The BRICS statement pairs its objection to CBAM with a demand on money, and the two are connected. Adaptation finance - funding for climate-resilient infrastructure, disaster preparedness, water security and similar defensive investment - has always run far behind mitigation finance, and the ministers asked wealthy countries to triple it by 2035. They also pressed for the form of the money to change: grants, which need not be repaid, and concessional finance, which is lent on terms easier than the market's, rather than commercial loans that add to the debt burden of the countries least responsible for historical emissions. The underlying argument is the UNFCCC principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities: developing countries contend that a border levy penalises them for an emissions intensity that reflects their stage of development, while the finance promised to help them decarbonise has not arrived at the scale required.

CBAM is the first serious attempt to attach a carbon price to trade rather than to production, and it turns climate policy into market-access policy. For India that is a direct commercial question - steel and aluminium exporters face a cost at the EU border that domestic policy cannot fully offset - and a systemic one, because a mechanism accepted once establishes that a bloc may set the environmental terms on which others sell to it. The BRICS statement matters less for what it changes today than for what it signals: eleven economies, several of them major exporters, are now on record calling the instrument protectionist and inconsistent with international law, which frames how any future dispute at the WTO or under the UNFCCC will be argued.