At the COP30 summit in Brazil on Saturday, the world agreed to a new climate deal that calls for tripling funding to help countries adapt to increasingly severe climate impacts. But the countries failed to agree on a plan to phase out fossil fuels after entrenched differences threatened to derail negotiations.
The agreement was reached after more than two weeks of increasingly tense negotiations between representatives of more than 190 countries in the port city of Belem, known as the gateway to the Amazon.
The final text made no mention of fossil fuels, a driver of the climate crisis, signaling a reversal of consensus agreements reached just two years ago. It included only a general agreement on deforestation, rather than more explicit commitments, which was another key issue in the negotiations.
More than 80 countries have endorsed the Fossil Fuel Transition Roadmap, building on commitments made at COP28 in Dubai in 2023. However, fierce resistance from petrostates and large consumers of fossil fuels prevented consensus.
Instead, the president of the CoP in Brazil said that as part of reaching an agreement, it would prepare additional texts detailing a global roadmap to phase out fossil fuels and tackle deforestation, which not all countries have signed.
This unusual move was intended to demonstrate that all countries' concerns were heard at the summit and allow them to potentially use the language at future summits.
The reaction from global climate experts has been mixed. Ten years after the landmark Paris Agreement, under which countries pledged to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the summit in Brazil proved the process “works”, former German climate envoy Jennifer Morgan said.
“While the results in Belen fall far short of what is needed, they represent significant progress,” Morgan said in a statement. “Despite efforts by major oil-producing nations to slow the transition to a green economy, multilateralism continues to support the world's interests in tackling the climate crisis.”
And Sierra Leone's Environment and Climate Change Minister Jiwo Abdoulaye said this year's summit had “moved the needle” in terms of richer, more developed countries taking on greater fiscal responsibility to help the rest of the world adapt to climate change.
But where some saw cautious progress, others noted a much grimmer trend. “Science was excluded from COP30 because it insults polluters,” said Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, Panama's special envoy for climate change. “Forest KS” without any obligations on forests is a very bad joke. A climate solution that can't even say “fossil fuel” isn't neutrality, it's complicity. And what's happening here goes beyond incompetence.”
Harjeet Singh, a COP veteran and founding director of the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation, agreed. “The hypocrisy of the Global North has been exposed,” he said. “They offer us endless new ‘dialogues’ that cannot pay for adaptation or rebuilding of homes destroyed by climate disasters.”
This story is current and will be updated.
For more CNN news and newsletters, create an account at: CNN.com
