COP30 – is failure baked into the Paris Agreement?
NOVEMBER 28, 2025
Martin Franklin assesses the recent conference in Brazil.
Science warns us that we are on the brink of climate ‘tipping points’ which destroy ecosystems, cause increasingly extreme weather events and ultimately threaten human civilisation. It is hard to grasp how issues of such existential importance are being handled in such a dysfunctional way.
After thirty summits and now ten years since the Paris Agreement, the UN Conference of the Parties, COP 30, should have been a landmark event. But it was yet another dance of dispute and delaying tactics by fossil fuel interests. Besides the large presence and influence of lobbyists, the problems with COPs and the 2025 Paris Agreement are deep and raise questions about the usefulness of these performative gatherings.
The prospects for COP30 were gloomy. The international surge of right-wing politics has pushed climate science denial and dismantled progressive environmental programmes, encouraged by President Trump’s statement that climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”
The last three summits were held in undemocratic petrostates, but Brazil’s democratic state allowed COP30 to be a platform for climate justice protests. Even so, the voices of those experiencing the intensifying impacts of climate heating, such as indigenous groups, were heard outside the conference, at times subject to police control, while those benefitting from fossil fuelled business as usual, were inside the conference, shaping agreements.
For two main reasons COP is unlikely to halt climate heating before it’s too late. First, the Paris Agreement requires the 195 signatory states to set carbon reduction goals, known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). NDCs are reviewed every five years, and further reductions are meant to be set to limit global heating to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2200 with an ambition for 1.5 degrees – this has already been overshot.
Ten years on from Paris, COP 30 had a critical role to review and set higher targets to limit global heating, but many countries failed to submit NDC pledges. A UN Environment Programme assessment lamented that:
“a huge implementation gap remains, with countries not on track to meet their 2030 NDCs, let alone new 2035 targets.” The full implementation of current NDCs would result in up to 2.8°C of warming above preindustrial levels.
The lack of submissions, means that the conference seems to have ended without a new global NDC reduction target.
Note that NDCs are pledges – not legally binding targets. They do not reflect real reductions and are unsecured promises. Still more alarmingly, the estimates of mitigated warming are based on inaccurate data. Leaving aside the absence of the USA – the world’s biggest fossil fuels producer and second largest CO2 emitter from estimates – there are serious problems with emissions accounting that underpin the Paris Agreement.
A Washington Post report exposed how many countries’ climate pledges are based on flawed data. The investigation found underreporting of greenhouse gas emissions, amounting to an estimated gap of 8.5 to 13.3 billion tons in 2021.
Underreporting results from, amongst other factors, differing national capacities to measure emissions, intentional undercounting, and exclusion of some greenhouse gases such as methane. Some countries exclude logging and deforestation defining them as carbon neutral along with emissions from biomass fuels (such as burning wood pellets).
The second problem is ‘consensus-based decision-making’. Agreements do not result from a majority vote so a single objection will veto them. At COP1 in 1995, advice from US lobbyists linked to fossil fuels, auto companies and libertarian political groups led the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to argue against a “last resort” voting rule to break deadlocks.
Consensus decision making inhibits meaningful action and increases the vulnerability of summits to procedural ‘climate obstruction tactics’ which bog down discussions and place time pressures on delegates to compromise in order to reach agreement. At COP30 the inclusion of fossil fuels was a sticking point. Despite the support of over 80 countries, a roadmap for transitioning away from fossil fuels, or any mention of them, was excluded from the text.
Majority decisions, with a vote, would allow countries to agree and initiate effective policy measures and hopefully bring others onboard. Instead, COP summits end in weakened commitments laced with ambiguity and loopholes, outcomes favouring the richer states and fossil fuel interests over poorer nations, some facing imminent obliteration from rising seas, extreme weather and desertification.
To control climate breakdown, core actions are necessary. These include the phasing out of fossil fuels (and supporting the growth of sustainable alternatives), halting deforestation and financing poorer, global south countries to enable them to cut emissions, adapt and build resilience against environmental breakdown. Reparations for loss and damage caused by the historic emissions of the global north nations also need to be in place. These actions would shift the dial towards climate justice. So how were they addressed in the final agreement?
