Why Cop30 remains key to fighting the climate crisis

There might be a sense that global progress on the climate crisis is flagging, but experts tell Nick Ferris that there remains real hope that the summit in Brazil can drive forward the climate agenda - so long as rich countries agree to budge on the key issue of aid

It’s the month of November, which means that the eyes of everyone working in climate will be turning to whichever city is hosting the annual UN Conference of Parties, or Cop. This year, it’s being hosted in the northern Brazilian city of Belem, with Brazil’s President Lula hoping that its location close to the Amazon will help place the world’s largest rainforest at the heart of the discussions.

It can be easy to have a sense of deja vu about it all: talk is once again of how to “turn words into action”; Donald Trump is for the second time pulling the US out of the key international climate treaty, the Paris Agreement; and emissions are continuing to rise year on year, despite this being the 30th time that countries have met with the intention of turning the tide on just that.

With the technical rulebook for the 2015 Paris Agreement now more or less complete following Cop29 in Baku, it could be argued – given that we now have the structure through which countries are supposed to decarbonise – that Cop no longer serves a real function. Moreover, after deals agreed in recent years – to reverse deforestation and reduce methane emissions at Cop26 in Glasgow, and to triple renewables deployment and “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems” at Cop28 in Dubai (the first time, amazingly, that countries agreed to mention the main cause of climate change) – there is a sense that the ability of the conference to drive things forward may have stalled.

Last year, developing countries were bitterly disappointed after rich countries committed to giving them some $300bn (about £227bn) a year in aid by 2035 to help them to both mitigate and adapt to climate change, which is far below the trillions that experts believe will be required. With the Trump administration putting pressure on countries to turn away from the climate agenda – and a serious resurgence in climate scepticism also seen among politicians in Europe over the past year – could it be that the time is right to move on from the annual climate circus?

Not according to Debbie Hillier, who is the UN climate policy lead for the huge global humanitarian NGO Mercy Corps, and someone that has been closely following the Cop summits for many years. “It can be frustrating, and it’s easy to throw sticks at the process. But this is a genuinely global challenge, and so we have to have a forum where we work this out together,” she says.

“Emissions are much lower than they would have been if we did not have Paris – but equally they are nowhere near reduced enough to actually stop climate change,” she continues. “That’s the world’s messy reality, and so the work continues.”

Hillier’s words on the importance of Cop, and of multilateral forums to tackle climate change, were echoed by Cosima Cassel, from the climate think tank E3G, when she spoke at a recent pre-Cop briefing. “At the UN General Assembly last month, we saw the vast majority of world leaders reaffirm that climate is critical to their security,” she said. “[Before the Paris Agreement] we were on track for 4C of warming, and now we are on track for 2.7C – so it’s a huge reduction in projected temperature, but it’s still way off where we need to be for the 1.5C goal.”

For Cassel’s colleague Rob Moore, it is important, too, not to feel that the conference loses legitimacy because the US federal government will not be present – despite the fact that the country continues to contribute 10 per cent of global emissions.

“Many US states and private-sector actors do remain committed [to climate action], and many of them will be present at Cop. It’s an economic imperative for a lot of them, because it creates jobs and strengthens energy security,” says Moore. “The Cop without the US is also still a larger share of global emissions than the G20... It’s obviously a shame if the US is not present, but I don't think it defines the legitimacy of the Cop.”

While recent Cops have had a clear purpose tied to them under the terms of the Paris Agreement – Cop29 was based around the new climate finance target, and Cop28 around the “global stocktake” of climate progress so far – Cop30 has no such issue to anchor it. Recent weeks, however, have seen more and more experts suggesting that this could be the “Adaptation Cop”, where parties look to get a handle on just how countries are expected to adapt to the ever more severe impacts of the climate crisis.

Such a focus could not be more timely, with 3.6 billion people now believed to be highly vulnerable to rapidly worsening climate events like storms, floods, wildfires, or droughts – while Hurricane Melissa recently demonstrated just how devastating climate-related extreme weather can be.

At the same time, the recent UN Adaptation Gap report found that foreign aid available for developing countries to adapt to climate change actually fell from $28bn (£21bn) in 2022 to $26bn in 2023, with the adaptation finance requirement being 12 to 14 times greater than what is currently available.

“Brazil has really made adaptation a core focus of Cop30,” says Lily Hartzell, from E3G. Hillier agrees: “At the Bonn Intersessional Climate Talks this year, more and more people were talking about adaptation. Then we had the [International Court of Justice] ruling on climate change, which said all sorts of things about how developed countries need to provide funding for adaptation,” she says. “More and more countries have also been producing national adaptation plans, and they are becoming more and more detailed and systematic.”

