After two weeks of tense negotiations, the United Nations Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP30) concluded in Belém do Pará in Brazil with an agreement to triple funds destined to help developing countries adapt to the impacts of global warming between now and 2035.
The final text, however, omitted any explicit mention of fossil fuels, directly responsible for climate change. The absence upset the European Union and several Latin American countries, who had arrived in Amazonia asking for a roadmap for the abandonment of oil, gas and coal.
COP30 will go into history as the first climate summit to be held in a city in the Amazon, a vital biome in grave danger due to deforestation and other extractive activities. From the beginning of the summit, the tone was set with the launch of the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), considered to be the largest mechanism for forestry financing ever created.
The accord, which coincides with the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, recognizes that the window for limiting global warming 1o 1.5°C is closing rapidly and reaffirms the urgent need to reduce emissions 43% by 2030, 60% by 2035, reaching zero net emissions by 2050.
Brazil defined this event as “The Truth Summit”, an attempt to rebuild trust in a multilateral system under strain. The deadline had been reached for countries to present their new nationally determined contributions (NDCs). But, as the summit closed, only 122 of the 198 countries had done so – another sign that effort is lagging the crisis.
Some days before the summit, UNEP’s 2025 Emissions Gap Report revealed a world heading for global warming of 2.3 to 2.5°C by the end of the century. In an attempt to reverse this direction, COP30 launched two important initiatives: the Global Implementation Accelerator and the Belém Mission to 1.5°C, designed to help countries comply with their NDC and adaptation plans, as well as increasing ambition and fostering international cooperation and promoting investment. Both these initiatives left it clear that the time for negotiation is over. The time for implemention has arrived.
In the first week, the COP29 and COP30 presidencies presented the Baku to Belém Road Map to 1.3T with a view to mobilizing USD 1.3 trillion a year up to 2035. The document offers broad recommendations and an action framework based on five axes: replenish, fiscal rebalancing, rechanneling, revamping and reshaping.
The plan highlights the role of multilateral banks and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), while the direct responsibility of developed countries, established in Article 9 of the Paris Agreement, remained in the background.
COP29 in Baku saw countries agree to “take the initiative” in mobilizing USD 300 billion per year until 2035, tripling the previous target of 100 billion set in 2015.
Adaptation funding was one of the summit’s most sensitive areas. The Paris Agreement established the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), but without defining how it would be measured or what kind of financing would be necessary.
The general framework was approved at COP28. Experts and delegations have since reduced the initial list of more than 9,000 possible indicators to just 100. They arrived in Belém ready for this to be adopted.
But, in the home stretch, the process completely changed. The final text proposed adopting 59 indicators with a commitment to perfect them later. The decision sparked protests, especially from South Korea, who questioned the presentation of new indicators without “sufficient scientific evidence” or enough time to analyze them.
Yet there was concrete progress. Multilateral development banks presented a report with new metrics and methodologies for speeding up adaptation investment. This was accompanied by an announcement by Climate Investment Funds (CIF) of an initial contribution of 100 million dollars from Germany and Spain to the ARISE program focused on resilience financing.
One of Brazil’s central commitments was to make this COP the one with the greatest indigenous participation in history. And it accomplished this. Around 3,000 representatives were in Belém, 1,000 of them in the Blue Zone, the rest in the Green Zone, the space for civil society.
The summit wasn’t without its tensions, however, but the final agreement contained a precedent: the first paragraph explicitly recognized the rights of indigenous peoples, including their territorial rights and traditional knowledge. For indigenous leaders like Taily Terena, this was the first time these rights had been mentioned so clearly in a central COP text.
Other advances made in parallel included the Belém Declaration On Fighting Environmental Racism, considered to be the first international initiative formally incorporating racial justice and climate action.
Although Brazilian President Lula da Silva spoke about them, and they were in the demands of more than 80 countries and denounced by civil society, the final text eliminated all direct reference to fossil fuels.
The debate has been raging since COP28, when, for the first time, it was agreed to advance to a “gradual transition” away from fossil fuels and to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030. The questions were how and when, but COP30 avoided addressing them.
In the streets, the response was resounding. Seventy thousand people marched in the “Funeral for Fossil Fuels”. There was also a political backlash, with Colombia and the Netherlands announcing the first international conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels, which will be held in Santa Marta, Colombia, in 2026. Meanwhile, Brazil promised to move forward two roadmaps: one to abandon hydrocarbons and the other against deforestation.
COP30 made specific progress, but there were also silences that were difficult to justify, especially around fossil fuels. Now attention turns to Turkey and Australia, where the international community is due to convert promises into difficult and measurable decisions in the face of a climate crisis that is accelerating.
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