A diluted COP: Climate divisions hardened at Belem amid global warming

The many hopes invested in the 30th edition of the Conference of Parties (COP30), the United Nations’ (UN’s) annual climate conference held in Belem, Brazil, were comprehensively belied in an agreement that is unlikely to reverse the trajectory of global warming, even as it hardened divisions and power alignments over the climate-change agenda.

 

The headline omission in the agreement is the critical road map for the phaseout of fossil fuels. The European Union (EU), the richest group of nations still in the climate talks, had been pushing for this road map, and developing nations led by the BRICS grouping (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) had been opposing it on grounds of climate equity. Developing nations are unwilling to commit themselves to a uniform burden of fossil-fuel reduction with the developed world on grounds that doing so would impose asymmetric costs on economic growth. In the absence of the world’s largest emitter, the United States, from the climate talks, Saudi Arabia played a key role in ensuring that the fossil-fuel road map did not find a place in the final agreement. The alternative of negotiating road maps on deforestation and fossil-fuel phaseout outside of the COP framework may have saved face for Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva, but their legal standing remains uncertain. Likewise, the contentious issue of tackling climate-related border taxes, notably the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) on steel, cement, aluminium, and fertilisers, has been pushed down the road for future talks. 

 

Though developing nations, including India, see some gain in the absence of a fossil-fuel road map, there are concerns about accelerating global warming owing to the sustained dependence on coal, oil, and gas to power economic growth. So far, only 120 of the 196 countries of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have submitted updated climate-action plans (also known as nationally determined contributions, or NDCs) at COP30 to achieve the 2015 Paris Agreement goal of limiting the average global temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius and to work towards 1.5 degrees Celsius to avert drastic climate change. India is yet to do so, though New Delhi has pointed to achieving its COP26 target on renewable energy five years ahead of the 2030 deadline. Even those that have been submitted have mostly been judged grossly inadequate. By some estimates, assuming these commitments are followed in full, they would lead to a global heating of about 2.5 degrees Celsius.

 

But perhaps most concerning from the point of view of the developing world, including India, is the underwhelming compromise on climate finance. The agreement trebled climate finance principally for adaptation — such as reforestation, building flood defences, and so on. But the $120 billion per year promised till 2035 falls far short of the projected requirement of $360 billion. Analysts suggest that the 10-year time frame is far too long to ensure that vulnerable communities, especially in poor countries, are adequately shielded from the deleterious impacts of climate change in the form of heatwaves, floods, or tornadoes. COP30 was billed as the “implementation COP”. Instead it appeared to have significantly weakened the possibility of a meaningful multilateral consensus. Thus, COP31, which will be hosted by Turkiye with Australia leading the year-long negotiations leading up to it, has a much more challenging agenda to fulfil.