Any reference to fossil fuels was blocked by fossil-fuel-aligned governments, as was a deforestation roadmap. In response Brazil pledged to produce voluntary roadmaps for transitioning away from fossil fuels and to halt and reverse deforestation, but these will be outside the COP process.
Headlines stated that developing countries would receive a tripling of financial support from rich countries to adapt to the climate crisis. But these appear to rely heavily on loans which would worsen the debts of poorer countries and are not expected before 2035. Vulnerable nations are facing crises now.
The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that the funding secured at COP30 is a fraction of the up to $365 billion per year needed by 2035 for adaptation in developing countries. “Developing countries are receiving less than 10 per cent of the money they need to adapt to a world increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather… By 2035, developing nations will need well over $310 billion per year in dedicated funding to adapt to a planet increasingly altered by polluting fossil-fuel emissions”.
Rich nations acknowledged responsibility for historic emissions and began the process of operationalising a Loss and Damage Fund. Yet the figure ($250 million) for the first phase is seen as a “drop in the ocean,” given the challenges poorer nations face to address climate-related losses. Estimates suggest a financial gap of nearly $400 billion for 2025 alone.
COP outcomes are always spun as positive progress and if you’re part of the institutionalised culture of UN bureaucrats and participants, getting an agreement is in itself an achievement and failure would scupper the Paris Agreement. However, COP progress weighed against the reality of greenhouse gas emissions and global heating over 30 years can only be seen as abject failure.
Nonetheless, some outcomes maybe positive. COP30 launched a Just Transition ‘mechanism’ to support workers and communities affected by a shift away from fossil fuels. It was hailed as an important outcome of pressures from climate justice campaigners and an acknowledgement of the need for such a global shift that does not abandon workers and frontline communities.
Reflecting frustration with the agreement’s exclusion of a fossil fuel roadmap, Colombia in collaboration with the Netherlands, will hold a global just transition conference in April 2026. Governments, experts, industrialists, indigenous people and others, will meet to chart “legal, economic and social pathways” for a fair and just phase-out of fossil fuels. Twenty-four countries and Pacific island nations signed up for this conference, including fossil fuel producers Australia and Mexico. Their presence can be seen to endorse the importance of a just transition away from fossil fuels.
In addition, the Belém Declaration on Global Green Industrialization was launched, aiming to accelerate industrial transformation towards sustainability. 195 countries and international organizations approved the package. Both initiatives, the conference and declaration, include the usual COP lineup but will hopefully not reflect all of its dysfunctionalities.
The aims of the Colombia conference align with a recent opinion from the International Court of Justice on the Obligations of States in regard to Climate Change. The ICJ affirmed that states are obliged to protect the climate system from human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Though advisory, it has implications for national climate policies and international climate negotiations, opening new pathways for international and domestic litigation against governments. This has already been mentioned in relation to the Australian Government’s proposed legislation to remove environmental impact assessments and climate harms from fossil fuels. The island nation, Vanuatu is seeking to mobilise the ICJ opinion though the UN against this legislation, pursuing a UN resolution to turn it into political action.
COP provides a platform for protests and concern about environmental breakdown. It also exposes and shifts the power imbalances between opposing parties in the fight for climate justice. Yet it currently provides a weak means of accountability and delivery on climate measures that need to be strengthened. Does the conference in Colombia and other initiatives adjacent to COP indicate a fragmentation that undermines it or will they provide pressure for positive and meaningful action?
If a habitable planet for humans is to be secured for the future, a more functional international body is needed. Can COP be reformed and what other pathways can be developed in time?
Martin Franklin is a member of the steering committee of the Islington Environmental Forum.
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Fossil Fuels at COP30: Sacred, Profane and
Unmentioned
If the camel is a committee’s version of a horse, then the concluding notes of the 30th United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP30) at Belém, Brazil, were bound to be ungainly, weak, and messy. That is what you get from an emitting gathering of over 56,000 mostly subsidised attendees keen to etch their way into posterity. Leave aside the fact that some of the conference mongers might have been well-meaning, the final agreement was always going to be significant for what it omitted. It was also notable for lacking any official role from the United States, a country where Make America Great Again has all but parted ways with the notion of climate change.
