Key reasons to read this editorial
- Understand why COP, the world’s most important climate summit, is both indispensable and broken.
- Confront the central question: in a rapidly warming world, can consensus-based climate diplomacy still work?
- See how geopolitical tensions shape the climate outcomes you never hear about.
- Get a balanced take on what comes next. No easy answers there.
- Learn what COP30 actually achieved and why many are still calling it a failure.
COP30 closed in Belém, Brazil, with a mixture of modest breakthroughs and a long list of unfinished business but achieving just enough progress to avert diplomatic collapse. The summit’s most concrete success — agreeing on common indicators for the Global Goal on Adaptation — marked a long-overdue step toward measuring countries’ preparedness for extreme climate events. Yet, even this progress could not disguise how far the process is lagging behind the accelerating crisis it was built to confront.
What was billed by Brazil as a COP of ambition and implementation became, instead, the COP of waiting rooms, another reminder that the COP machinery struggles to deliver on its own promises.
See also: From finance to forests and oil: Five frontlines that will define COP30 in Brazil
The battles over fossil fuels and finance barely moved; the gap between pledges and the 1.5°C pathway widened; and much of the agenda was placed into the Global Work Program, the latest waiting room in a system that is defined by deferral. Brazil’s diplomacy may have prevented the Paris Agreement from falling to pieces, but it also underscored a deeper truth: incremental gains are now colliding with the limits of a consensus model that no longer keeps pace with our fast-warming planet.
Is the model breaking down?
The modest progress in Belém has revived a longstanding question: is the COP format, which gathers tens of thousands of participants each year and is dependent on consensus, still fit for purpose?
Summits excel at producing roadmaps that too often resemble little more than waiting rooms. They are less capable of keeping pace with reality: not only the reality of a destabilized climate that is producing relentless heatwaves, droughts, floods and superstorms, but also that of a volatile geopolitical landscape that is being shaped by wars, polarization, and a weakened multilateral system.
Unsurprisingly, the gulf between Brazil’s early promise of ambition and implementation and the diluted final result has renewed calls to overhaul the UN’s climate negotiation process.
See also: Under pressure, COP30 races to prove this isn’t just another discussion-only climate summit
In 2024, a coalition of scientists and global leaders – including former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon – openly argued that the conferences no longer “fulfill their purpose” and must be reformed. Greta Thunberg, once the emblem of youth mobilization at COPs, now dismisses the meetings entirely, labelling them as “blah-blah-blah.”
However, the crisis extends beyond climate. The UN system, born in 1945, is increasingly seen as ill-equipped for 21st-century geopolitics. This raises the uncomfortable question: do COPs still make sense?
Without them, many argue, the alternative would be far worse. Paulo Artaxo, a physicist at the University of São Paulo and IPCC member, notes that the climate policies adopted over the past decades have already shifted the projected end-of-century warming from 4°C down to around 2.6°C. Scientists emphasize that accelerating emission cuts is essential for bending the curve even further.
“The emissions trajectory has been flattened — because of agreements reached in halls like these, with governments legislating and markets responding,” Simon Stiell, head of the UN climate convention, commented during COP30’s opening session. He insisted that the Paris Agreement is delivering “real progress.”
“But I don’t minimize the situation. We need to move much, much faster”, he added. Renewables, now expanding faster than fossil fuels, remain one of the few bright spots, a shift many analysts credit in part to political signals from COPs.
Yet Stiell’s remarks touched a raw nerve in terms of the slow pace, the limited results, and the inability of the process to deliver outcomes at the scale required.
“The COP’s core purpose is to advance negotiations and achieve concrete results,” explained Ana Flávia Granja e Barros, from the University of Brasília’s Institute of International Relations. “Progress was limited and difficult to measure, and insufficient by scientific standards. In that sense, yes: the COP is a failure.”
A structural barrier remains the consensus rule. Every country holds veto power, meaning any objection can stall progress completely, a dynamic that repeatedly paralyzes efforts to address fossil fuels, finance, and adaptation.
Even the dispute over the COP31 host country exposed the cracks in the system. Australia and Turkey clashed over the venue, and the compromise placed the physical summit in Turkey but handed the presidency to Australia, a country actively working on climate-adaptation models. Observers comment that Turkey’s selection reflected pressure from Russia, underscoring how geopolitical games shape climate diplomacy — often at the expense of the most climate-vulnerable countries.
A Reuters survey of experts, scientists, environmentalists, and diplomats found broad agreement: the UN-led process needs renovation if three decades of promises are to translate into real-world action.
What COP30 left unresolved
1. Roadmaps still on hold
The final text excluded the transition and deforestation phaseout roadmaps championed by Brazil and Colombia. Oil-producing countries pushed back, and the documents were delayed until 2026.
2. A weakened Global Goal on Adaptation
Although adopted, the GGA was pared down from around 100 indicators to just over 60. Without clear financing or transparent negotiations, Global South countries say the goal was conceived diluted.
3. Climate finance far below needs
Countries agreed only to “make efforts” to triple adaptation finance by 2035 without specifying who pays, how much, or from which sources. For regions such as Latin America and Africa, this lack of clarity severely hinders planning for flood prevention, drought response, and other urgent measures.
4. Few structural advances on mitigation
The final text avoided mentioning fossil fuels and offered no increase in ambition beyond that which had been agreed the previous year in Baku. Delegations pushing for a firmer energy transition said the debate was left gridlocked by political divergences.
The major advances
1. The Belém Action Mechanism for a Just Transition
COP30 created the BAM, a permanent framework to help developing countries to plan a shift to low-carbon economies without neglecting workers and vulnerable communities. Many see it as one of the summit’s most consequential outcomes.
2. The long-awaited adoption of the Global Goal on Adaptation
Despite its reduced scope, the GGA finally established a common baseline for tracking how prepared countries are for extreme climate impacts. A two-year program will now detail how the indicators should function in practice — a foundational first step toward a more coherent adaptation policy.
3. A pledge to triple adaptation finance by 2035
Although lacking specifics, this commitment acknowledges the urgency of scaling up investment in adaptation. Concrete details are expected ahead of COP31.
4. A renewed push for the Tropical Forest Finance Facility
The TFFF gained political traction during COP30, with Germany confirming €1 billion and joining Norway, France, Brazil, and Indonesia, bringing total commitments to over US$6 billion. The summit boosted the fund’s political profile and raised expectations that more donors may join.
Where to?
The unresolved battles of Belém indicate that the COP system is no longer being judged by its intentions but by its capacity to deliver in a world that is running out of time and this has proved to be poor lately. If COPs are to remain the world’s main forum for climate action, they must evolve from promises to producing ambitious solutions.
