Given the torrential rainstorms that battered the Brazilian city of Belém as COP30 concluded a couple of weeks ago, it wouldn’t be strictly accurate to say that the dust has settled on the latest UN climate conference. But a new landscape has definitely come into view, and it will involve a fundamental change in perspective for those engaged in international climate politics.
Few of those attending COP30 judged it a success. Yes, securing a final agreement means the multilateral UN system has been maintained. Developing countries will see a tripling of financial assistance to help adapt to climate change. There is a new (though incoherent) global goal on adaptation, a new “just transition” mechanism and — despite the best efforts of Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the Vatican — a gender action plan.
But COP30’s main task lay elsewhere. It needed to acknowledge that the world is significantly off track to achieving the Paris agreement goal of keeping global warming to 1.5–2C above preindustrial levels — and do something in response.
In this, it failed. A majority of countries wanted the COP to agree on new analytical and discussion processes (so-called “roadmaps”) to help countries transition away from fossil fuels and end deforestation. But this was blocked by a coalition of the Gulf states, Russia, China and India.
Expressing the anger felt by many delegates from both developed and developing countries, Juan Carlos Monterrey, Panama’s special representative for climate change, addressed his closing remarks to the world’s young people. “The negotiators that your governments sent to COP30 are not defending your future. They are defending the very industries that created this crisis: the fossil fuel industry and the forces driving global deforestation… A ‘forest COP’ with no commitment on forests is a very bad joke. A climate decision that cannot even say ‘fossil fuels’ is not neutrality. It is complicity.”
This is not just about a single conference. The outcome of COP30 leaves the UN climate regime with a double problem.
On the one hand, future COPs already had little to negotiate about. Since the Paris agreement was signed in 2015, successive COPs have completed the Paris Rulebook on how to implement it, and they have now concluded the tasks Paris bequeathed. A New Collective Quantified Goal defines how much money needs to flow from the rich world to support developing countries tackle climate change up to 2035; a Loss and Damage Fund will assist them recover from climate disasters; and now there is a Global Goal on Adaptation.
Given how hard Australia and Turkey fought to to be responsible for COP31 — in the end Australia was put in charge of the negotiations, while Turkey will host the event in the Mediterranean resort of Antalya — the actual agenda next year will be ironically thin. Not until COP33 in 2028 will anything really important be up for negotiation: that will be the next five-yearly “Global Stocktake,” when the Paris agreement requires the world to assess progress against its global goals and define new ones.
But that prospect merely highlights the second problem. On the issue that matters most — whether or not emissions can be slowed to a trajectory sufficient to limit warming to 2C before returning to 1.5C — the world is now irrevocably split.
What happened at COP30 was not surprising. Two years ago, when the last Global Stocktake concluded in an agreement that the world should be “transitioning away from fossil fuels… so as to achieve net zero by 2050,” Saudi Arabia and Russia were furious. The phrase threatened their economic and political interests, they believed, and should not be repeated.
Having stopped both the G20 and COP29 from using it last year, they were implacable in Belém. Marshalling the other Gulf States and the rest of the Arab Group alongside their allies in the BRICS alliance, China and India — and by pressuring a number of poorer African and Asian nations — they were able to build a bloc easily large enough to prevent the consensus, or even compromise, required by the UN system.
At their back sat Donald Trump. The United States did not attend in Belém, but the president’s extremely friendly meeting in Washington with the Saudi leader Mohammed Bin Salman during the second week of the COP will surely have aligned their climate strategies. The extraordinary bullying by the US of delegates to the International Maritime Organisation meeting in October, which stopped the IMO adopting an emissions reduction plan for global shipping, had already revealed the Trump administration’s ruthless determination to sustain the market for fossil fuels.
In this sense COP30 witnessed the emergence of what we can call an Axis of Obstruction: a small but powerful set of oil and gas producers and their major customers determined to resist further global emissions reduction commitments. Russia, the US, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Iran are the key producers: India and China their customers.
On the face of it, China’s position is puzzling. As the world’s largest producer of wind and solar equipment, electric vehicles and critical minerals, it has a huge economic interest in the rest of the world’s decarbonisation. But it is also Russia’s major backer in the Ukraine war, and it sees its strategic interests best served by the Trump-inspired division of the Western alliance. In Belém many observers felt that, had there been a consensus for the fossil fuel roadmap, China would have gone along with it. But the priority was its wider geopolitical goals.
Having won this significant victory in Brazil, it is very difficult to see the Axis of Obstruction — or at least, its core oil and gas producing members — compromising at future COPs. Which means that, however often the Europeans, Latin Americans and small island states demand an explicit commitment to transitioning away from fossil fuels, they will not get it. The Belém stalemate will continue.
The question is, does this matter? There’s a strong case for saying that it doesn’t.
The Paris agreement creates a very clear division of labour. The UN system sets the global goals and rules of climate action, by consensus. But it is up to individual countries to decide what they will do to meet them. The actual mechanisms of emissions reduction and adaptation are national climate plans and policies, and subsequent business investment in solutions.
In other words, climate policy and investment — the implementation of the Paris agreement — doesn’t need a global consensus. If the majority of countries want to develop roadmaps away from fossil fuels and deforestation, they can do so. Such roadmaps will not have the legitimacy of the UN regime, but as guides to national and business implementation they won’t need it.
That is why Brazil’s announcement at the end of COP30 that it would assemble a “coalition of the willing” to develop a roadmap process for the fossil fuel transition — and a parallel one for deforestation — is so significant. For if the world is to transition away from fossil fuels, it is not the producers who will lead the charge. It is all those countries that consume fossil fuels and must find ways of consuming less. Fossil fuel supply will decline when demand falls.
