Getty ImagesRepresentative image Every month, disasters caused by extreme weather kill more people in South and Southeast Asia. In January, a landslide in Indonesia’s West Java followed heavy rain and led to dozens of deaths — including 23 Indonesian marines out on a training exercise.The end of 2025 was punctuated by similar depressing headlines. Cyclone Ditwah killed over 600 in Sri Lanka in December; a few days earlier, Cyclone Senyar’s toll in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand had crossed 1,000.Senyar formed in the Malacca Strait; that’s an area very atypical for such storms. The people of South and Southeast Asia are living the reality of out-of-control climate change — a problem largely caused by the rest of the world, but one they’ve been left on their own to deal with.A recent report by the US-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis pointed out that Asia lost more than $75 billion a year as the direct consequence of climate-related events between 2020 and 2023. That’s 40% of the global total. But the continent receives a tiny fraction of the already low amount of money set aside for adaptation to climate change.Climate finance, including private capital, is supposed to fill the gap left by the industrialized world’s withdrawal from its responsibility to subsidize those suffering because of atmospheric carbon. It’s true that these flows have grown considerably since the Paris Agreement formalized this abdication almost a decade ago. But almost all that money goes into mitigating ongoing emissions — by building out renewable energy or retiring old fossil-fuel infrastructure.Live EventsThe world put together a $20-billion “just transition” package for Indonesia in 2022, for example, but it focuses on accelerating the shift away from coal-fired power and doesn’t include a penny for dealing with the chaos that climate change has already wrought.Nobody really expects public money from the developed world, particularly from US taxpayers, to help fill this gap. Instead, there’s been a long-standing hope that multilateral development institutions, such as the World Bank, will step in to help build protective infrastructure. Or that these new projects — seawalls, river embankments, restored wetlands — could be partially financed by private capital.But that effort has run into sadly familiar roadblocks. For one, the development banks don’t have enough money. In 2023, they spent $25 billion on adaptation, while the amount needed might be more than eight times that.Private finance is underperforming even more. The areas that need such investment the most — densely populated, flood-prone West Java, for example — are least able to put together the complicated financial proposals required to turn these hopes into reality. Preparing the paperwork for projects like these takes time and expertise, and many of them are relatively novel, something financiers hate. According to IEEFA, only two-thirds of the money proposed for adaptation projects is eventually disbursed, compared to 98% for development finance overall.Institutions and state capacity are the crucial missing links here. The World Bank has made a real effort to target its spending toward the most vulnerable countries, for example. But those that already had the minimal infrastructure to respond to climate change tended to get five times as much per capita than those without it.Some at-risk nations have done better than others by creating tight-knit collectives that pressure global organizations and leverage their symbolic weight. Small island nations, for example, pull together at occasions like climate summits and make sure their voices are heard; unsurprisingly, they often do better, in per capita terms, at snagging adaptation finance. Tiny Barbados, home of the Bridgetown Initiative to reform multilateral finance, gets $24 per person, while Indonesia, the world’s fourth-most populous country, gets $0.76.South and Southeast Asia need to do better. First of all, they need to pool their resources more effectively. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ climate finance strategy has suggested a regional coordination mechanism that allows member states to share catastrophic risk. Something similar has worked in the Caribbean for almost two decades. It stresses quick payouts, which can make the difference in disaster-hit areas between recovery and destitution.They also need to pool their ability to prepare financial instruments. A region that boasts one of the world’s great financial centers, Singapore, can’t claim that it is short of expertise in the aggregate. There’s considerable appetite for well-structured bonds that can finance infrastructure, particularly for urban areas.International partners can help, too. In the developed world, Japan has been one of the active participants in international adaptation finance mechanisms, though that’s a low bar. Last year, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government issued a $300-million “resilience bond”