VICTORIA, Seychelles, Seychelles used the closing days of the United Nations Bonn climate conference to press major emitters to table more ambitious Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and to widen the pool of climate finance available to small island developing states, a position it built jointly with the wider Alliance of Small Island States during the two-week meeting.
The 64th sessions of the Subsidiary Bodies (SB64) ran from June 8 to 18 in Bonn, drawing more than 9,000 delegates from governments, observer organisations, and the research community. The gathering was a midpoint on the road to COP31, scheduled for November in Antalya, Türkiye, and the technical work done there will shape the political choices ministers face when they meet again later this year.
Seychelles joined fellow AOSIS members in defending the 1.5°C temperature guardrail, in calling on industrialised economies to bring forward deeper emissions cuts, and in arguing for reform of the international finance system so that vulnerable states can implement their NDCs without diverting money from health, education, and disaster preparedness. The alliance has consistently framed the 1.5°C line as a hard ceiling rather than a negotiating position, and its members see every tenth of a degree of additional warming as directly relevant to their survival.
The Seychelles delegation was led by Will Agricole, technical advisor in the Department of Energy and Climate Change, accompanied by Dr Barry Nourice, George Uzice, and Sheils Barra. The team’s interventions focused on the operational mechanics of climate delivery: how NDCs are financed, how transparency reporting works in practice, and how adaptation finance reaches communities at risk. The third NDC, validated earlier this month, gives the country a measurable baseline to defend in those conversations.
The Bonn sessions included technical tracks on the Facilitative Sharing of Views, the Enhanced Transparency Framework under the Paris Agreement, and the Global Stocktake annual dialogue. Seychelles participated in a side event on NDC implementation readiness, joining representatives from other small island states to lay out the practical bottlenecks they face in moving from policy text to field-level projects, and to call for predictable, grant-based finance rather than loan-heavy instruments.
The country’s exposure is unusually concentrated for its size. Sea-level rise, coastal erosion, shifting rainfall patterns, and increasingly frequent extreme events all hit the same narrow inhabited coastal strip, and any disruption to the tourism-driven economy translates quickly into fiscal stress. As Africa’s only high-income country, Seychelles also faces a specific barrier: its income classification puts it outside concessional climate windows that would normally fund small island adaptation, even as its vulnerability profile is identical to lower-income neighbours.
AOSIS has made those access barriers a central plank of its negotiating posture. The alliance’s recent statements ahead of COP30 noted that the global NDC synthesis report released in October 2025 shows dangerous delay on emissions cuts and on the finance pledges industrialised countries have signed up to under successive COPs. That diagnostic is now driving the AOSIS ask in Bonn and beyond: more ambitious NDCs from the largest emitters, faster disbursement of adaptation finance, and a clearer pathway for vulnerable states to access the resources their plans require.
For Seychelles, the practical question is whether the Bonn technical work translates into decisions at COP31. Antalya will host the political phase of the negotiation, and the Seychellois delegation has signalled it will push there for predictable and accessible climate finance, technology transfer, and capacity-building support that matches the scale of the country’s adaptation needs.
Sources cited: Department of Energy and Climate Change, Seychelles. Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). UNFCCC Subsidiary Bodies (SB64).
Source: SN
