Is COP30 likely to lead to real change in the way countries and companies address climate change?
By Doug Specht, co-editor of The Violence of Development website.
The thirtieth Conference of the Parties concluded in Belém as this issue of the ENCA newsletter headed to print. While not exclusively about Central America, the summit’s outcomes have left many questioning whether international climate diplomacy has lost its way entirely, and this could have dire consequences for the region. Whilst there were marginal advances on adaptation finance and some promising initiatives on the periphery, COP30 has fundamentally failed to deliver on the existential crisis that brought nearly all the world’s nations to Brazil in the first place.
The most glaring failure was the summit’s complete inability to secure a roadmap for transitioning away from fossil fuels. Despite more than 80 countries pushing for concrete language on phasing out oil, gas and coal, the primary drivers of climate chaos, the final text makes no direct mention of fossil fuels whatsoever. This represents an extraordinary retreat from even the tepid commitments made at COP28 in Dubai, where nations at least agreed to “transitioning away from fossil fuels”. Saudi Arabia, Russia, China and India successfully blocked all attempts to include such language, exposing the cynical reality that petrostates continue to wield disproportionate power over global climate negotiations.
The influence of fossil fuel interests at COP30 cannot be overstated. More than 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists descended upon Belém, outnumbering every national delegation except the host country. That’s one in every 25 attendees representing the very industries driving planetary destruction. This army of lobbyists, which has grown from 503 at Glasgow in 2021 to its current record levels, succeeded in their mission to obstruct meaningful progress. As Panama’s Special Representative for Climate Change Juan Carlos Monterrey Gomez observed, “A climate decision that cannot even say ‘fossil fuels’ is not neutrality, it is complicity”.
The venue itself became an inadvertent metaphor for the proceedings when fire broke out at the COP30 site on Thursday. “The venue bursting into flames couldn’t be a more apt metaphor for COP30’s catastrophic failure to take concrete action,” noted Jean Su from the Centre for Biological Diversity. The summit was meant to be Brazil’s “forest COP”, yet it delivered no binding roadmap to halt deforestation, despite taking place at the gateway to the Amazon. Whilst President Lula pledged to create voluntary roadmaps on both deforestation and fossil fuels, these carry no legal weight and represent little more than consolation prizes.
Perhaps most damning is the gap between scientific reality and political will. UN Secretary-General António Guterres confirmed ahead of COP30 that overshooting the 1.5°C warming threshold is now inevitable, potentially beginning in the early 2030s. Brazilian scientist Carlos Nobre warned that fossil fuel use must fall to zero by 2040–2045 to avoid catastrophic temperature rises of up to 2.5°C. Yet current nationally determined contributions would deliver only a 12 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, woefully short of the 60 per cent cut needed by 2035. Analysis by Greenpeace found that G20 countries’ 2035 targets would achieve only 23–29 per cent reductions compared to 2019 levels, with many major emitters failing to submit plans altogether.
Whilst COP30 did agree to triple adaptation finance by 2035 and mobilise $1.3 trillion annually for climate action by that date, these financial commitments ring hollow without binding mechanisms to phase out the very activities causing climate breakdown. The summit’s modest achievements—the establishment of a just transition mechanism, recognition of Indigenous territories, and $6 billion pledged to Brazil’s Tropical Forests Forever Facility, are genuine progress. Yet they pale against the summit’s fundamental failure to confront fossil fuel expansion.
After thirty years and thirty COPs, the uncomfortable truth is that global greenhouse gas concentrations have risen by 17 per cent since the first summit in 1995, and the world continues hurtling towards catastrophic warming. It is predicted that more than 700,000 lives have been lost to climate-related extreme weather over those three decades. COP30 has exposed the brutal reality that as long as fossil fuel interests dominate these negotiations and consensus rules allow petrostates to veto progress, the COP process remains fatally compromised. What transpired in Belém wasn’t climate leadership, it was a masterclass in organised irresponsibility dressed up as diplomacy.
Dr Doug Specht is a Chartered Geographer, a Reader in Cultural Geography and Communication, and Head of the School of Media and Communication at the University of Westminster.
This article was added to the TVOD website at the same time as the related article by Doug Specht and Sarah Capes ‘Is Indigenous leadership a priority at COP30?’. The latter appears in Chapter 8 of the website.