#RESTalksCOP is a COP30 interview series created to bring people closer to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process. Through conversations with negotiators, experts, filmmakers, and civil society, we explore diverse perspectives and behind-the-scenes insights. Recorded on the ground at the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30), these interviews offer a time-capsule look at the people and stories shaping today’s climate negotiations.
In this episode, we speak with Jeffrey Qi, a policy advisor at the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD). With nearly a decade of experience in the UNFCCC process, Jeffrey works on adaptation negotiations and nature-based solutions — offering a deep insider perspective on the Global Goal on Adaptation and the challenges of tracking global progress.
Jeffrey Qi: Hi, I’m Jeffrey. I’m a policy advisor with the International Institute for Sustainable Development or IISD. I mainly work on adaptation negotiations and nature-based solutions.
Zvezdana Božović: How long have you been engaged in the UNFCCC process?
Jeffrey: It’s been almost eight or nine years. So I started as a youth delegate back in 2017. So the 46th Meeting of the Subsidiary Bodies (SB46) was my first UNFCCC event.
Zvezdana: What are you following this year at COP30?
Jeffrey: COP30, this is an “Adaptation COP”. So, we are following the assessment of the national adaptation plans (NAPs), but also the negotiations on the list of indicators for the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) this year.
Zvezdana: Many people had high hopes going from SB62 into the COP30 on the indicators, but there has also been criticism about the size and scope of the indicators. What are your impressions on the progress that has been made here at the COP?
Jeffrey: Yeah, for sure. The indicators are such daunting work. There’s no one single metric for global adaptation progress. We don’t have something like the greenhouse gas emission kind of data or a number to actually track progress. Every single country is different, every context for adaptation is also different. So I think the experts have done a tremendous amount of job to go from nine thousand indicators to five hundred to now one hundred. So countries really need to figure out how to take these one hundred indicators and adopt them at this COP. It could be a set of this one hundred, because not every country is happy with the indicators themselves or the process of how we develop these indicators. So I think progress is slow, but there is a moving trend towards getting a good outcome here at COP30.
Zvezdana: When it comes to the negotiations so far, have you noticed any particular obstacles that stand in the way of setting up this framework?
Jeffrey: Yes. The indicators, again, are such technical work, and all of the negotiators are political negotiators, so it really relies on an army of experts to really supply the knowledge. But the UNFCCC is a political process, so there are a lot of salient political issues, like finance, that continue to influence how the negotiations are actually being conducted. So I’d say that navigating around these UNFCCC issues is key for adopting this very technical work. You don’t want to micromanage this process too much. You don’t want the indicators to become a political indicator. But you also want to be able to have something that captures the full picture of the global adaptation story. How to navigate that balance and how to get out of the mindset of politicizing everything? I think that is a major challenge and a major barrier.
Also, there is a technical question as well – how are we actually going to operationalize these indicators? There are so many methodologies, there are a lot of missing data and also for developing countries, capacity is just not there to actually track these indicators. So how to navigate these challenges will also be a part of this final decision, and hopefully, countries will agree on something that allows for more support and more methodology and technical work to actually be able to support countries collecting data, to inform these indicators, which will then feed into the second Global Stocktake (GST).
Zvezdana: How optimistic are you on the idea of the GGA indicators being then transposed into national policy? Have you noticed that some Parties seem more willing than others to already start considering how this will play out after the COP?
Jeffrey: I think that is always a question that’s in the back of everyone’s mind, because now you have this list of indicators, how are you actually going to use them? It is a costly process, it’s a time-consuming process, so now we have something – how are we actually going to get some investment back, right? The most obvious way is the second GST. These indicators will be used to help assess global adaptation progress. Some Parties have a clear idea on how to do that. Some other Parties may want to have additional time to think through more methodologically on how this will actually inform a global stocktake, because this is an important task. The next GST will start in 2027, so we only have one year to really dive down on how we will actually operationalize these indicators.
Zvezdana: No pressure! (laughs) I want to go back to the topic of climate finance because to me it seems like it permeates every discussion, particularly on adaptation. How have you seen climate finance being integrated into the indicators? In what way would you say that it also affect the indicators as they are now?
Jeffrey: We do have a massive adaptation finance gap. I think the latest UNEP Adaptation Gap report puts it somewhere around two hundred eighty to three hundred ninety. Don’t fact-check me on that number, but it is a massive gap. Finance commitments have been made through the new collective quantified goal on climate finance (NCQG). We are still waiting to see how countries are going to actually make that commitment, or actually reach that commitment-agreed amount. And adaptation has always been lagging behind our mitigation finance as well.
So there is a real challenge and a real concern from developing countries that developed countries are not providing enough public grant-based adaptation finance. So in the indicators, there are what we call the means of implementation (MOI) indicators, so finance, technology, transfer and capacity building. Right now, there are MOI indicators across different thematic areas, across these process targets as well. So the question is how many of them are going to be in there, does it make sense to track domestic resource mobilization as well, so countries’ own budget that’s allocated to adaptation?
Zvezdana: How does this affect developing countries?
Jeffrey: For developing countries, that is a red line because we have the Article 9 obligation – a developed country has to provide public finance to a developing country. That is the data a developing country wants to track. However, there’s also an argument that if you do not track domestic resource mobilization, developed countries will have no way to track their own expenditure on adaptation. So you’re missing a large part of the global adaptation story. You’re only tracking finance mobilized and provided to a developing country, but you’re not tracking developing countries’ own finance for their own allocation actions.
So there are valid arguments to be made on both sides, and we’ll just have to see how countries work it out in the second week.
Zvezdana: Thank you so much for sharing your insights. What projects are you working on now?
Jeffrey: IISD is working across climate change system developments. We have energy, resilience, as well as water projects. We also have the Earth Negotiation Bulletin (ENB) that tracks international negotiations, including at COP30. My personal work side that’s outside of the UNFCCC, is nature-based solutions. So how countries could use nature-based solutions to integrate their nationally determined contribution (NDC), their NAPs and their National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plan (NBSAP) on the biodiversity side to make sure these policies are coherent and they all work together to protect lives, livelihoods, as well as our biodiversity. So mainly just working on building capacity of countries to plan and implement nature-based solutions, but also informing the global conversation on what are the safeguards needed for nature-based solutions – human rights, gender responsiveness, things like that.
Zvezdana: Very interesting! If people want to know more about your work, where can they find you?
Jeffrey: Head to iisd.org and learn more about IISD’s work on sustainable development, but also on climate change negotiations as well.
Interview conducted on 17 November 2025