How to transition away from fossil fuels. How to measure adaptation. How to confront the gap between national climate plans and the Paris Agreement goals. How to mine critical minerals sustainably and fairly.
How to get things done — not just whether they should get done — was front and center at this year’s United Nations climate conference, a marked shift from the annual event’s proclivity for making broad promises to wrestling with some of the tougher realities of keeping global warming in check.
Friday is the last official day of the two-week gathering known as COP30, taking place on the edge of the Amazon rainforest in Belém, Brazil, although probably not the actual end of it. Despite early assurances from the Brazilian government that this year’s conference would finish on time, delegates are still hashing out a final decision text and are likely to keep at it until at least Saturday.
The Brazilian leadership and other COP veterans have framed this as an “implementation COP,” where parties to the Paris Agreement “move from pledges to action” and similar clichès. It’s certainly not the first time these words have been used at COP. The Paris Agreement itself was billed as “enhancing the implementation” of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the foundational treaty underlying these annual negotiations.
“Action” may be a stretch to describe what ultimately happened this year. As is the case at every COP, the provision of finance, or lack thereof, from developed to developing countries dominated the discussion, preventing progress on other agenda items. “Climate finance just remains this ongoing obstacle,” Rachel Cleetus, a senior policy director for the Union of Concerned Scientists, told me. Global south countries and small island states argue they simply cannot increase their ambition, or work on adaptation, without finance. The conference’s repeated failure to come to terms with that is probably the biggest counterpoint to the idea that these meetings have become more grounded in reality.
It remains to be seen which, if any, of the efforts to work out the details of the transition will make it into the final agreement, but the success of these annual gatherings should not only be measured by what’s in the text.
Here are three key ways Belém has already pushed the conversation forward.
A more proactive attempt at a “just transition”
During a speech at the start of the conference, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva proclaimed that it is “impossible to discuss the energy transition without talking about critical minerals, essential to make batteries, solar panels, and energy systems.”
Never before had the negotiations broached the subject of all of the industrial earth-moving implicit in the fight against climate change. By the end of the first week, however, one of the working groups had released a draft text that acknowledged “the social and environmental risks associated with” extracting and processing critical minerals.
A later revision of the document added a note about “enabling fair access to opportunities and fair distribution of benefits of value addition,” a reference to breaking the pattern of rich countries extracting minerals cheaply from the Global South while keeping the more profitable processing and manufacturing of those minerals at home. (As of Friday morning, however, references to “critical minerals” were erased from the text.)
The text was released by the Just Transition Work Program, a newer workstream at the conference that was established at COP27 in Egypt. Outside of the critical minerals note, there was a larger push to get Just Transition program as a whole more grounded in reality. This area of the negotiations focuses on ensuring the goals of the Paris Agreement are achieved fairly and equitably, with recognition that the transition will happen at a different pace in different countries, with different implications for each one’s economy. It was primarily established as a forum for countries to exchange ideas and information, with biannual meetings.
At COP30, however, the G77, China, and many global south countries began pushing to turn it into more of an action-oriented group that guides the global transition and tracks progress using agreed-upon metrics.
A new coalition pushes a roadmap off fossil fuels
The Just Transition mechanism is not to be confused with the much-talked-about roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels, although the two are closely tied.
Two years ago, the final agreement at COP28 in Dubai made history with the first-ever call for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.” Last year, however, that edict was dropped, as negotiations over a new climate finance target took precedence. Now it’s been revived, with robust support from countries to build on the statement with a more fleshed-out plan. Phasing out fossil fuels has vastly different implications for different countries, some of whose economies are deeply dependent on revenue from their fossil resources. The roadmap would start to work through what it would really mean to coordinate the effort.
Once again, the message came from the top. “We need roadmaps that will enable humankind, in a fair and planned manner, to overcome its dependence on fossil fuels, halt and reverse deforestation, and mobilize resources to achieve these goals,” Brazil’s Silva said in a speech at the opening of the conference.
This past Tuesday, a coalition of a whopping 82 countries came out in support of this planning effort, pressing for it to be included in the final decision text. “This is a global coalition, with global north and global south countries coming together and saying with one voice: this is an issue which cannot be swept under the carpet,” Ed Miliband, the UK’s energy secretary, said during a press conference that day.
Several more countries have joined since, bringing the count to 88 — nearly half of the 195 parties to the Paris Agreement. The biggest fossil fuel emitters, such as China, India, and Saudi Arabia, are not on board, however. As of Friday morning, all mentions of fossil fuels, let alone a roadmap, have been scrubbed from the draft decision text. Still, the huge coalition backing the roadmap is a sign of a growing and potentially powerful consensus.
COP confronts overshoot of 1.5 degrees
One of the big questions looming over this year’s conference was whether and how countries would address their utter failure to live up to the Paris Agreement’s goal to keep warming “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels,” let alone the more ambitious target of 1.5 degrees.
A report issued by the United Nations Environment Program just before the talks began concluded that countries’ latest climate pledges, known as their “nationally determined contributions,” or NDCs, would put the planet on a path to warm at least 2.3 degrees by the end of the century. It also stated definitively that global average temperatures would exceed 1.5 degrees of warming.
This wasn’t news — scientists have previously concluded that exceeding 1.5 degrees is basically guaranteed. “But this is the first time we saw it so bluntly in the UN report,” Cleetus told me. “So that was a pretty sobering backdrop coming into this COP.”
All countries were supposed to submit updated NDCs this year that contained targets for 2035, but more than 70 have failed to do so, including India, one of the world’s biggest emitters.
Island states, backed by Latin American nations and the EU, wanted the conference to make some kind of declaration that countries’ current pledges are not sufficient and should be revised. The draft text issued this morning, while acknowledging the insufficiencies of NDCs, does not spell out the implications or required response as bluntly as many want to see.
It does, however, introduce an important new concept that could become a key part of the negotiations in the future. For the first time, the text references a resolve to “limit both the magnitude and duration of any temperature overshoot.” This not only acknowledges that it’s possible to bring temperatures back down after warming surpasses 1.5 degrees, but that the level at which temperatures peak, and the length of time we remain at that peak before the world begins to cool, are just as important. The statement implies the need for a much larger conversation about carbon removal that has been nearly absent from the annual COPs, but which scientists say that countries must have if they are serious about the Paris Agreement goals.
"If countries (or the UNFCCC) want to keep talking about reaching 1.5C, they need to embrace net-negative emissions, moving even beyond net-zero,” Oliver Geden, a senior fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, and an IPCC report author, told me. “If they don't want to do this, then talking about reaching 1.5°C is not credible anymore.”
