The Resilience Test: Can Climate Turn Middle Powers Into Rule-Makers?

In January 2026, when it had become clear that global economic and trade relationships were becoming instruments of coercion, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney urged middle powers to act together. His most memorable warning at Davos was: “If you are not at the table, you are on the menu.”

But another of his observations deserves greater attention in the face of one of the planet’s gravest long-term threats, climate change: “Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortresses.”

As countries prepare for COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye, the urgency of that argument is becoming clearer. The Iran war has exposed the vulnerability of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of global LNG trade normally passes. Western Europe has endured its hottest summer on record, while 52% of Europe experienced at least very strong heat stress and summer river flows fell to their lowest levels in over 30 years. Yet global military spending reached $2.887 trillion in 2025, against just $26 billion in international public adaptation finance to developing countries in 2023.

The economic stakes are mounting. Extreme heat already costs South Asia the equivalent of nearly 31 million full-time jobs annually and could leave its economy almost 7% smaller by 2050 than it would otherwise have been, according to the World Bank. Floods, droughts and water scarcity are adding to losses across agriculture, industry, infrastructure and public finances. Climate change is increasingly a threat to productivity, investment, employment and economic growth itself.

At COP31, developing countries will seek to defend decades of negotiations that established historical responsibility for global warming and obligations on wealthier nations to support poorer countries in adapting and transitioning to cleaner energy. But wars, trade disputes and weakening multilateral cooperation are testing those hard-won commitments.

Could middle powers help turn these commitments into action—and go further, building resilient supply chains, sharing climate-risk knowledge and reshaping economic and fiscal policies around resilience rather than narrow national interests? In doing so, could they also gain greater influence over the rules governing the global economy?

“The world needs middle powers now, definitely,” said Dammu Ravi, India's former Secretary (Economic Relations) at the Ministry of External Affairs.” He sees them as a possible “stabilising force” that can help in an increasingly divided world. 

Their potential influence, however, rests not on starting from scratch, but on building on the rules and principles developing countries have fought to establish.

The rule-making problem

The idea of middle powers is often traced to Giovanni Botero’s 1589 Della Ragion di Stato. But modern middle-power diplomacy took shape around the founding of the United Nations. At the 1945 San Francisco conference, Canada and Australia argued that countries outside the great-power club should still have influence if they could contribute meaningfully to international stability. Canada’s “functional principle” captured the idea neatly: influence should reflect capacity and contribution, not simply rank.

The demand for greater influence over international rules has continued. In 2003, India, Brazil and South Africa established the IBSA Dialogue Forum, calling for greater developing-country representation on a reformed UN Security Council. At their 2006 summit, they also pressed for reforms to IMF voting rights. The objective was not merely to participate in international institutions, but to have a greater say in how they were governed.

India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar offered a contemporary interpretation on October 14 when he described India as a “power in the middle” rather than simply a middle power. His larger point was about agency: countries caught between competing big powers can identify their own interests, frame independent policies and build arrangements with one another.

Having a voice, however, is not the same as shaping the rules. Can middle powers turn their collective economic weight into real leverage?

Amitendu Palit, Senior Research Fellow and Research Lead (Trade and Economics) at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, points to a measure suggested by WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala: economies individually accounting for more than 1% but less than 4% of global trade. Together, they represent roughly half of world trade, according to Okonjo-Iweala. Yet Palit is sceptical about their ability to translate that weight into influence. They have, he argues, “pull but no clout.”

The CPTPP illustrates the problem. After the US withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2017, Japan, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Peru, Vietnam and others revised the treaty and brought it into force. But Palit argues that much of the groundwork had already been done under US leadership. They preserved and adapted an institution. Could they have originated it?

Yet middle powers have influenced rules. The Australia-led Cairns Group, which includes Brazil, Canada and Indonesia, helped shape agricultural trade negotiations during the Uruguay Round of 1986–1994. But maintaining rules, influencing their design and creating new ones that others adopt are different degrees of power.

Climate could give middle powers common ground to work together and shape how global cooperation works.

Climate as common ground

Dammu Ravi sees greater scope for middle-power cooperation in geoeconomics than geopolitics. Countries remain constrained by their relationships with larger powers on strategic questions, he said in an interview, but have more freedom to shape trade and investment arrangements. The India–Australia Renewable Energy Partnership illustrates the possibilities: cooperation on solar supply chains, energy storage, green hydrogen and two-way investment, including a solar-technician training initiative in India. Such partnerships can advance shared economic interests without requiring broader geopolitical alignment. For Ravi, cooperation becomes possible when countries find a convergence of interests.

Climate resilience could provide that convergence. Australia, India, Brazil, Canada and South Africa differ in resources, industrial capacity and development priorities. But all face disruption to infrastructure, food and water systems, production and public finances due to climate shocks.

Ümit Şahin, Senior Scholar and Coordinator of Climate Change Studies at Istanbul Policy Center, Sabancı University, sees an opening. “With the US absent, China doing climate diplomacy in a very bilateral way, and the EU less active than before because of its own domestic issues, middle powers are very important and can take on real responsibility,” he said at a COP31 webinar organised by Delhi-based Climate Trends. But they are also, he acknowledged, “the most fragmented part of the world.”