For three decades, these events have drawn attention to climate change ostensibly to address it. For three decades, the stuttering, the vacillation, the manipulation have become habitual features, making the very object of condemnation – fossil fuels – both sacred and profane. The message is that humanity must do without it lest we let planet Earth cook; the message, equally, is that it can’t. “COP30 will be the ‘COP of truth,’” Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva declared extravagantly at the 80th United Nations General Assembly in September, immediately dooming it to comic platitude. The sacred and profane – fossil fuels – would remain strong at the end of the show.
There was some initial promise that attending member states might do something different. Initial pressure was exerted by the Colombia-led coalition (“mutirão” or joint effort) of 83 countries to abandon the use of fossil fuels and chart a Roadmap to decarbonise the global economy.
Then came a soggy threat from a group of 29 countries in a letter to the Brazilian COP presidency that any agreement lacking a commitment to phase out fossil fuels would be blocked. “We cannot support an outcome that does not include a roadmap for implementing a just, orderly, and equitable transition away from fossil fuels,” emphasised the authors, which included such countries as Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Palau, the UK, and Vanuatu. This expectation is shared by a vast majority of Parties, as well as by science and by the people who are watching our work closely.” The threat duly sagged into oblivion.
The resulting COP 30 agreement, with the aspirational title “Global Mutirão: Uniting humanity in a global mobilization against climate change” was a tepid affair. There were the usual tired acknowledgments – the importance of addressing climate change (yes, that’s what they were there for); the need to conserve, protect and restore nature and ecosystems through reversing deforestation (wonderful); the human rights dimension (rights to health, a clean, healthy and sustainable environment); the importance of equity and the principle of common albeit differentiated responsibilities specific to the States (fine sentiments) known as the just transition mechanism.
Most conspicuously, the final agreement makes no mention of fossil fuels (it made a unique appearance in COP28), tantamount to discussing a raging pandemic without ever mentioning the devastating virus. As Jasper Inventor, Deputy Programme Director of Greenpeace International acidly remarked: “COP30 didn’t deliver ambition on the 3Fs – fossil fuels, finance and forests.” In what can only be regarded as an observation born from defeat and desperation, UN Climate Change Secretary Simon Stiell offered his summary: “Many countries wanted to move faster on fossil fuels, finance, and responding to climate disasters. I understand that frustration, and many of those I share myself. But let’s not ignore how far this COP has moved forward.” In this area of diplomacy, movement is excruciatingly relative.
There remained a modish insistence on voluntariness, with COP30 President André Corrêa de Lago announcing a voluntary “roadmap” to move away from fossil fuels. Officially, the sacred and the profane could not be mentioned; unofficially, other countries and civil society could do what they damn well wished to when addressing climate change challenges. To that end, the process would take place outside the formal UN processes and merge with the Columbia-steered “coalition of the willing”. The parties would otherwise, as the agreement stipulated, “launch the Global Implementation Accelerator” to “keep 1.5°C within reach”, yet another woolly term conceived by committee.
Colombia and the Netherlands were quick to announce their co-hosting of the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels. “This will be,” explained Irene Vélez Torres, Colombia’s Minister for Environment and Sustainable Development, “a broad intergovernmental, multisectoral platform complementary to the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] designed to identify legal, economic, and social pathways that are necessary to make the phasing out of fossil fuels.”
Admirable as this may be, a note of profound resignation reigned among many in the scientific community. While COP30 might have been seen as a meeting of “truth and implementation”, the truth, charged Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, was that keeping the target of 1.5°C within reach entailed bending “the global curve of emissions downward in 2026 and then reduce emissions by at least 5% per year.” And that’s saying nothing about implementation.
Al Hamndou Dorsouma, head of the Climate and Green Growth division at the African Development Bank Group (center of the panelists), cited several Bank Group mechanisms related to the climate-peace-security nexus. Source: African Development Bank Group (AfDB)
November 28, 2025
By Eurasia Review
Climate change, of which Africa has been the principal victim, is aggravating severe and rising security threats across the continent — including terrorism, armed confrontations, and inter-community conflicts — endangering stability and, ultimately, the very survival of its populations.
