In the span of two weeks in early April 2026, India delivered two climate signals that on the surface appear contradictory. It announced its 2035 climate targets – a 47 percent emissions intensity reduction and 60 percent non-fossil capacity by 2035 – which experts say it will likely exceed before the decade is out. Days later, India quietly withdrew its bid to host COP33 “following a review of its commitments for the year 2028.” The instinct is to read this as retreat. It isn’t. The more accurate reading is that India is rethinking climate forums, not climate ambition.

As one Indian analyst put it bluntly: hosting COP33 would mean “spending significant money and political capital to support a global process that, from India’s perspective, has not delivered fairly for the Global South.” For New Delhi, that price is no longer worth paying, and there is a growing acknowledgment that the leverage lies elsewhere. Increasingly, that means outside the United Nations system entirely, in the plurilateral groupings where the Global South sets the agenda rather than responds to one written elsewhere. 

Chief among them is the BRICS group, which India currently chairs. With 11 members representing nearly half the world’s population and 52 percent of global emissions, BRICS is a climate-critical grouping whether it chooses to be or not. This year also marks two decades of the bloc, and the theme India has identified for its presidency – “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation, and Sustainability” – signals intent. 

Strip away the diplomatic language and the climate crisis is, at its core, a capital allocation problem. Global climate finance stands at $1.9 trillion annually against a requirement of $7.4 trillion. Clean energy costs more than twice as much to finance in emerging markets as in advanced economies, while less than 8 percent of climate finance from the multilateral development banks reaches adaptation. 

The cognitive dissonance at the IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings – where the United States pushed to scrap the World Bank’s 45 percent climate finance target even as oil hit almost $120 a barrel amid the Iran-U.S. conflict – have only sharpened the case for an alternative. For BRICS members and other emerging economies, fossil-dependent supply chains and dollar-pegged currency systems are not just environmental liabilities, they are financial vulnerabilities.

Across BRICS, the clean energy transition is already underway, with wind and solar projects outnumbering planned fossil fuel plants two to one. What is missing is a joint financial architecture to match that momentum. India’s BRICS presidency is the opportunity to build it through two levers that move beyond declaration toward delivery.

Strengthening the NDB as the Global South’s Climate Bank

BRICS’s own New Development Bank (NDB) was built as an alternative to Global North-led Bretton Woods institutions. The NDB has equal-vote governance, no conditionality legacy, and a 40 percent climate finance allocation target. Its portfolio grew from $5.7 billion to $8.1 billion between 2023 and 2024, yet the bulk remains concentrated in middle-income BRICS members. At a time when Bretton Woods institutions are retreating from climate commitments, the NDB must step forward. 

As BRICS chair, India can push for accelerated deployment of three specific mechanisms. First, BRICS can amplify the reach of Project mBridge, the blockchain-enabled multi-CBDC platform developed by BRICS’ central banks, as a settlement layer for climate finance transactions, reducing dollar intermediation and transaction costs for cross-border green investment within the bloc. 

Second, India can push a formal framework for strategically utilizing Gulf Sovereign Wealth Fund co-investment in NDB climate projects. The UAE and Saudi Arabia manage over $2 trillion in sovereign assets; securing their participation through co-investment models is more durable than diplomatic pressures given the  bloc’s internal contradictions. For ASEAN partner countries like Malaysia and Vietnam, whose clean manufacturing supply chains depend on affordable transition finance, the strategic significance would extend well beyond BRICS itself. 

Third, accelerate the rupee bond program across BRICS currencies, leveraging India’s expertise in building large-scale, low-cost digital public infrastructure (DPI) frameworks. Local-currency financing eliminates the dollar-mismatch problem at source and DPI enables rapid disbursement of funds. 

To deploy that capital effectively, four institutional reforms are needed within the NDB itself: a dedicated concessional adaptation finance window for vulnerable BRICS+ members; operationalizing the BRICS Multilateral Guarantees Initiative announced in 2025, allowing for derisking of climate-resilient development investments as a first-loss guarantee facility; an IFC-like private sector arm for structured private capital mobilization; and finally, a project-level climate finance traceability, which has consistently been a  major gap in NDB’s reporting.

Advancing a Unified BRICS position on Carbon Markets

The rules of the global carbon economy are being written right now, and BRICS is not in the room. The EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) entered full effect from January 2026 and while BRICS condemned it as “unilateral, punitive and discriminatory,” mere opposition is not a strategy. For India alone, CBAM could reduce steel export margins by $25 million this year, and that cost is set to rise sharply by 2030, with the United Kingdom and Canada developing their own equivalents. 

The foundation for an alternative already exists. Eight of 11 BRICS countries have voluntary carbon markets in place, and two are finalizing their regulatory frameworks. Brazil, China, India, and Indonesia account for over a third of all carbon credit projects registered worldwide. The BRICS Carbon Markets Partnership MoU committed members to cooperative approaches under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement – creating frameworks for bilateral trading under Art 6.2 and the U.N.-supervised market under Art. 6.4. The obstacles are design problems: China’s ETS excludes international credits, carbon prices vary from $14 in Beijing to under $3 in Indonesia, and India’s carbon scheme excludes steel and fertilizers, the sectors most exposed to CBAM, from its first phase. 

India’s presidency should pursue three specific steps: first, use the BRICS Carbon Markets Partnership to advance mutual recognition of national registries under Article 6. New Delhi must also accelerate the inclusion of steel and fertilizers in India’s own Carbon Credit Trading Scheme (CCTS), without which any claim to carbon market leadership is undermined before it begins. 

Second, the BRICS should join Brazil’s Open Coalition on Compliance Carbon Markets as a bloc. The coalition was endorsed at COP30 by 18 countries including China, the EU, the U.K., and Canada, covering 40 percent of global emissions. It is writing the interoperability standards that will determine whose carbon credits count globally. The BRICS presidency gives it leverage to join shaping the rules from the inside rather than objecting from the outside. 

Third, India, representing BRICS, can demand CBAM revenues should be recycled back to exporting countries as transition finance, with binding technology transfer for industrial decarbonization. India’s own FTA with the EU secured 500 million euros in discretionary decarbonization support – useful, but no substitute for structural commitments. BRICS as a bloc has the collective weight to make binding transfer a condition of cooperation rather than a concession. 

Conclusion

India’s NDC and COP33 decisions will attract continued criticism. But climate leadership in a fragmented world is no longer primarily about hosting summits or submitting targets. It is about building the institutions, instruments, and coalitions through which finance actually flows to people who need it. 

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was right that the international order has become “a system of intensifying great power rivalry, where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as coercion.” The answer is not to wait for that system to reform itself, but to build a parallel architecture, one that emerging and developing economies design, govern, and own. 

India’s 2026 BRICS presidency is a credible opportunity to do exactly that. Whether New Delhi treats it as such, or as another summit cycle, will depend on its ability to navigate the internal dynamics within BRICS, which the Iran war has begun to complicate.