Did COP30 achieve anything to tackle climate change?

What happened at COP30?

Last month’s climate jamboree in Brazil, COP30, was a damp squib – and not just due to the torrential rain that poured through the venue’s leaking ceilings. The UN’s 30th Conference of the Parties had been touted as the moment when there would be a move from pledges to implementation. But action was little in evidence.

For the first time, the US boycotted the conference. China was there, but studiously avoided stepping into the leadership vacuum. The summit ended with a watered-down resolution that made no direct mention of fossil fuels, the main driver of global warming. And at a summit held in the Amazon rainforest city of Belém, delegates failed to agree the hoped-for road map to a global deforestation accord.

Did COP30 achieve anything?

The summit adopted a set of 59 global indicators to track progress toward the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) and agreed on the next round of National Adaptation Plans, bureaucratic scorecards that represent an important and growing recognition that adaptation and mitigation – not just emissions cuts – must be part of global climate action. These were backed up by national commitments to triple adaptation finance by 2035 to roughly $120 billion a year.

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But the defining feature of COP30 was the failure to even mention fossil fuels in the final resolution, even while explicitly acknowledging – for the first time – that the world is now likely to “overshoot” the 1.5˚C warming target in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Is it time to scrap the COPs?

Many think so. The COPs have long been attacked as talking shops that spew a lot of hot air about hot air – issuing countless warnings about the cost of inaction but rarely managing to agree solid proposals for how the world should halt dangerous rising temperatures. In the 30 years since the first congress in Berlin, greenhouse gas emissions have risen by 34%. That’s slower than the 64% increase over the three previous decades, but not nearly enough to stop temperatures breaching the thresholds that scientists say will cause irreversible damage to the planet.

Looked at another way, though, without the Kyoto (1997) and Paris (2015) COPs, the situation would be far worse. Simon Stiell, head of the UN’s Climate Framework, calculates that, without the COP process, world temperatures would now be heading for a truly catastrophic 5˚C of heating, instead of the 2.5˚C increase – merely disastrous – that is now projected.

What’s happening to temperatures?

They are going up. This COP had an inauspicious run-up, in that early last month the UN’s Emissions Gap report confirmed what had long been known: that the steady increase in carbon emissions since Paris means global temperatures will rise beyond 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Global temperatures have surged past that mark in some recent years, with 2023 and 2024 ranking among the hottest on record. The 30-year rolling average – the benchmark used by the Paris deal – is still just below that level, at about 1.37˚C.

To keep even a 50% chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C, the world must cut emissions roughly 55% by 2035, compared with 2019 levels. But the national plans submitted within the COP process offer a fraction of that, putting the world on track for roughly 2.5°C of warming.

Are emissions now falling?

No. Global fossil-fuel emissions hit record highs in 2025, with the world emitting roughly 39.1 billion tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide, according to the Global Carbon Project. That’s 1.1% more than in 2024. A relatively small number of big countries account for most of the world’s emissions, with China responsible for 32%, the US 13%, India 8% and EU nations 6%.

Though emissions are still rising in the US, one promising sign is that they are now flatlining in China, after years of surging. Even so, the International Energy Agency projects that demand for coal, for example, will remain at around record highs until 2027. Demand is still rising in China, India and other developing countries, offsetting falls elsewhere.

So climate diplomacy has failed?

It may be becoming less important. It’s a “COP cliché to say the pavilions where countries host talks on green projects, technologies and trends are more interesting than the formal negotiations”, says Pilita Clark in the Financial Times. What became clear in Belém is that things are changing in the real world regardless of what gets agreed at COPs. In developing countries, from Ethiopia to Nepal, sales of electric cars are surging exponentially. Renewable energy is booming everywhere from Ukraine to Pakistan.

The economics of energy continue to shift decisively in favour of decarbonisation, agrees Paul Polman, the former CEO of Unilever, in Time. Meanwhile, the “centre of gravity is shifting” at COPs – with much of the most important progress happening “around the formal process and despite its limitations”.

What's changing?

In Belém, for example, the Action Agenda – a non-negotiated process – saw businesses, investors and city authorities set out investment plans totalling $1 trillion for clean energy and grid expansion by 2030. And the Netherlands and Colombia jointly announced a non-COP international conference in 2026 to develop an equitable, science-based road map for phasing out fossil fuels.

The institutions of multilateralism still matter greatly, but “may no longer be the primary engine of climate progress”. Businesses – organisations that plan far beyond political cycles – will increasingly be at the forefront, while the COP process must evolve to become simpler and implementation-oriented, or risk losing all credibility.

Indeed, last month’s jamboree may be “remembered less for what it resolved and more for what it exposed: that ambition is outpacing architecture, and that the world is ready to move faster than the institutions designed to guide it”.

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