Nine of the 10 countries most vulnerable to climate change are in Africa. The continent also accounts for 12 of the 19 countries most affected by armed hostilities, and nine of the 20 experiencing institutional and social fragility.
To help address the climate–peace–security nexus, the United Nations Office to the African Union, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, and the African Union Commission convened a roundtable on 14 November 2025 in Belém, Brazil — host city of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30). The discussion, held under the theme “Adapting for Stability – Scaling Partnerships for Peace and Climate Resilience in Africa,” explored how the continent can strengthen cooperation and reinforce resilience in the face of rising climate-related security risks.
The side event brought together representatives from international organisations, development finance institutions, civil society, and other development actors, creating a platform for shared analysis and collaboration.
“Climate change is amplifying conflict and fragility on the continent,” explained Dr Al Hamndou Dorsouma, Manager for Climate Change and Green Growth at the African Development Bank Group. “In 2024 alone, climate disasters caused 9.8 million new internal displacements in Africa, highlighting how deeply interconnected climate risks and forced mobility are.”
He added: “Declining and irregular rainfall, as well as water scarcity, have altered the seasonal migration patterns of African pastoral communities, increasing competition between pastoral groups and between pastoral and agricultural communities. This has led to recurring conflicts in almost every region of the continent, from Ethiopia to Darfur, from Kenya to Nigeria, and throughout the Sahel.”
“There can be no implementation of climate projects without peace; we cannot fight climate change without peace,” said Nazanine Moshiri, Senior Advisor on Climate, Peace and Strategic Partnerships at the Berghof Foundation.
“As the continent’s leading development finance institution, the African Development Bank Group is fully committed to working with African countries and development partners to build climate resilience while addressing the root causes of conflict and fragility,” continued Dorsouma. “I invite our colleagues and partners here today, as well as those following online, to focus our efforts on financing: investing in early warning systems and adaptation measures is not only a humanitarian imperative, but also an economically rational and sustainable solution. Every dollar invested in climate adaptation and resilience generates an ROI of between two and 10 US dollars.”
According to Abdi Fidar, Director of the Climate Prediction and Applications Centre at the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), it is now difficult to separate the security-climate nexus, as fragile areas do not benefit from climate finance.
Dorsouma went on to explain to those present that the African Development Bank’s response to the climate-peace-security nexus is threefold. First, there is its Strategy for Addressing Fragility and Building Resilience and its Transition Support Facility (TSF), a concessional financing mechanism for 37 low-income African countries enduring fragile situations. The Bank has also established a Climate Change and Green Growth Strategic Framework for 2030, which has positioned the climate-peace-security nexus at the core of its priorities for climate change adaptation in Africa.
The pan-African development institution has recently introduced innovations in the design of its operations taking on board aspects such as fragility and climate vulnerability. Most importantly, it has also increased financial resources for adaptation and resilience. In 2023, the Bank Group launched the Climate Action Window under the auspices of the African Development Fund, with some $450 million in funding made available. In one year of operations, the Window has already supported 59 climate action projects in African countries experiencing fragility and climate vulnerability, including 41 focused on adaptation and 18 on mitigation, with a cumulative value of $386 million, according to Dorsouma, who cited other instruments that have been implemented to tackle climate and security issues.
“Building resilience while addressing fragility requires joint action across the spectrum, from humanitarian aid to peacebuilding, but most importantly with an emphasis on climate-resilient development efforts, which is the only guarantee for safeguarding the development gains already achieved and preventing climate change from continuing to amplify fragility and undermine efforts to achieve sustainable development,” said the Bank Group representative. “I call on each and every one of us to intensify our efforts to build a more climate-resilient and peaceful Africa.”
In conclusion, Charles Mwangi, Head of Programmes at the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance, explained that civil society, often closest to the affected communities, must be included in discussions and in the definition of national, continental and global policies, and on climate, peace, and security in order to avert local risks and injustices that could lead to conflict.
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