COP30 in Brazil faces world at its hottest and most divided on climate

As COP30 opens in Brazil, record CO₂ levels and faltering global leadership leave climate goals in peril, testing the world's resolve to act on its promises

The United Nations Conference of Parties (COP 30), scheduled for November 10 to 21 in Belem, Brazil, will start on the bleakest note in a decade, with the latest data from the World Meteorological Organization showing that the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere last year showed a record increase. The global average grew 3.5 parts per million (ppm) to 424 ppm in 2024 over 2023, the highest increase since modern measurements started in 1957. Among the key contributory factors for this surge is the accelerated burning of fossil fuels, including in India, though countries had pledged in 2023 to transition away from oil, coal, and gas. Global heating has created a vicious cycle of creating hotter and drier conditions, which caused historic levels of wildfire emissions in the Americas last year. In a nutshell, the world is suffering the consequences of the developed world abdicating its responsibility for global warming, a principle enshrined in the adoption of Common but Differentiated Responsibility (CBDR) at the Rio de Janeiro UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) way back in 1992. 

The key problem has been the consistent lack of leadership by the United States (US), the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases per capita, which has rendered moot emission-reduction targets in subsequent UNFCCC protocols. Some US administrations did address emission levels but the CBDR principle had been made largely redundant by the 2015 Paris Agreement. The US abandonment of even this diminished agreement, under both Donald Trump presidencies, has further weakened the scaffolding on which the agreement stood. One index has been that developed countries exceeded the climate-finance pledge target of $100 billion per year, taken at the COP 15 in Copenhagen in 2009, in only one year — 2022 — that too two years after the original target of 2020. Now, with US President Donald Trump declaring climate change a “hoax”, finance from the industrialised West, including private sources, have waned. For instance, days before Mr Trump’s second inauguration, major investors such as BlackRock withdrew from the Net Zero Asset Manager’s Initiative, one of the largest climate-finance groups, under pressure from Republican lawmakers. Giants such as Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and J P Morgan Chase exited the Net Zero Banking Alliance under similar pressures. This exodus has made a mockery of the COP29 pledge in Baku, Azerbaijan, in November last year to treble annual financial support for developing countries to $300 billion by 2035 from private and public sources. 

As a result of virtually unfettered greenhouse-gas emission — exacerbated by wars in Ukraine-Russia and Gaza-Israel — the world’s traditional carbon sinks, on which India has set great store, are proving less effective. With oceans growing warmer, and the landmass turning hotter and drier, the absorptive capacities of nature’s cleaning agents are failing. It is ironic, in fact, that COP30 is being held in Belem, the city is considered a gateway to the Amazon, where devastation caused by sustained deforestation has turned the world’s largest tropical forest into a carbon source in some parts. Carbon trading could well be a solution but workable global trading mechanisms have proved elusive. In short, negotiators at COP30 have their work cut out.