COP30 Brazil: A global summit of fading hopes, fires and thunderstorms

Despite dramatic scenes in Belem, the summit delivered little on climate finance, fossil fuel transition or equity, leaving India and other developing nations disappointed

Fifteen days of tropical heat, torrential rain, the flooding of the summit venue, a riot, 70,000-strong protestors, a coffin march for fossil fuels, and a fire on the penultimate day razing a pavilion — you could see it all in Belem, Brazil, on the edge of the Amazon rain forest, at the world’s biggest annual climate summit.

 

But what you couldn’t see at the 30th edition of the Conference of Parties (COP) — in the final agenda document adopted on Saturday night after hours of high drama — were road maps to fund ambitious climate pledges: nor visible concrete plans to move away from burning fossil fuels, responsible for nearly 80 per cent of global emission and a growing threat to civilisation, climate scientists say.

 

India’s vociferous demand for a road map to allocate $300 billion in public funding by developed countries — a commitment made at COP29 in Baku last year — did not find a place in the final agenda, after the European Union (EU) declined to commit itself to details.

 

Little was available on plans to mobilise up to $1.3 trillion a year, with the document merely “calling on all actors to work together to enable the scaling up of financing for climate action from all public and private sources to at least $1.3 trillion per year by 2035”.

 

“It’s a very low-ambition text,” said R R Rashmi, distinguished fellow at think tank The Energy and Resources Institute, and India’s lead negotiator at previous United Nations (UN) climate summits.

 

“The decisions on NDC (Nationally Determined Contributions or climate pledge) and finance are very weak.”

 

But what was more bothersome, Rashmi said, was that the text completely ignored “equitable framework of allocation of responsibility or effort sharing, which is the foundational principle of raising (climate) ambition”.

 

What that means is that the developed world, led by the United States and EU, used up the earth’s carbon budget to become rich while contributing the most to emission — but when it came to a cleanup of the planet’s polluted air, they refused to provide adequate financing, while urging developing countries like India and China to do the heavy lifting.

 

“The real fault line running through COP30 was the refusal of developed countries to agree to the provision of finance across all areas,” said Climate Action Network (CAN), a global network of more than 1,900 civil society organisations in over 130 countries. “Their blocking of commitments on adaptation finance, mitigation ambition, and the transition away from fossil fuels directly weakened the overall outcome.”

 

Lack of concrete outcomes

 

COPs must deliver concrete outcomes, not sink into cycles of dialogues, roadmaps, and reports, CAN said. That was missing in Belem, unlike in Baku, where the foundations for a UN supervised global carbon market were laid in the form of Article 6, opening a new source of finance for countries like India; and a promise by developed countries to treble climate finance to $300 billion annually by 2035.

 

But missing in Belem was a mechanism to disburse finances, Rashmi said. There were no such giveaways this year, despite talks headed into extra time. Instead, what one witnessed was name calling in a gathering of 194 countries — when Colombia and Paraguay raised objections to the COP30 agenda after they were gavelled (adopted), Sergei Kononuchenko from the Russian delegation referred to Latin American nations as children, seeking to grab all the sweets on the table leaving nothing for others. India’s Suman Chandra, director, Ministry of Non-Renewable Energy, said the agenda could not be modified after adoption.

 

“This has become a practice for the past few COPS when the presidencies have been pushing decisions without a 100 per cent consensus,’’ Rashmi said. The first instance of this happened in Cancun in 2010, when Bolivia’s objections were brushed aside; so were India’s interventions in Baku.

 

“Technically, this is wrong. It fractures the sense of community and disrupts the cohesiveness of the whole spirit of international cooperation,” Rashmi added.

 

That was not how COP30 began, against a backdrop of the US boycotting it, record warming in the past three years, and tepid climate pledges.

 

Changing times

 

The United States, under President Donald Trump, had quit the Paris Agreement, an international, legally binding climate treaty forged a decade ago at COP21 as a bedrock for all future climate talks. The World Meteorological Organization warned that the past three years were the warmest on record, and the latest climate pledges by nations, the so-called NDCs that India, the world’s third-biggest polluter, is yet to submit, were tepid enough to ensure a rise in average global temperature levels “well above” 2 degrees Celsius, according to United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

 

Speaking at the world leaders’ summit ahead of COP30, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said the world “need[s] roadmaps to justly and strategically reverse deforestation [and] overcome dependence on fossil fuels”.

 

But a mention of fossil fuel was jettisoned in the final agenda despite the backing of over 80 countries after opposition from a Saudi Arabia-led block. As consolation, fossil fuel and deforestation found mention in the form of a footnote.

 

“I, as president of COP30, will therefore create two road maps — one on halting and reversing deforestation and another on transitioning away from fossil fuels in a just, orderly, and equitable manner,” said André Aranha Corrêa do Lago.

 

“I think Brazil played its part well,” Rashmi said, because their focus was on creating this mechanism for tropical deforestation. They have achieved that outside the COP30 agenda process. (Brazil’s proposed deforestation fund to protect tropical rain forests — found in Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Indonesia — has raised over $9 billion of a $25 billion target.)

 

“So therefore, the processes within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, whether they are ambitious, whether meaningful, they (Brazil) were not really concerned,’’ he added. As for India, it was one more COP where its demand for adequate climate finance was ignored by the developed world.