing that has often been missing in negotiations focused on mitigation, by framing resilience, sustainable development and climate cooperation as central to an expanded BRICS agenda. At Antalya, that language will matter only if BRICS and the G77 use it to demand real adaptation finance, protection for ecosystems and local livelihoods, and recognition that survival infrastructure is as urgent as emissions reduction.

The trade dispute is already visible in the European Union's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, presented as a tool to prevent carbon leakage. Pricing embedded carbon may sound fair in principle, but in practice it can penalise countries that lack the capital and technology to green their factories at the pace Europe demands.

BRICS now brings together Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, a mix of major emitters, fossil-fuel producers, fast-growing energy consumers and climate-vulnerable states. Most also sit within the wider G77 and China grouping of developing countries. That breadth gives BRICS political weight, but it also makes unavoidable the contradiction of heavy fossil-fuel investments that will have to be steadily reduced.

When the UNFCCC convenes COP31 in Antalya from November 9 to 20, 2026, the test will be whether these overlapping blocs can carry into negotiations what BRICS has now put on paper. The declaration can expose Northern hypocrisy and challenge debt-driven climate finance, unilateral carbon tariffs and unequal control over technology, but its members must also acknowledge inequity within their own borders, where the poorest communities often pay the highest price for both climate disasters and carbon-heavy development.

The New Delhi Declaration is not the end of the argument but the beginning of a harder one. If BRICS wants to change climate politics, it must show that a fairer world order means debt relief, grant-based finance, technology access, fair trade rules and a real voice for frontline communities, not merely a shift in power from one set of capitals to another.