People who attend UN climate conferences are loathe to describe any of them as a failure. They are too invested in the principles of the global multilateral regime, too desperate not to give succour to climate deniers and UN critics, too frightened that voters and businesses will stop believing in the near-utopian project of slowing global warming and stop supporting it. They acknowledge the absurdity of much of the negotiation process, but they cling to its simultaneous nobility, the search for consensus agreement among 194 diverse countries each pursuing its own national interests as well as the whole world’s.
Accordingly, many NGOs — and the UN itself — have been hailing the result of COP30, just concluded in Belém, Brazil, as vindication that the multilateral UN process still works. The conference didn’t break down. There was an agreement.
Yes, there was. But in truth it’s hard not to see COP30 as a failure. The 2015 Paris Agreement sets out a very clear goal, accepted by all 198 parties to the UN Climate Change Convention: to limit global warming to well under 2C relative to preindustrial levels, and if possible to no more than 1.5C. But the world is not on track to meet these goals, and COP30 has done nothing about it.
In fact the conference has revealed something more serious than this. There is now a powerful and organised resistance in the international community to deeper action on climate change. It is not about the science: outside the United States, this is not in dispute. It is about what the science means for the world’s consumption of fossil fuels. COP30 saw a determined effort on the part of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and their Arab Group allies, accompanied by Russia, India and China, to block agreement on any mention of fossil fuels or the need to shift away from them.
A large majority of countries came to Belém determined that the international community should acknowledge the Paris temperature goals are in grave danger. The Agreement requires countries to publish new climate plans every five years, and this was one of those years. With almost all large economies having done so, though, a large “emissions gap” remains between expected emissions and the levels required to limit warming to 1.5 or 2C. The UN judges that the world is heading for 2.3–2.5C of warming this century. These are levels that will cause ecological and economic devastation everywhere, and extinction for low-lying island nations in the Pacific.
That the world faces more than 2C of warming isn’t proof the UN regime has failed. Before the Copenhagen COP of 2009, the projection was around 6C of warming. Before Paris in 2015, it was around 4C. So huge progress has been made: emissions growth has been drastically slowed as a result of the global rollout of renewable energy over the last fifteen years following UN agreements on national targets and plans. But the majority of countries wanted the COP to acknowledge that it was not enough, and to commit the international community to doing more.
A specific proposal came to embody this idea. In his speech opening the conference, Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva called for the COP to agree to a “roadmap on transitioning away from fossil fuels” and a comparable roadmap to halt deforestation. He was stating the scientific fact that the world must wean itself off oil, gas and coal over the next three decades if it is to meet the UN climate goals.
But Lula was also acknowledging that we don’t know how to do this yet. Many renewable technologies are still too expensive, and for fossil fuel–producing countries and regions the economic and social consequences of declining production are likely to be harsh. The same is true for countries with rainforests being cut down to provide land for growing food. Both oil and gas and agriculture are major sources of jobs and exports for countries — like Brazil — still trying to end absolute poverty and hunger.
So the proposal for a roadmap based on technical expertise, economic analysis and discussion among consumer and producer countries was attractive. By the middle weekend of the COP more than eighty countries were pushing for it to be included in the final text.
The phrase “transitioning away from fossil fuels” is totemic. Two years ago, in Dubai, COP28 concluded dramatically with this phrase agreed as the new global goal. The UN’s press release hailed it as “the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era.” But since then Saudi Arabia and Russia have ensured the phrase has never again been used in any international forum, and they refused to allow it at COP30.
Whatever compromise language the Europeans and Latins tried — “a fossil fuel roadmap which did not mention either fossil fuels or a roadmap,” as one analyst put it — was greeted with the same absolute rejection. Applying pressure to a number of poorer African and Asian countries, the Saudis and Russia gathered a large enough opposition to ensure the proposal could not achieve consensus.
So there is no mention of either roadmaps or fossil fuels in COP30’s final text. The Brazilians have announced they will convene a coalition of countries to develop roadmap processes over the next year; but a voluntary initiative carries no weight in the UN process.
The final agreement does acknowledge the emissions gap, though not with any sense of alarm. And it launches two new initiatives, a Global Implementation Accelerator and a Belém Mission to 1.5, to speed up the execution of existing plans and encourage new ones. But even the most Panglossian of observers knows that these are just UN-speak for more consolatory talking shops.
The other key demand of developing countries was more money for climate adaptation. As extreme weather events increasingly batter vulnerable countries, they need more resources to help them cope. Specifically they wanted current levels of adaptation finance to be tripled by 2030. They didn’t get this, but the text does recognise the need for a tripling by 2035, and most developed countries acknowledged afterwards that they are now effectively committed to it.
Elsewhere COP30 agreed a new “global goal on adaptation,” but it has been widely rejected as incoherent after the Saudis inserted material contradicting the experts who had worked on it for two years. Ater the gavel had come down on the final plenary session on Saturday afternoon, several countries said they could not accept it. Others attacked the failure of the COP to recognise the urgency of the emissions gap and the need to transition away from fossil fuels. At one point the Brazilian chair was forced to adjourn the meeting to address their concerns in private.
In truth, there is a much deeper story than one climate conference. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Russia now collaborate closely in the “OPEC+” group of major oil producers. Their goal is to maintain oil price stability as a means to greater economic certainty; just this month they decided to pause planned increases in oil production for next year. They see action on climate change as a long-term threat to their core economic interests: if projected global demand falls, both output and price will fall too.
For their part, China and India have become Russia’s largest oil and gas purchasers since its invasion of Ukraine, with preferential price terms, both on the officially recorded market and in the “dark” trading of unregistered Russian tankers. India has recently reduced its imports in response to US sanctions, but it was little surprise to find all three countries united in Belém.
Indeed, it’s arguable that the COP was not the most important climate summit of the last few days. Even in a week that culminated in the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Johannesburg — another critical gathering of global governance boycotted by the US — the key meeting was surely Tuesday’s remarkably friendly White House encounter between Donald Trump and the Saudi prime minister Mohammed bin Salman. Alongside new US arms sales and Saudi investment in the American economy, the COP must surely have been discussed. As Saudi Arabia maintained its hard line in Belém, the two men will have found common cause.
Here we can see emerging the new contours of international climate relations. Inside the UN process Saudi Arabia and Russia collude with allies to block progress on transitioning away from fossil fuels. Outside it, the US under President Trump does all it can to obstruct and undermine the multilateral process and to bolster the expansion of fossil fuel production. Most of the rest of the world can only watch on, united in desiring a different future, but increasingly forced to seek progress in “coalitions of the willing” outside the formal UN process.
Next year’s COP will be presided over by Australia — though in a messy compromise between the two countries contending for the honour it will actually be held in Turkey. The schism in global climate politics revealed in Brazil this week will surely make Australia’s negotiating task even more difficult. But that may no longer be the point. If COP31 can prioritise implementation and investment over the search for further textual agreement it may make greater progress; and in doing so help the world navigate the new geopolitical terrain. •
