Red badlands of the Junggar Basin, Xinjiang, China, eroded into fluted spurs and gullies, banded above and below by chalk-white gypsum and salt flats. Captured by the EarthDaily Constellation on August 14, 2026.
COP30 called itself the implementation COP, the moment climate pledges were supposed to turn into something checkable. A year later, at COP31 in Antalya, that promise faces another test. The 59 Belém Adaptation Indicators adopted at COP30 are being tested and prepared for use. The second Global Stocktake is due to begin at COP31, starting with the collection and preparation of information. Both need the same raw material: countries producing evidence of what's actually happening on the ground, not just what they signed up to.
A year ago, this space argued that reliable measurement is the foundation of climate accountability. That still holds. The harder question this year is narrower: not just whether the measurement is reliable, but whether every country can actually produce it. COP31's own texts already acknowledge that gap. What's still unclear is whether the support meant to close it is enough, and whether it'll last.
UNDRR's 2025 Global Assessment Report put the economic cost of disasters at roughly $2.3 trillion a year. That's close to ten times the $202 billion figure governments had been working from. The old number only tracked direct damage, things like destroyed buildings and ruined crops. The new one tries to capture what comes after, when people lose income for months or kids get pulled out of school while families rebuild.
Aon's first-half 2026 report put global economic losses from actual catastrophes at around $111 billion. That's a quarter below the 21st-century average. It's also the lowest first-half total since 2018. Swiss Re put a different figure on the table for 2025: a $424 billion natural-catastrophe protection gap. It's measured in premium-equivalent terms — basically, how much more in premiums the industry would need to collect to cover the losses it actually expects. Aon counts what happened. Swiss Re estimates what it would cost to close that gap. Different measurements. Both depend on solid information about what's actually at risk, and that's unevenly available to begin with.
Insurers and governments can only price risk they can measure with confidence. Thin or missing measurement doesn't make the risk go away — it just sits there, invisible, until the bill comes due.
That gap in measurement isn't spread evenly. The reasons are structural. A recent paper in Global Policy Journal cites a 2022 ESA-commissioned study: developing-country firms generated just 0.4 percent of the identified upstream Earth observation data-acquisition-and-distribution market, using 2019 figures. It's a narrow slice of the market, and it doesn't capture everything about a country's ability to use freely available satellite data, but the same imbalance shows up elsewhere too: most of the capacity to collect and process satellite data still sits with a handful of spacefaring states.
The paper's clearest example is Pakistan's 2022 floods, which affected up to 33 million people. Mapping the floodwater and the crop losses depended partly on US and European satellite data — access that was neither sovereign nor guaranteed, even where some of the underlying data was openly available. The paper's broader argument is that timely, processed, usable data is the harder problem. Getting hold of raw data is often the easy part. India and Brazil have built real Earth observation capacity of their own. Most climate-vulnerable countries haven't, and some of the programs meant to help them close that gap have lost ground instead. NASA's SERVIR initiative helped developing countries use satellite data for disaster response. In March 2025, NASA reported that USAID had terminated its agreements and contracts with NASA and the SERVIR network.
The reporting side isn't structurally different. The Belém Indicators are voluntary, and the COP30 decision is explicit that they shouldn't create a new mandatory reporting burden. But in an understaffed ministry, a small team may already be handling several reporting obligations at once. A donor's quarterly request may get added to the pile. One more voluntary framework, however light on paper, still competes for the same limited hours.
It's there in the text, if you read closely enough. The process that produced the Belém Indicators began at COP28. A year later, at COP29 in Baku, Decision 3/CMA.6 added criteria for the indicator-development process to weigh “as appropriate,” including whether a country can draw on data “already available or can be easily collected.” When the indicators themselves were adopted at COP30, the decision text was blunt: reporting is voluntary. It shouldn't add to anyone's burden. The process doesn't pretend every country can produce the same evidence on demand. It takes that gap as a given.
The Group on Earth Observations brings governments and organizations together to improve access to and use of Earth observation data. GEO, as it's known, says much the same thing. Its Post-2025 Strategy states that not all countries have the same capacity to provide and use Earth intelligence. A 2025 draft implementation plan proposed real mechanisms toward that: multi-user data licensing so small island states can access data they currently can't afford, readiness assessments for countries that opt in, and a fund structure to help lower-income countries take part in the conversation. The proposals acknowledge the problem.
The Belém Indicators and the second Global Stocktake create new ways to assess progress. But a stronger reporting framework does not by itself close the gap in who can produce the evidence. Plenty of countries are still waiting on a satellite, a funding cycle, or a set of priorities set by somebody else entirely.
Consistent, calibrated monitoring that doesn't require every country to own a satellite constellation helps here, even if it's only part of the answer. Programs built around nearly daily, comparable global coverage, like EarthDaily's, are one version of what that could look like. Lower-income countries actually being able to afford, access, and use that kind of coverage is a different problem, and the industry hasn't solved it either.
There will be plenty of language about accountability coming out of COP31. Whether the data infrastructure behind it gets built for everyone, or mostly for the countries that already had it, is the part worth watching.