The COP30 climate summit has concluded in Belém, Brazil. It was scheduled to run from the 10th November to the 21st November 2025, but overran (as usual) and finished late on Saturday 22nd November.
Things haven’t been great in the intervening year since the last summit. 2025 heralded the return of President Donald Trump. One of the many executive orders he signed removed the USA from the 2015 Paris climate agreement for a second time, having initially removed the USA during his first term in office, before Joe Biden rejoined. In February, the stupidity of the decision was immediately laid bare when Dr James Hansen and colleagues published a new study, which showed that:
- “Shutdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is likely within the next 20-30 years, unless actions are taken to reduce global warming.”
- “Several meters” of sea level rise is predicted over the next “50-150 years”.
- The planet’s albedo (the reflectivity of lighter coloured landscapes such as ice sheets and glaciers), has “decreased about 0.5%… since 2010.” This change in albedo, “is equivalent to an increase of CO2 by 138 ppm, from the 419 ppm actually measured at the beginning of 2024 to 557 ppm.”
- The Paris target of limiting temperature rises to 1.5C by the year 2100, has already been “breached, for all practical purposes.”
- On our current trajectory, we’re heading for 2C – 3C of warming, which would “push the climate system beyond the Point of No Return.”
There are only so many times and so many ways to say that humanity is in perilous territory. And yet there appears to be a near-endless number of times that leaders can ignore that warning. 2025 marks 37 years since Dr James Hansen first sounded the alarm on climate change back in 1988. COP30 also marks the 30th year that the world has come together to try and tackle the climate emergency and failed.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported that carbon dioxide levels increased by a record amount in 2024. Between 2023 and 2024, CO2 levels increased by 3.5ppm, taking the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere to 423.9ppm in 2024. For context, prior to the industrial revolution, CO2 was around 280ppm. And scientists believe the safe concentration is 350ppm, with anything over 400ppm putting us in the danger zone.
A separate WMO report notes that in addition to CO2, the other two major greenhouse gases, methane and nitrous oxide, also “reached record-high observed levels in 2024.” 30 years of climate summits. 30 years of failing to address climate breakdown. 30 years of allowing fossil fuel companies to jeopardise our collective future. This is beyond deplorable. It’s criminal.
Before diving into the rest of the review, I produced a handy explainer about what the COP summits are and what they’ve achieved over the years. As usual, I’d like to give a special shoutout and thank you to the Guardian’s environment team who have once again covered COP30 in-depth, and their reporting has informed much of the following post. I appreciate all their hard work and their continued dedication to inform the world about one of the biggest challenges of our time.
Before COP30
Perhaps the most significant news that came out prior to COP30 was the UN Secretary-General’s admission that humanity has missed the 1.5C Paris climate target. This was a significant point of contention with the COP29 outcome last year. For context, in January last year, I wrote that we were living through the breach of the 1.5C target. I therefore felt completely baffled when leaders at COP29, reaffirmed their commitment to this target which was, for all intents and purposes, dead. Thus, António Guterres’ admission in an interview with the Guardian, was a welcome acknowledgement from the UN that this target has been surpassed.
To show how far off course we are in regards to the (breached) 1.5C target, Fiona Harvey wrote in the Guardian that 60 countries submitted plans to the UN, which showed they intend to reduce carbon emissions by 10% by 2035, in comparison to 2019 levels. This is one sixth of what is required to bring us in line with the 1.5C target, meaning that the world is five sixths off course.
In the opening plenary of the World Leaders Climate Action Summit, António Guterres said that missing the 1.5C target was, “moral failure – and deadly negligence.” I couldn’t agree more. But do world leaders care about the fate of over 8 billion people? After 30 years of COP climate summits which have failed to tackle this crisis, one could say with a fair degree of confidence that they simply don’t.
What’s the current state of things? The WMO reports that, “The past 11 years, 2015 to 2025, will individually have been the eleven warmest years in the 176-year observational record, with the past three years being the three warmest years on record.” Damian Carrington writes in the Guardian that the climate crisis is causing rising levels of heat, which kills an average of “one person a minute around the world.” This means that millions of deaths are being caused by world leaders failing to address the climate crisis.