One key achievement around adaptation that is set to be completed at Cop30 is the “Global Goal on Adaptation Indicators”, which is the framework through which countries are expected to measure adaptation under the Paris Agreement. “It’s very easy to measure climate mitigation: you can just look at emissions,” explains Hillier. “And now, over the past two years, technical experts have developed 100 indicators of how to measure adaptation, which are set to be confirmed at Cop30.”

Any achievement in defining the measurement of adaptation will likely generate serious disquiet among developing countries, however, if it does not come alongside a new pledge to boost the amount of aid available to them to adapt. “A set of indicators are not going to change the world on their own,” says Hillier.

Adaptation finance has until now been dictated by an agreement made at Cop26 in Glasgow for rich countries to double adaptation finance over the following five years, effectively from $20bn to $40bn – but that deal is due to expire this year. “The doubling is still a ridiculously small target compared to the need, but it sends a political signal,” says Hillier. “If that signal is not renewed, then it sends a very weak message.”

Developing countries are calling for a new deal to triple the Glasgow pledge by 2030, which would go some way to meeting their climate adaptation costs, estimated at $300bn per year. Various groups have suggested different means of raising this money – from reallocating funds from fossil fuel subsidies in rich countries, to taxing pollution in sectors like shipping. But after a year of overseas aid cuts and increasingly climate-sceptic discourse among politicians, reaching any concrete financial settlement is going to take some serious diplomatic prowess.

“The donor side is really tricky in the context of aid cuts. No single donor or political leader has yet really had the courage to make a case that international support for climate action is actually a really good thing,” says Moore. “A lot more international investment is coming from China and the Gulf, and it’s unclear what exactly that will mean.

“As with all climate finance, predictability is about to fall off a cliff, and there will be a lot of expectation from developing countries [of] some security on where future adaptation finance will come from. But we don’t think the donors have particularly strong answers at the moment.”

Another major point of discussion at Cop30 will be around climate mitigation, which is all about decarbonising energy systems and reducing the carbon emissions that actually cause climate change. Ahead of the conference, all 195 parties were supposed to submit interim emissions targets for 2035, known as “nationally determined contributions”, or NDCs, under the terms of the Paris Agreement.

“NDCs are really the backbone of the Paris Agreement,” explained Silvia Ulloa, from the Stockholm Environment Institute, speaking at a pre-Cop30 briefing. “They are really the central mechanism through which countries communicate their climate ambition and also coordinate action.”

As it turned out, however, only 64 countries – covering only 30 per cent of global emissions – actually managed them. A report produced by the UN ahead of Cop30 found that these plans fall far short of the emissions reduction required to limit global warming to a “safe” 1.5C: taken together, the plans would mean that global emissions of CO2 would only fall by around 10 per cent by 2035.

“Brazil has got to put some serious spin on this, because at the moment, it looks like a bit of a failure,” says Hillier. “It may well be that they conclude the summit with a package that says, ‘There’s more to do on NDCs and mitigation, but look at what we have achieved on adaptation.’”

A slither of hope can be found in the fact that territories including the EU and China have announced pledges, even though they were unable to submit their NDCs in time. The Independent has also heard from sources that a new NDC synthesis report is expected to be released partway through Cop30, which would likely have improved mitigation results.

While it remains uncertain just what the outcome of the UN-backed climate talks will be, one thing is clear: Brazil is set to launch its pet project, the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), at the world leaders’ summit later this week.

The concept is for the TFFF to incentivise forest nations like Brazil to prevent deforestation, by providing annual payments to countries to aid their forest conservation efforts. A key milestone for the TFFF was achieved in recent days after the World Bank confirmed that it will run its administrative functions – and Brazil is looking for $25bn in startup capital from governments, which is expected to leverage a further $100bn from the private sector.

“The Cop being in Belem brings a very welcome spotlight onto deforestation and the loss of ecosystems, and it opens up a space for thinking about things in different ways,” says Toby Gardner, from the Stockholm Environment Institute. TFFF in particular, Gardner adds, represents something “radically new” in its aim of paying countries to protect forests that are still standing, and penalising countries where deforestation is ongoing.

While world leaders are likely to offer warm words of support for the scheme at the world leaders’ summit, success will ultimately depend – once again – on the amount of money that rich countries are willing to stump up to support it.

“TFFF is a really important ecosystem service that has really just fallen through the gaps in climate talks so far, but is really critical for meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement,” says Moore. “Its announcement represents a really important political moment... but it does also depend on getting money from donors.”

Cover photo:  Workers make finishing touches to the conference venue for Cop30 in Belem, Brazil (AP)