Expectations haven’t been the highest for COP30 in Brazil. The absence of any high-level US officials in Bélem comes on the heels of President Trump’s description of climate change as a ‘green scam’ at the UN General Assembly in September, a speech greeted with enthusiasm by a small – but very vocal – faction of populist politicians and groupings across Europe and the wider world.
The political picture isn’t all one way of course. The elections in 2025 of Claudia Sheinbaum (a climate scientist) in Mexico, Mark Carney in Canada and Anthony Albanese in Australia show that. And Ed Milliband continues to champion the economic and security benefits of a green agenda in the UK.
But what can multilateralism still deliver? What might COP30 achieve? Host President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has, like other leaders, said that this meeting will be more about ensuring the implementation of existing agreements, like Paris, rather than coming to new ones, and that the meeting’s very location in Bélem presents an opportunity to focus minds: “a COP in the Amazon, not a COP about the Amazon.”
After the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were signed in New York 10 years ago, I remember standing in Central Park at the celebratory concert and feeling unsettled; that somehow the signing of the SDGs might be seen as the end goal in itself, time for a party, and they wouldn’t necessarily translate into action. The SDGs were not perfect and they certainly haven’t been taken in full into national government plans. But what they did do was create a framework, a common language in which all future negotiations could take place. Negotiations between companies and NGOs became smoother once we had the SDG framework and language.
COP, the Conference of the Parties, gives those parties, the nation states, a framework and a language to build progress around. Governments of all political persuasions might despair of COP, but imagine if we didn’t have it? Imagine trying to move forward by starting from scratch each time.
Progress isn’t easy, because building consensus is messy. All the parties have their own domestic priorities and pressures. And one of the barriers to progress is thinking that it’s binary. Today’s anti-ESG rhetoric follows a period where ESG was positioned as the key to economic growth. Both sides are responsible for the stulted momentum that comes from zig-zagging.
Over 80 per cent of the world’s population say they are concerned about the climate crisis and want governments to take action. And COP30 presents an opportunity to show those people – and their governments – that action is possible.
One of President Lula’s ambitions for this COP is to get the parties to sign up to the Tropical Forest Forever Facility a financing mechanism to pay tropical forest countries for maintaining their forests. This is a realistic ambition and would deliver the sort of outcome that can be held up as proof of action.
Holding onto successes like this is important, and not dismissing COPs as a failure if they don’t lead to agreement on everything. Messy is how progress happens.
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