Climate disasters have already had an enormous impact on a large portion of the world’s population. According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), around 250 million people have been displaced by weather-related disasters over the last decade. This amounts to an average of 67,000 people being displaced every day.
Yet, there is still a concerted and highly successful effort by lobbyists to prevent climate action. Nina Lakhani wrote in the Guardian that around 5,350 fossil fuel lobbyists have attended the last four climate summits (COP26 through to COP29). They worked for 859 different fossil fuel entities, including 180 coal, oil, and gas companies. The goal of these people is to ensure that whatever is agreed at the summit doesn’t jeopardise the ability of some of the wealthiest corporations on the planet to continue to make gigantic profits by burning more fossil fuels and thereby worsening climate breakdown.
So, the red carpet (or should that be the smoggy carpet?) continues to be rolled out for the fossil fuel industry at the COP climate summits. But, how do activists fair? Ahead of COP30, Haroon Siddique wrote in the Guardian that environmental protestors in the UK who are released from prison are receiving licence conditions which are typically reserved for extremism cases. That says a lot. In the eyes of the UK government, those trashing the climate are idolised. Those fighting for a liveable future? Extremists! The lot of them.
The President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, wrote an opinion piece in the Guardian saying that this will be “the ‘Cop of truth.’” Indeed, for climate breakdown is happening as we speak. Transformative change is coming one way or another. Either we continue down this crazy path and face climate chaos, or humanity pulls together and bends the curve. It’s up to all of us to decide which of these two paths we’d like to traverse.
COP30 Begins
In an attempt to cajole leaders out of their reverie, the UN Climate Change Executive Secretary, Simon Stiell, delivered a speech at the start of the conference saying, “To squabble while famines take hold, forcing millions to flee their homelands, this will never be forgotten, as conflicts spread. While climate disasters decimate the lives of millions, when we already have the solutions, this will never, ever be forgiven.”
Protestors sought to add to the urgency when dozens of individuals stormed the summit venue on the second day of talks. Towards the end of the first week, thousands of protestors marched through the streets of Belém, calling for urgent action on the climate and environmental crises. Dharna Noor wrote that many activists were pushing for the adoption of the Belém Action Mechanism (Bam), which would provide fair assistance for transitioning to low carbon societies.
Meanwhile, research released by Amnesty International during the summit, found that around 2 billion people live within 5km (3 miles) of fossil fuel sites, which number over 18,000 facilities and span 170 countries. This figure is estimated to include 463 million children who live within a kilometre of these sites, meaning they are exposed to far greater health and environmental risks. The report notes that indigenous people are particularly exposed, with 16% of this infrastructure situated on their land. Unsurprisingly, things are trending in the wrong direction as a further 3,500 fossil fuel sites are “either proposed, in development, or under construction globally.”
This despite the latest update from Climate Action Tracker, which showed that government plans to cut emissions are so weak that we remain on track for 2.6C of warming by the end of this century. This exceeds both the lower 1.5C and upper 2C goal in the Paris Climate Agreement. However, Fiona Harvey and Jonathan Watts mention that in a separate report, Climate Action Tracker say things could be turned around and 0.9C shaved off this forecast, if countries keep their three promises on:
- Tripling renewable energy production by 2030 (pledge made at the COP28 summit)
- Double energy efficiency worldwide (pledge made at the COP28 summit)
- Significantly reduce methane emissions
It looks uncertain that the world will meet any of these targets. But if this was to happen, it would reduce the forecast to 1.7C of warming by the end of the century, which slots in between the Paris targets.
Back at the summit, Fiona Harvey and Jonathan Watts wrote that over 80 countries called for the introduction of a roadmap for fossil fuel phase-out. These countries included the UK, EU nations, as well as countries from the Pacific, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Unsurprisingly they were met with stiff resistance from petrostates. Linked to this, Damian Carrington profiled Saudi Arabia, who the Guardian label as “the biggest blocker of climate action.”
Another significant barrier was the presence of lobbyists who actively worked to prevent climate action. It was revealed that COP30 had the highest proportion of lobbyists of any COP summit to date. Nina Lakhani wrote in the Guardian, that over 1,600 fossil fuel lobbyists were in attendance, equating to one out of every 25 people at the summit. Collectively, they outnumbered any single country’s delegation at the summit, aside from the host nation of Brazil.
