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COP30 was always going to be different. The first UN climate summit to be held on the edge of the Amazon. The first to be so comprehensively spurned by the US administration. And the first since the world hit 1.5C of global warming for an entire calendar year.
It also turned out to be the first with a venue plagued by extreme heat, flooding — even a fire that brought the talks to a standstill for much of their second-last day.
Yet the conference in the steamy Brazilian city of Belém still managed something these huge annual gatherings should have done years ago: a shift away from showy pledges to tackling the real world complexities of cutting carbon emissions.
Delegates grappled with global trade rules, critical minerals, a pathway for phasing out fossil fuels and other issues long deemed too toxic or irrelevant for climate COPs.
One might reasonably ask what took them so long, not least on the matter of fossil fuels.
Burning coal, oil and gas is by far the biggest cause of global warming. But the unwieldy nature of COP decision-making means 30 years of these meetings have failed to produce anything like a framework for how and when to wean nations off these fuels.
Dozens of governments sought to address this gap by calling in Belém for a fossil fuel transition road map, a move that led participants to spell out the many obstacles currently blocking the transition with clarifying force.
As Susana Muhamad, Colombia’s former environment minister, told one meeting, countries trying to end oil exports today face a profusion of risks: tumbling energy company share prices, IMF questions about debt repayments and credit rating agency concerns about investment ratings. Without an international framework for the transition, she said, “who is going to put their economy at risk first?” Quite.
Other financial considerations help to explain why the world has retired about 300 gigawatts of coal-fired power in the decade since the 2015 Paris Agreement but added nearly 600GW more — and with another 600GW still in the pipeline, as Harvard professor Akash Deep told participants. Though cleaner power options exist, fossil fuels are still the rational choice for many fast-growing economies because they are easier to finance, he said.
As talks went down to the wire on Friday, the fate of the road map was in flux but the push for it in Belém has led a slew of countries to intensify work on it next year, potentially in league with international institutions.
Firmer steps were taken to address another issue that rose to the top of this COP agenda: global trade rules.
Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs may have helped to focus attention on a topic that has long hovered on the margins of these talks. Likewise, western tariffs on Chinese EVs have fuelled concerns that the pace of the global energy transition will be slowed if barriers to the world’s leading source of green technologies gather steam.
But the flashpoint in Belém was the EU’s pioneering carbon border tax, which is set to become operational in January.
An array of nations attacked the bloc’s carbon border adjustment mechanism, or CBAM, which aims to stop domestic industries being undercut by imports from countries lacking the EU’s robust carbon pricing system. It currently requires companies to pay around €80 a tonne for carbon pollution.
Saudi Arabia was among those attacking what it claimed was an unfair “economic transfer from the poor to the rich, disguised as climate action”, which would sap smaller countries’ efforts to decarbonise.
But several other countries are eyeing such measures amid signs the CBAM is fuelling the spread of carbon pricing. Researchers say more than 40 schemes in 37 countries have been launched, considered or implemented since the EU plan was first discussed in 2019.
Helpfully, Brazil used COP30 to launch a forum for countries to thrash out what seem certain to be rising trade and climate tensions. Just another talking shop? Perhaps, but it was refreshing to see immediate economic realities introduced into a process that often seems remote from such concerns.
Likewise, countries made a rare push to include the critical minerals central to the energy transition in the formal COP talks. Stamping out climate misinformation, another problem rarely addressed head-on at these gatherings, was also endorsed by a number of nations. And a pioneering $5.5bn tropical forest protection fund was launched.
To be clear, we are talking more of a totter than a wholesale lunge away from COP business as usual. Negotiators still spent hours wrestling over legal texts that would baffle any outsider, let alone those who understand how fast the world is racing towards uncharted changes in the climate.
There is no guarantee any of the new efforts will deliver meaningful improvements. Still, Brazil has begun the overdue job of redrawing how the world deals with a defining challenge of our age. It may not be the final answer but it is a start.