They disagree over finance, technology and whose rules should prevail. The challenge is identifying what middle powers can achieve together that they cannot achieve alone.

Three areas offer a starting point. First, greening and diversifying supply chains for critical minerals and clean technologies, reducing emissions and dependence on concentrated sources of supply. Second, sharing knowledge on climate impacts, from water management and heat action plans to disaster forecasting, and using that expertise to build resilient infrastructure. Third, designing economic and fiscal policies that account for climate risks, including the losses resilient investment could prevent.

Together, these could shift the basis of economic cooperation from immediate national advantage towards longer-term resilience. Supply chains would be valued not only for the trade they generate but for their ability to withstand disruption; investment for the future losses it prevents, not merely immediate returns. This would offer middle powers a common economic purpose without diminishing developed countries' obligations to provide climate finance.

From declarations to institutions

Middle powers have begun trying to turn those ideas into institutions. BRICS has advanced climate-finance reform, adaptation and disaster resilience. The BRICS-founded New Development Bank’s 2022–2026 strategy targets 40% of approvals for climate change mitigation and adaptation.

India has also helped build institutions. It launched the treaty-based International Solar Alliance with France in 2015 to expand solar deployment, investment and technical capacity. The Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI), launched in 2019, focuses more directly on resilience by seeking to integrate climate and disaster risk into infrastructure planning and finance. An October €19 million EU-CDRI-ESA programme extends that work across seven South Asian countries.

The test is whether these efforts become investment criteria and common standards rather than remain projects.

There is, however, a ceiling. Türkiye’s COP31 Climate Implementation Bridge can help turn climate priorities into investable projects and connect them with financiers. But it is “not a new fund” or financing mechanism. Şahin puts the problem more starkly: it brings “no new financial pledge and no new mechanism to actually provide finance.”

Also read: COP31's BRIDGE should be judged by deals closed, not plans written

COP31 president-designate Murat Kurum has argued that climate spending should show ambition comparable to Europe’s rising defence budgets. Şahin describes that as a political statement rather than a formal presidency proposal.

The fiscal test

Finance is the hard frontier. The UNEP Adaptation Gap Report 2025 estimates that developing countries will need $310–365 billion annually for adaptation by 2035. International public adaptation finance reached just $26 billion in 2023.

Pepukaye Bardouille, Director of the Bridgetown Initiative and Special Adviser on Climate Resilience in Barbados’s Prime Minister’s Office, argues that the rules themselves must change. “We have to accept that countries are going to need more debt. The question is on what terms, particularly for adaptation,” she said at the COP31 webinar.

Bardouille wants debt-sustainability assessments, particularly for middle-income countries, to recognise long-term adaptation needs and the terms that would make additional borrowing sustainable. Otherwise, investments that prevent future losses can remain unaffordable because existing assessments focus on current debt. She also warns that guarantees, routinely proposed to attract private capital, are often unavailable.

There are models of cooperation. The African Risk Capacity, created under the African Union, pools disaster risk across countries and has paid out more than $206 million. It cannot replace adaptation, but it shows how countries can share some of the financial consequences of disasters rather than absorb them alone.

Brazil’s Tropical Forest Forever Facility tests another idea: rewarding tropical-forest countries for keeping forests standing through returns from a long-term investment fund. The model is still being built and has yet to make its first conservation payments.

The larger opportunity for middle powers is to extend these principles across borders, pooling guarantees and climate risk, sharing the cost of resilient infrastructure and recognising that resilience in one economy can benefit others.

Beyond the bipolar choice

As US–China rivalry hardens, middle powers risk being forced into choices they would rather avoid. One response is to work together where their interests overlap.

The September launch of the Partners for Multilateralism initiative by Australia, Barbados, Brazil, Canada, the EU, India and Kenya reflects that search. Its agenda spans resilient supply chains, financial reform and climate cooperation. But Palit’s warning applies: coalitions endure only if they deliver benefits.

National interests will still collide. India and the EU are deepening clean-energy and climate cooperation even as New Delhi contests the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism at the WTO. Cooperation will continue to run up against trade restrictions, industrial policy and disagreements over technology, finance and who pays.

Resilience does not abolish national interests. It offers a way to organise cooperation around shared long-term economic vulnerabilities, even where immediate commercial priorities differ.

COP31 provides an immediate test. Türkiye will host and lead the Action Agenda while Australia leads the negotiations, an unusual division of responsibility between two middle powers. The measure of success is not another coalition or declaration, but whether cooperation produces rules that stick, attracts capital and reduces vulnerability. It will also test whether middle powers can defend the principles already established through years of climate negotiations, including equity, historical responsibility and the obligation of developed countries to provide climate finance.

And the next stress may already be building. The WMO warns that the current El Niño could become unprecedented in strength, raising the risks of drought, floods and extreme heat into 2027. That threat is arriving amid wars, stretched budgets and fragile food, energy and supply chains.

Climate will test whether middle powers can do more than work around rules made elsewhere and start shaping them.

[Edit: Bhasker Tripathi, Production: Arkatapa Basu]