Rachel Sherrington and Nina Lakhani also wrote in the Guardian, that 302 agricultural lobbyists were present at COP30. The irony here is that this summit was held in the Amazon, and this industry is the primary cause of deforestation. You couldn’t make this up.
When a draft of the outcome text was released near the end of the summit, it failed to mention the fossil fuel phase-out roadmap. Fiona Harvey reported in the Guardian, that 29 of the 80 countries who were in favour of the roadmap, threatened to walk out of the summit if the final agreement didn’t include the roadmap.
On a related note, AP reported that Juan Carlos Monterrey Gomez, a negotiator from Panama said that the COP summit was at risk of “becoming a clown show” due its failure to mention fossil fuels as being a primary cause of climate change, in the final agreement text.
The COP summits are notorious for overrunning, even without unforeseen issues occurring. Yet that’s exactly what happened on the penultimate day when a fire broke out and the venue had to be evacuated. In the chaos, the talks were suspended for hours. In short, it therefore became inevitable that this summit would also overrun.
Outcomes of COP30
An agreement was finally gavelled through late on Saturday 22nd November. It has to be said that the agreement was extremely light on pledges, even by COP standards.
The agreement failed to mention the phrase “fossil fuels” and thus these weren’t acknowledged as being the cause of the climate crisis (again, it’s worth pointing out that we’re 30 years deep into climate negotiations and consensus can’t be achieved on this simple statement).
The call by 80 nations for a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels therefore fell flat. As Professor Michael Mann wrote on Bluesky, “A climate deal without explicit language calling for a fossil fuel phaseout is like a ceasefire without explicit language calling for a suspension of hostilities.” A group of countries pushing for the roadmap, agreed to continue their efforts outside the UN process given the lack of consensus at the summit.
Damian Carrington wrote in the Guardian, that one notable outcome was the agreement for a just transition mechanism (JTM) ensuring that the transition to a greener economy is fair for everyone.
Given that the summit was held in the Amazon, the text acknowledged the need for “halting and reversing deforestation,” but it gave no indication of how this may happen. The final agreement continued to make mention of achieving the 1.5C Paris climate target, something that we’ve already blown past – more on this in the next section.
COP30 Agreement
The final COP30 agreement (“Global Mutirão: Uniting humanity in a global mobilization against climate change”) can be found here. Some noteworthy points include:
- Despite scientific warnings that we’ve surpassed the 2015 Paris Agreement goal of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5C – something that the UN Secretary-General also acknowledged this year, world leaders were (once again) hellbent on ignoring this. As such, many points in the final agreement contained the phrase, “with a view to keeping 1.5 °C within reach.” It’s believed that if 1.5C was ever to be achieved now, it would only happen by overshooting the target and then bringing global greenhouse levels down, so as to move back towards 1.5C. The question then is, if our only option is to overshoot and then remove greenhouse gases to reduce global temperatures, why aim for 1.5C at that point? Why not 1C, or 0.5C? Seeing as we’re going to be backpedalling anyway, why not backpedal further to safer territory? Refusing to acknowledge the dead 1.5C target and then seeking to overshoot and row back, but only row back “a little bit” to 1.5C seems completely illogical, when even that level of warming is extremely dangerous. The 1.5C target was mentioned no fewer than 13 times in the 8 page agreement, including:
o “Reaffirms the Paris Agreement temperature goal of holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that achieving this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.”
o “Recognizing that limiting global warming to 1.5 °C with no or limited overshoot requires deep, rapid and sustained reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions of 43 per cent by 2030 and 60 per cent by 2035 relative to the 2019 level and reaching net zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.”
o “Recognizes the need for urgent action and support for achieving deep, rapid and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions in line with 1.5 °C pathways, noting that finance, capacity-building and technology transfer are critical enablers of climate action.”
