The world’s largest climate fund recently approved $250 million in funding for Glaciers to Farms, a program aimed at supporting nine glacier-dependent developing countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
This noteworthy contribution by the Green Climate Fund (GCF) will be complemented by $3.25 billion in co-financing from the Asian Development Bank, which will be invested over the next few decades. This marks “a very significant investment in climate adaptation,” particularly “given the massive shortage of capital in developing countries” for such projects, Bruce Usher, professor of professional practice at the Columbia Climate School and co-director of Columbia’s Tamer Institute for Social Enterprise and Climate Change, said in an interview with GlacierHub. These two commitments also mark one of the largest funding mechanisms to date aimed specifically at strengthening glacier-dependent communities.
The Glaciers to Farms program will implement 25 projects across four major glacier-fed river basins that will strengthen agricultural systems, expand glacier and hydrological monitoring, improve water governance and watershed management, build local climate finance capacity, and deliver social and public health services to vulnerable communities. The scale and scope of the program underscore that glacier melt creates cascading impacts to water security, food systems, economic stability and livelihoods across mountain regions.
Accelerated glacier melt due to rising global temperatures is particularly significant for high mountain areas, where glaciers are expected to retreat at faster rates. As glaciers melt, communities face both short- and long-term risks, including decreased freshwater availability and increased natural hazards, including avalanches, floods, landslides, mudslides and droughts. There is also a growing risk of glacier lake outburst floods, which occur when the natural barriers of a glacial lake fail.
These issues are of particular concern in the regions targeted by the Glaciers to Farms program. Central Asia alone has over 4,500 glacial lakes, and over 70 percent of the region’s irrigation water comes from glacier-fed rivers. In Pakistan, over 3,000 glacial lakes have formed—more than 30 of which are at risk of triggering flooding—and over 90 percent of the country’s agricultural production relies on glacier meltwater. The South Caucasus, a mountainous region between Western Asia and Eastern Europe, has lost over 23 percent of its glacier area since 2000, and glacier-fed rivers support irrigation and drinking water for the region’s communities. According to GCF’s proposal, glacier melt across these regions threatens the livelihoods of more than 340 million people, including women, farmers and Indigenous and rural communities.
Rather than funding isolated projects, the Glaciers to Farms program will invest in several interconnected sectors, strengthening long-term climate resilience and addressing systemic barriers. In addition to physical infrastructure and monitoring, the program also targets social aspects of climate adaptation, including investments to expand health infrastructure, increase emergency response capacities and fund social protection schemes. For example, one of the projects will invest in strengthening health infrastructure and training professionals in communities along the Panj River in Uzbekistan (part of the Amu Darya River Basin), which face increased risks of heatwaves and waterborne diseases. Another project aims to enhance water storage capacity in the Amu Darya River Basin to increase the resilience of the agricultural sector, which is the country’s greatest consumer of water.
Glaciers to Farms builds on several years of preparatory work by GCF. Prior to the approval of funding in October 2025, GCF conducted comprehensive risk assessments, feasibility studies and meetings with stakeholders, all of which helped to form the technical and scientific basis for the initiative. They identified major river basins and priority areas, collected climate metrics and informed the project’s design by ensuring it was rooted in climate science, local needs and the targeted regions’ climate strategies and frameworks. In an interview with GlacierHub, Lara Fornabaio, a lead researcher at the Columbia Climate School’s Center on Sustainable Investment, said that effective climate adaptation investment “should be grounded in robust, decision-relevant climate data that clearly describes how climate change affects specific sectors, geographies or populations.”
GCF classifies Glaciers to Farms as wholly focused on adaptation. This designation is significant given that global climate finance has historically prioritized mitigation initiatives over adaptation efforts, which help communities deal with current climate impacts. The Asian Development Bank has highlighted that “current climate investments in these regions are insufficient, sporadic, and highly localized, lacking the scale and coherence to address systemic risks,” so Glaciers to Farms’ focus on climate resilience and long-term adaptive capacity is crucial.
While the program’s exclusive focus on adaptation is notable, Fornabaio emphasized that “adaptation finance must go hand in hand with sustained and well-coordinated investments in mitigation.” She noted that, “as climate change intensifies, the scale and cost of adaptation will continue to rise, making it more complex and resource-intensive to implement effectively,” emphasizing that long-term success depends on the program’s ability to take an “iterative, long-term view.”
As glaciers continue to melt at unprecedented rates, the need for sustained, coordinated climate adaptation in high mountain regions is increasingly urgent. While the GCF’s commitment cannot completely offset the impacts of glacier melt in the region, the Glaciers to Farms program provides a compelling example of how large-scale, multinational climate finance can support long-term climate adaptation efforts and systemic change.
