The world has changed. The challenges have intensified. The need for breakthrough solutions has never been more urgent.
In 2025, we reimagined D&C Days, acknowledging that the constraints many organisations and institutions are under hamper their opportunities to engage in the kinds of conversations D&C Days is renowned for. Now, more than ever, practitioners, negotiators, scientists, and policymakers need D&C Days to help break down barriers and identify commonalities and approaches to building resilience that ensure we leave no one behind, even as resources become increasingly scarce.
The digital version of D&C Days was hosted in advance of COP30 to bring everyone together online and create a set of key messages and asks that we could then take to COP30 to influence climate decisions that recognise the most vulnerable people and Parties at the front lines of climate change.
On Thursday 30 October, 2025 we welcomed over 350 people online for a day of dialogue, interaction, difficult conversations and solution-focused sessions, bringing together climate thought leaders to discuss the real issues that we should be tackling at COP30.
On Saturday 15 November 2025 we hosted an in-person reception at The Resilience Hub in the blue zone at COP30 Belém, Brazil where we highlighted these messages with UNFCCC experts and negotiators from the UNFCCC COP process to help ensure these were voiced during COP30.
Read our Key Messages from D&C Days 2025
COP30
COP30 is a key moment for countries to reassess and strengthen their climate commitments. With the summit taking place in Belém, at the heart of the Amazon, Brazil assumes both a strategic and symbolic position in the global climate conversation. Themes include climate finance, Indigenous leadership and addressing loss and damage. It will also highlight the crucial role of nature-based solutions and the Amazon rainforest in addressing the climate crisis.
Furthermore, COP30 will focus on accelerating climate action by mobilising non-state actors and implementing existing initiatives. COP30 is expected to focus on putting existing agreements and initiatives into action rather than creating new ones. The Action Agenda at COP30 will specifically target non-party stakeholders, including businesses, NGOs, and local governments, to accelerate and scale up climate action.
This creates an important space for D&C Days to bring together leaders, thinkers, and innovators from across the globe, united by the challenge of advancing climate action and effecting positive, lasting change. It will create a safe space for the uncomfortable yet necessary conversations about the challenges of inaction and shifting the status quo. We’re creating a space where bold initiatives and game-changing solutions can confront the challenges of inertia and slow progress towards meeting the world’s climate goals head-on.
D&C Days 2025 - a new format
While D&C Days is an event theoretically open to all, in reality, it is limited to an elite few – those able to be in the place where the COP is held, overcoming barriers of access and resources to be in the host city during one of the year’s largest events. Beyond this, participation is further limited to a subset of this group (200-300 individuals), many of whom are already exhausted from a week of intense negotiations, advocacy, and engagement – and staring down the barrel of another week (or more) of the same after D&C Days concludes. Despite these barriers, D&C Days never fails to ‘sell out’. We know that people from all stakeholder groups deeply value the conversations and connections that happen each year.
Building on lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, where D&C Days (and the Community-based Adaptation (CBA) conference) transitioned online and remained highly successful – and more accessible - we followed a similar approach for D&C Days 2025, incorporating a digital conference.
Our digital D&C Days event wasn't just another COP event – it was a powerful catalyst for change. Bringing together voices from around the globe ahead of COP30, we created a unique opportunity to unite, collaborate, and amplify the urgent needs of those on the climate frontlines.
Together, we created compelling messages and actionable policy demands that were carried directly to COP30 in Brazil.
D&C Days 2025 themes
D&C Days partners led important and challenging conversations in the following areas:
1) Scaling locally led approaches to climate action
This theme recognised that the most effective and meaningful climate solutions often originate at the community level, where people have intimate knowledge of local vulnerabilities, resources, and contexts.
The challenge lies in taking these proven local solutions – whether they're innovative adaptation strategies, renewable energy initiatives, or nature-based solutions – and replicating, adapting, or connecting them across wider networks to achieve systemic change.
Sessions examined approaches and strategies for partnerships and funding modalities that could amplify impact. We examined successful models of scaling trialled by a range of actors, from grassroots federations to national governments, that preserve local leadership while creating broader transformation and discussed how to overcome common barriers such as funding gaps, institutional resistance, and the tension between standardisation and local adaptation.
2) Financing resilience
We are facing the critical challenge of mobilising adequate funding for climate adaptation and building community resilience in the face of increasing climate risks. This theme explored innovative approaches for financing resilience that unpack the question of effectiveness and efficiency, and asked - of the little adaptation finance that is available, are we making the most of it to achieve resilience?
Sessions discussed a range of topics on how climate finance can be effective in promoting resilience. This included discussions from examining the role and approaches for philanthropies to crafting advocacy messaging on effective financing. Participants discussed practical solutions for unlocking both public and private capital, overcoming barriers that prevent finance from reaching frontline communities, and ensuring that resilience investments deliver equitable outcomes that strengthen rather than displace local communities.
3) Innovation for transformation
Many climate change solutions can deliver economic benefits while improving our lives and protecting the environment; however, there is a lack of ‘paradigm shifting’ solutions for adaptation and resilience across finance, policy and practice.
This theme explored innovative and evidence-based solutions on building resilience through transformational ideas, with the aim of igniting discussions on initiatives that catalyse broader change beyond their immediate areas of implementation, deliver impact at scale, and encourage an inclusive and collaborative approach across sectors.
Within each theme, we addressed uncomfortable truths, tackling big questions, seeking effective and practical answers, and working together on fair solutions that leave no one behind. At D&C Days, we share learning experiences by engaging, being productive and having fun. The dynamic format encourages dialogue on a range of issues that link policy, knowledge and practice. Innovative approaches encourage participants to interact, challenge existing thinking and generate new ideas.
At D&C Days 2025 we welcomed a range of stakkeholders from the frontline of sustainable development and climate agendas, including practitioners, NGOs, grassroots organisation representatives, national climate leaders and policymakers at all levels.
D&C Days 2025 was organised in partnership by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre (RCCC), DanChurchAid, the Global Resilience Partnership (GRP) and the Wellcome Trust, with additional support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands via the Generating Ambition for Locally-led Adaptation (GALLA) programme.
Photo Credit : Farmers in Nigeria are improving productivity through sustainable farming methods (Photo: UNDP Climate, via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