- Despite all the mentions of the 1.5C target, it nonetheless acknowledges that we’re on track for 2.3C – 2.5C of warming this century. So, on the one hand, they say we need to keep on the 1.5C pathway, while knowing that we’re on track for well over 2C of warming. The hypocrisy got to me when I read the title, “United in celebration of the 10-year anniversary of the Paris Agreement;” the same agreement we’re way off track with. The inaccuracy was also frustrating as Climate Action Tracker said that based on current policy pledges, we’re on track for 2.6C of warming. Not 2.3C – 2.5C that was mentioned in the agreement. Each fraction of a degree leads to more climate chaos, displacement, and death. So, the least these so called ‘leaders’ could do, would be to get the facts straight:
o “Acknowledges that significant collective progress towards the Paris Agreement temperature goal has been made, from an expected global temperature increase of more than 4 °C according to some projections prior to the adoption of the Agreement to an increase in the range of 2.3–2.5 °C and a bending of the emission curve based on the full implementation of the latest nationally determined contributions, while noting that this is not sufficient to achieve the temperature goal.”
- “Acknowledges that the global transition towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development is irreversible and the trend of the future.” But will world leaders, including those of petrostates, put this into practice? 30 years of climate summits suggests probably not.
- “Decides to urgently advance actions to enable the scaling up of financing for developing country Parties for climate action from all public and private sources to at least USD 1.3 trillion per year by 2035 and emphasizes the urgent need to remain on a pathway towards the goal of mobilizing at least USD 300 billion for developing country Parties per year by 2035 for climate action, with developed country Parties taking the lead.” This was positive – at least on paper. In practice though, few targets are achieved from these summits.
Conclusion
It’s been said that COP30 showed multilateralism (the ability of a group of countries to work together) is still alive, despite all the conflict and upheaval in the world. I won’t argue that point.
However, apart from the JTM (just transition mechanism) and the financing for developing countries, very little appears to have moved forward at this summit. A large group of petrostates including Saudi Arabia and Russia, prevented fossil fuels from being mentioned in the text. As such there was no roadmap for phasing out fossil fuels, which is something that 80 countries were pushing for – indeed something critical for tackling the climate emergency.
Despite the 1.5C Paris climate target being dead in the water, the agreement had no fewer than five mentions of intending to keep “1.5 °C within reach.” The only way the world will achieve 1.5C is by overshooting the target and then significantly reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to claw our way back down. But, this in itself seems unlikely as global pledges currently put us on track for 2.6C of warming. This would exceed all the Paris climate targets and jeopardise civilisation as we know it, with large displacements of populations and inconceivable levels of death. Yet world leaders are hellbent on ignoring reality and clinging to a target we breached in 2024.
My feeling is that if we know we’re going to overshoot and then need to rapidly remove greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, why would we ONLY aim to reduce heating to 1.5C? Why not take things back to safer levels? Why not aim to reduce heating back to 1C, or 0.5C, or even 0C? As mentioned above, the logic is completely flawed in that leaders are holding up a dead dog and telling us that it’s alive and doing well. On top of which if they intend to magic their way out of disaster through carbon removal – why not remove enough to take us back to truly safe territory? What they’re proposing doesn’t make any sense.
Therein lies a problem. For as a global society, we’re letting politicians get away with lying and disguising fallacies as possibilities. Climate chaos seems all but inevitable given the lack of progress at this – the 30th annual attempt to make headway. I’m convinced that if we’re to survive this century without any kind of real global leadership, then we urgently need new forms of governance including citizens’ assemblies. Return power to the people, because politicians simply aren’t representing society’s interests like they were employed to do.
Without such an overhaul, I feel that either the escalating climate emergency, or the rapidly advancing AI crisis will destroy society as we know it. Time stopped being on our side years ago.
If the 8.2 billion people alive at the time of writing wish to have a chance of a decent future, we have to realise that the pathway to achieving that lies with each of us lobbying for the change we want, and doing so urgently. When the climate tipping points begin triggering a cascade of further tipping points, when AI has made the population jobless and obsolete and turned us upon one another, then it will be too late for humanity.
I fear we’re a lot closer to that point than many of us would like to acknowledge. With what little time remains, will we choose to waste it frivolously, or fight for our collective future? That’s the question that each of us needs to answer now.
My cli-fi children’s picture book, Nanook and the Melting Arctic is available from Amazon, including Amazon UK and Amazon US. My eco-fiction children’s picture book, Hedgey-A and the Honey Bees about how pesticides affect bees, is available on Amazon’s global stores including Amazon UK and Amazon US.