This is not a straightforward prospect. As the International Energy Agency’s latest World Energy Outlook reveals, neither the economics nor politics of reducing fossil fuel demand to net zero by around 2050 will be easy. Net-zero electricity is within reach: the declining costs of wind, solar and batteries, supplemented by hydro, geothermal and nuclear make this entirely feasible. The same is true of electric vehicles. But it is not true, yet, in heating and cooling, aviation, shipping or heavy industry. And the fears of workers, communities and nations dependent on fossil fuel production are entirely understandable: a “just transition” for them needs to provide replacement jobs and foreign exchange, not just words.
So the idea of a “roadmap” process, involving technical and economic analysis accompanied by real-world political discussion, is a good one, and it doesn’t need unanimity to happen. Countries cannot go it alone on such a project — innovation needs the incentive of global markets — but if a sufficient “coalition of the willing” wishes to push ahead, the axis of obstruction won’t be able to stop them. Colombia has already offered to host an initial conference for the fossil fuel roadmap in April next year.
Indeed, those lamenting the results of COP30 face an uncomfortable truth. If the fossil fuel producers had been forced to accept the language of “transitioning away from fossil fuels,” they would still not have cut fossil fuel production. Nothing in the words agreed at the UN about global goals can force individual countries to do anything. That is the Paris agreement.
This is not to say the UN regime is redundant. The global goals matter. The five-year cycle of setting and reviewing national climate plans ensures a constant ratchet of global progress. Countries must be transparent about what they are doing. And the responsibility of developed countries to provide financial assistance to developing ones is crucial both in reality and symbolically. But decision-making COPs really aren’t needed in years that don’t end in 0 and 5 (to set plans) and 3 and 8 (to take stock).
Some reformers have suggested the other COPs be abolished, or at least made more low-key affairs in the UN climate headquarters of Bonn. With the locations of COP32 (Ethiopia) and COP33 (India) already decided, that isn’t going to happen.
But the focus of COPs could shift from rulemaking to implementation. Brazil tried to encourage this at COP30: alongside the formal talks it convened more than 350 side events and accompanying announcements on the implementation of climate plans. Organised under the auspices of the ten-year-old “Climate Action Agenda,” the program brought together 482 separate initiatives in the fields of energy, industry and transport; forests, oceans and biodiversity; agriculture and food systems; resilient cities, infrastructure and water; human and social development; and finance, technology and capacity-building.
These initiatives have almost all been organised by coalitions involving some combination of the private sector, national governments, states and cities, international organisations and civil society groups. Nearly 200 formally reported their results through a UNFCCC portal this year, and more than 100 submitted their future plans to accelerate solutions.
But in Belém, as at previous COPs, the “action agenda” felt as if it happened off stage. The main show remained the negotiations. It is this dynamic that needs to change if the Paris agreement process is to shift from rulemaking to implementation. As the negotiating agenda diminishes, the question is whether the Australian–Turkish COP31 can give equal billing to the action agenda.
Could COP31 organise, not just individual side events, but a parallel conference to discuss the possibilities and pitfalls of climate action in the real world? This would offer more — and more interesting — stories for the media to cover. If such a conference were to report into the official COP, with a formal session at which ministers could respond, this could even unify the two sides of the overall event.
The negotiators are likely to resist such a shift. Implementation is not what they do, or in many cases what they know about. And they have already, at COP30, resisted one attempt to bring implementation into the talks.
The fossil fuel and deforestation roadmaps discussed in Belém were not the first suggestions of their kind. COP29 agreed that a roadmap should be produced to show how the world could get US$1.3 trillion of climate finance flowing to developing countries by 2035. That figure had been agreed as the world’s aspirational goal but no one knew how to achieve it. So the COP asked its current and next presidencies, Azerbaijan and Brazil, to produce a “Baku to Belém Roadmap to $1.3 trillion” in time for COP30.
That roadmap was published just before the conference opened. It identifies, over the course of ninety analytic pages, all the different sources of public and private finance that might be mobilised to get to the US$1.3 trillion goal, and sets out a number of short-term actions that could be taken by groups of countries and international institutions to scale up the relevant flows. But it was not discussed at COP30, and was merely “noted” in the final text.
It was the developing country negotiators who primarily objected to the document. As it had not been negotiated, they complained, it had no status under the COP. The process by which it had been written had not been transparent. It discussed sources of finance, policies and institutions that lay outside the competence of the UNFCCC.
Yes, said the Azerbaijani and Brazilian officials, it did. This is because most of the money making up the $1.3 trillion — if such a figure can ever be reached — belongs to private sector firms and public institutions that aren’t members of the UN. If the UNFCCC wants the money to flow, it will have to engage with them, and this is what the Baku to Belém Roadmap proposed.
This is where climate action in the real world — the world beyond the talks — will actually happen. But it is not yet where national climate negotiators are comfortable.
This then is the international climate policy vista revealed in Brazil. Until the next Global Stocktake in 2028 — and probably even then — the UN system won’t make progress on the goal of “transitioning away from fossil fuels.” The Axis of Obstruction countries will do their best to block faster decarbonisation efforts, both within the UN and beyond it. Meanwhile coalitions of willing countries, subnational governments, international institutions, businesses, investors and civil society will continue to accelerate the processes of climate action and implementation.
For Australia’s presidency next year the question will be whether these coalitions and actors can be given equal status with the negotiations, and even perhaps be recognised and legitimised by them. If they can, a new climate regime may come into view just at the point it is required. •
