BRICS Has a Resilience Blueprint. Financing it is the Challenge

India’s BRICS presidency brought countries representing nearly half the world’s population to a common position on global economic reform, development and resilience amid unprecedented global turmoil.

China and India, Russia and the UAE, Iran and Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Brazil, Egypt, Ethiopia and South Africa have competing interests and very different relationships with the West. Yet leaders representing 49.5% of the world’s population and 40% of global GDP agreed on a more balanced multilateral system, greater voice for emerging economies and a development model built around economic and climate resilience.

The New Delhi declaration is significant for what the BRICS has put inside that development argument. Climate risk sits alongside industrial policy, energy and food security, critical minerals, supply chains, finance and trade, rather than being treated as a separate agenda.  

And while it stops short of creating major new pooled financial or economic mechanisms, the grouping has set out a common position on how emerging economies want the global system to evolve: more voice in multilateral institutions, greater policy space, stronger domestic resilience and a larger role in shaping the rules that govern trade, finance and development.

“It is profoundly multilateral, at a time when multilateralism has been actively rubbished by all the major powers,” said Rathin Roy of the Kautilya School of Public Policy. The declaration seeks reform of the UN Security Council, IMF quotas, World Bank shareholding and the WTO dispute-settlement system.

The declaration’s climate framing is notably different from the language that has dominated much of the international climate debate.

“Net zero”, Roy noted, is absent. Instead, climate is placed within a wider sustainable-development framework. “In most places in the declaration where climate change is mentioned, the word ‘including’ precedes it. So this is sustainable development, including climate. They are weaving in a broader lens,” he said.

This broader lens runs through the document and this year’s discussions.

The BRICS declaration links energy security to diversified supply, food security to climate-adaptive agriculture, critical minerals to domestic value addition, and adaptation to infrastructure, finance and disaster preparedness. Fossil fuels remain part of the energy mix, alongside renewables, storage, smart grids and hydrogen.

According to Anil Kishora, former vice-president of the New Development Bank (NDB), this  is “the right approach.”

“A holistic model free of sectoral silos is what the world needs to support resilient development,” he said. “Our experience since the Paris Agreement shows that addressing climate as a stand-alone issue has not worked.”

Since the Paris conference, 2015–2025 have been the 11 hottest years on record; 2025 was about 1.43°C above the pre-industrial average. Disasters killed an average 37,900 people and affected about 100 million annually between 2016 and 2025, while the richest 10% now own 75% of global wealth and the poorest half just 2%.

Political Economy

The declaration also carries a stronger economic and trade argument. The United States, the world’s largest economy, has expanded its use of tariffs, sanctions and financial restrictions amid ongoing conflicts and choking of energy supplies in West Asia, while the European Union has tightened carbon-border and due-diligence rules. Both still wield outsized influence in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. BRICS wants more policy space and a greater say in the institutions that set the rules.

Yet, finance and trade are where the BRICS’ grouping will be tested on their ability to deliver. The New Delhi summit advanced work on local-currency lending, multilateral guarantees, sustainable finance and cross-border payments, but created no new climate-finance pool or common payments system. That leaves the Shanghai-headquartered New Development Bank as the main institution through which BRICS can put significant money behind its development agenda.

The NDB already operates differently from the Bretton Woods lenders: it is demand-driven, works through country systems and lends in local currencies. Kishora argued that capital is not its immediate constraint; with about $13 billion in equity and reserves, the bank has room to expand lending. The harder task is building the governance, expertise and institutional capacity needed to use that balance sheet more effectively, particularly as India chairs the NDB Board of Governors in 2027 and the bank prepares its next five-year strategy.

Kishora does not see this as an argument for constructing a financial system outside the existing global architecture.

“We can’t have an architecture tailored just for the Global South as both the north and the south are part of the same global financial system,” he said. “What we need is a few critical reforms to adjust or update the building blocks of the current global system.”

Trade shows what that could mean in practice. Intra-BRICS merchandise trade reached $1.17 trillion in 2024. Under India’s chairship, trade ministers advanced a Global Value Chains Action Plan for 2026–30, customs cooperation, principles for digitally delivered services and new credit-assessment guidelines for export-oriented MSMEs. A proposed invoice-discounting mechanism for smaller exporters remains under study.

These are also climate measures in practice. Carbon-related trade rules increasingly depend on product-level emissions data, standards, customs systems and supply-chain information. BRICS has strongly opposed carbon border measures it considers unilateral or protectionist, but opposition alone will not protect exporters. Smaller firms in particular will need access to finance, credible emissions data and systems that allow them to demonstrate compliance as carbon requirements tighten.

That is the more practical test of BRICS’ demand for greater policy space.

How the BRICS nations move ahead together will become clearer in 2027 when two rivals, who have been working on reconciliation after their 2020 border conflicts – China and India – take on important positions that will need them to work closer on the BRICS’ finance and trade agendas. 

China takes over the BRICS presidency, while India chairs the NDB Board of Governors as the bank shapes its next strategy. China will inherit the wider political and economic agenda agreed in New Delhi; India will have a direct role in determining whether some of it gets financed. The year will show whether BRICS can move from common positions