Belém, Brazil
Written by Olivia Nater | Published: November 27, 2025
This year’s international climate conference, COP30, wrapped up in Belém, Brazil, last weekend. Following the failure of previous COPs to deliver the ambition and action needed to avert catastrophic climate change, the stakes were higher than ever before. Unfortunately, however, COP30 was on the whole another flop, only making marginal progress.
At the Leaders’ Summit of the UN Climate Change Conference held in Belém a few days ahead of COP30, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) presented a report revealing that 2025 is set to be the second or third hottest year on record, meaning the past 11 years dating back to 2015 will be the 11 hottest ever recorded.
The WMO warned that the average global temperature for January-August 2025 was 1.42 °C warmer than pre-industrial levels, and that limiting global heating to the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels was now “virtually impossible.”
Returning to 1.5 °C by the end of the century remains “entirely possible,” but “would require carbon dioxide to be sucked from the atmosphere, by growing new forests and using technology to remove and bury the CO2.”
Scientists have been cautioning for over a decade that overshooting 1.5 °C is incredibly dangerous due to the risk of triggering catastrophic climate tipping points, such as melting of the Greenland ice sheet and disruption of key ocean circulatory systems.
World leaders are still not taking these warnings seriously, however, and at COP30 they once again prioritized short-term national interests over the future of our planet and of humanity.
The 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) to the United Nations Framework to Combat Climate Change (UNFCCC) concluded on Saturday evening, 27 hours behind schedule, which makes it one of the shorter COPs. It’s the norm for these climate talks to overrun significantly — a byproduct of trying to get almost 200 vastly different nations to agree on anything.
Conference proceedings were disrupted on the second day, when dozens of angry Indigenous protesters forced their way into COP’s primary venue, leading to clashes with security staff, and last Thursday, when — rather symbolically — a fire broke out at the venue.
This was the first COP at which there was no official US delegation, demonstrating Trump’s disdain for climate action. The United States is the second biggest emitter of fossil fuels after China, meaning lack of US participation will make it incredibly difficult to bend the global emissions curve downward.
Despite decades of negotiations, climate multilateralism is still a long way from achieving any meaningful emissions reduction due to resistance from oil-producing nations and prioritization of industry and economic interests.
It was only at the 2023 COP28 in Dubai that nations agreed for the first time to “transition away from fossil fuels.” The hope for this year’s COP was to produce a “roadmap” that lays out concrete steps to achieve this transition.
This did not happen, however, with petrostates, including Saudi Arabia and Russia, refusing to approve even a vague reference to a “roadmap” that would allow governments to pursue self-chosen measures and schedules.
No mention of a roadmap or even of fossil fuels made it into the final “Global Mutirão” agreement. Arguably the only meaningful progress made was a call to triple climate adaptation finance for developing countries by 2035 — five years later than the deadline delegates from least developed countries (LDCs) were pushing for.
It is also not a given that this funding will actually materialize. At COP26 in Glasgow, UK, it was agreed to double adaptation finance to $40 billion per year by 2025. A new report from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), however, found that in 2023 (the last year for which complete data is available), developed nations provided only $26 billion in adaptation finance to developing nations — far short of the estimated $365 billion that will be needed annually by 2035. With finance goals set at previous conferences set to be missed, it is hard to imagine that new, more ambitious ones will be met.
Proponents of climate action were also pushing for nations to adopt a new set of 100 indicators against which they could measure their adaptation progress, yet this was met by resistance by a bloc of African countries. The African group argued that the indicators were “intrusive” because they track domestic policies and shift responsibility from developed to developing countries.
In the end, the final adaptation text included an annex of 59 of the potential 100 indicators, and stressed that these “do not create new financial obligations or commitments.”
By the end of COP30, 119 countries accounting for 74 percent of annual global emissions had submitted new nationally determined contributions (NDCs) — their domestic mitigation commitments. Together, these NDCs would deliver only around 11 percent of the total emissions reductions required by 2035 to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 °C, and 17 percent of the total emissions reductions required by 2035 to limit global temperature rise to 2 °C.
According to UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report 2025, the world remains on course for 2.3-2.8 °C of warming by the end of the century.
There were also attempts to weaken references to the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is the leading authority on climate science intended to guide countries’ climate efforts.
The need to counter misinformation on climate change was mentioned in an earlier draft of the “Research and systematic observation” text, but was cut from the final version. The text also failed to mention the latest state of the climate findings that were presented by the IPCC and the WMO.
Similarly, there was wide disagreement over wording related to gender across different negotiations. Parties were tasked with developing a new “Gender Action Plan” but conservative delegations voiced so much disagreement that the new draft text only makes vague references to gender “responsiveness” and “mainstreaming,” without promising any concrete actions that would advance gender equality. Not a single mention of sexual and reproductive health and rights made it into the latest draft. Some countries, including the Holy See, Argentina, and Paraguay, sought to add footnotes defining gender as biological female and male sexes.
Perhaps it is unrealistic to hope that multilateralism will deliver the action needed to combat the climate crisis. Maybe the fact that these COPs are still happening at all and that the majority of countries have at least agreed to do something about climate change is worth celebrating. It could be worse.
As Fiona Harvey wrote for The Guardian,
“This flawed deal might have been all that was possible, given the geopolitical headwinds – a US president who shunned the talks and is wedded to oil and coal, the rising tide of rightwing populism, conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, intolerable levels of inequality, and global economic uncertainty.”
Next year’s conference, COP31, will take place in Antalya, Turkey, with Australia to preside over the negotiations. The realists among environmentalists may not have high expectations, but we will keep fighting for our one and only planet and the countless lives threatened by its rapid warming.
