After dragging on for a day longer than scheduled, the COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil, ended with a compromise that satisfies few. Countries had called for a tripling of adaptation funding to help poor countries to adapt to extreme weather, but environmentalists warned the deal falls short.
The marathon final session produced what diplomats call a ‘balanced outcome’, where everyone can find something to dislike. Many celebrated they had agreed on anything at all.
The compromise agreement does not include an explicit commitment to phase out fossil fuels that drive climate change or even mention them. Instead, it merely ‘takes into account’ the so-called UAE Consensus agreed at COP28 in 2023 that included language on transitioning away from fossil fuels.
On the bright side, COP30 launched a Just Transition Mechanism, aiming to support workers and communities as the world shifts to cleaner energy. Civil society groups called it one of the strongest rights-based outcomes ever.
Negotiators also unveiled a ‘Global Implementation Accelerator,’ part of a broader push to bridge the gap between countries’ current plans and the goals of the Paris Agreement, which aimed to limit global average temperature rise to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, with the goal of limiting it to 1.5°C (a target that seems increasingly remote).
Some progress was made outside of the negotiations on tackling deforestation, including the establishment of a fund called Tropical Forest Forever Facility, which has raised more than $5 billion to avoid deforestation and invest in reforestation. Around 90 countries have also supported the call for a global deforestation roadmap.
Held in Belém, this was meant to be the COP of the Amazon, an ecosystem at the front line of climate change.
Yet, critics say the overall deal still lacks urgency. The adaptation target is delayed; there is no timeline for winding down fossil fuels; and the overall package leans heavily on future promises. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said: ‘The gap between where we are and what science demands remains dangerously wide.’
Gideon Henderson of Oxford University, former Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, added that there is a recognised need for carbon dioxide removal at scale if we are to get close to Paris targets, but he was concerned by the lack of ambition in this respect.
Aside from government action on climate goals, big corporations are an important driver of change, and he added that he is also concerned that, in the rush to AI ‘big IT companies are quietly softening their net zero commitments.’
Perhaps if the COP30 climate meeting has shown one thing, it is that this climate-negotiation machinery is too slow, too incremental, and too sclerotic to prevent dangerous warming. But it did also prove the determination of some countries to continue with a multilateral process despite the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement.
By the time delegates gathered in Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon, the flaws of the COP process were already well rehearsed: long winded sessions, lowest-common-denominator deals, and action at geological pace. This summit witnessed a group of former leaders and climate experts call for COP to be reformed.
They might find a sympathetic ear in U.N. climate secretariat head Simon Stiell, who has set up a group of 15 former world leaders, diplomats, ministers, business, and Indigenous representatives to advise in coming weeks on how to make COPs fit for the next decade.