What now, André? – revista piauí

Translated by Christopher Peterson

“Nobody said it was easy. No one ever said it would be so hard.” The words to the song The Scientist, by the British band Coldplay, clearly summarize the drama of 30^th Conference of the Parties (COP30), the upcoming climate conference in Belém, Brazil. The United Nations meeting in the Pará state capital will be the first multilateral meeting on the climate crisis held in Brazil since 1992, when the UN Conference on Climate and Development (UNCED) was hosted in Rio de Janeiro. COP30 is taking place in a context with daunting logistic, geopolitical, and domestic challenges, but mainly with high expectations: the world is expecting the Conference of the Parties to provide answers at a time when political insanity is as unchecked as global warming.

When Coldplay bandleader and beanpole Chris Martin (6 ft 2”) arrives in Belém for a long-awaited performance before the conference, the planet’s eyes will be on another tall man: Brazil’s Ambassador André Corrêa do Lago (6 ft. 6”), president of COP30. The Carioca diplomat has the mission of building an ambitious agenda for the meeting and convincing the delegates from 197 countries to adopt it. This in the most unfavorable context for international cooperation since UNCED, the “Earth Summit” or “Rio-92”, when the world agreed to collaborate to prevent “dangerous human interference” with the climate.

COP30 marks ten years since the Paris Agreement, the 2015 climate treaty that sought to engage all countries of the world in the fight against greenhouse gas emissions, the cause of global warming. That year, the international community agreed to act to keep the Earth’s warming well below 2ºC (preferably below 1.5ºC) compared to pre-industrial levels, to adapt society to the current climate changes, and to finance the transition to a low-carbon economy. Science has suggested that the treaty has failed its mission thus far: in part of 2023 and all of 2024, the planet warmed more than 1.5ºC. Scientists are attempting to explain the phenomenon and determine whether it is permanent. In May, prominent American physicist James Hansen published a study indicating that the Earth system’s susceptibility to additions of carbon dioxide may be worse than previously believed; that is, more warming is coming than previously predicted.

To avoid this phenomenon from becoming permanent, all countries will need to adopt new and courageous targets for cutting emissions. The current targets, known as NDCs, would lead the planet to nearly 3ºC warming by the end of the 21^st century, even in the unlikely event that all the targets are met. In September this year, the world will learn of the new commitments’ aggregate ambition, and COP30 will need to decide what to do in case they are insufficient to protect the Earth’s species, including Homo sapiens (spoiler: they won’t be). The Belém conference will also need to finalize negotiations on such important issues as adaptation to the climate crisis. Finally, the conference will attempt to forge forward with the determination of COP28 in 2023 to make “the transition away from fossil fuels”, beginning in the current decade.

In addition, after three consecutive COPs in countries with dictatorships (Egypt in 2022, Arab Emirates in 2023, and Azerbaijan in 2024), civil society hoped to turn COP30 into a collective global catharsis, with huge street demonstrations and wide grassroots participation in Belém, a city with serious infrastructure problems. This alone would have been too much on Ambassador Corrêa do Lago’s plate and that of his partner conference leader, São Paulo economist Ana Toni, the COP30 executive director. Meanwhile, Belém also needs to deal with an identity crisis, a cursed legacy, and two bombshells.

The identity crisis involves the very usefulness of the COPs at present. Thirty-two years since signing the UNFCCC (the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), we are entering a new terrain: the commitments’ implementation phase. For the first time, there are no more agreements to be celebrated. The main rules for operation of the Paris Agreement have already been adopted, for presenting the targets, inventories of emissions, progress reports with the NDCs, functioning of the carbon markets, and even the global goals for adaptation and climate financing. This brings an existential crisis to the convention: what purpose do the annual junkets serve, now that we have negotiated nearly everything there was to negotiate?

The cursed legacy comes from the Caspian Sea. Late last year, COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, failed spectacularly to reach an agreement on financing, the most divisive issue in the negotiations from the onset. Civil society proposed that COP29 agree on an annual global financing target of 1 trillion dollars in donations or low-interest loans, flowing from the wealthy to the poor countries. What was achieved in practice was 300 billion dollars a year from various sources (including private loans) and wording that was adopted in the final COP plenary, railroaded through under protests from developing countries like India, Cuba, and Nigeria. To leave a door open to the poor countries and avoid a collapse in the negotiations, COP29 pulled off the biggest “don’t call us, we’ll call you” move in global financial history: its decision mentioned a vague “Roadmap from Baku to Belém” to reach 1.3 trillion dollars a year in climate financing. Theoretically, the roadmap needs to be designed jointly by the presidents of COP29 and COP30. Given the Azeris’ history of incompetence, the thankless task was left to Corrêa do Lago and Ana Toni, with the help of a climate neo-convert, Brazilian Finance Minister Fernando Haddad.

Of course, the main bombshell goes by the name Donald Trump.

The U.S. president withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, as everybody knew he would do. He also announced the far-fetched goal of “re-carbonizing” the American economy by reversing Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, the only real plan to fight climate change in U.S. history. With the United States out of the agreement, the world will need to turn elsewhere to cut the more than 5 billion tons of CO₂-equivalent emissions by the U.S. to help meet the 1.5ºC target. And other countries will need to pitch in to compensate for the climate financing gap left by the biggest emitter in the planet’s history (and thus the largest debtor). Of course, no one wants to do either.

Still, pulling out of the Paris Agreement is nowhere near Trump’s worst move for the multilateral climate effort. The United States is undermining the very foundations of the multilateral system, making 2025 the year with the biggest changes in the international system since the end of the Cold War and probably since the end of World War II. This alone does not condemn COP30 to failure, but it virtually guarantees that whatever the outcome of the conference, nothing will remain as before in the climate regime. Against this backdrop, the identity crisis in the UNFCCC is no longer a chronic illness; it becomes an acute and potentially fatal disease.

The climate regime was born in the post-World War II period under impetus from the world’s democracies, based on U.S. hegemony, with relatively stable international rules, multilateralism, and a gigantic increase in international trade and the main economies’ productivity. From Rio-92 to today, the regime has achieved partial success. On the one hand, it has increased public awareness on global warming, highlighted the role of science, created and improved a system of international standards to mitigate climate change, and promoted the establishment of national climate policies and the development of renewable energies. If you notice Chinese electric vehicles on the streets today – or if you drive one – it is largely due to the men in suits-and-ties and the women in business suits who toil late every year in the torturing two-week COP negotiating sessions.

Meanwhile, carbon emissions continue to grow at approximately 2 percent a year. The consensus-based multilateral negotiations model, where a single country can block the progress made by the other 196 members, has guaranteed that the UNFCCC always falls behind the reality it proposes to fight. For example, it took 28 COPs before the gradual elimination of fossil fuels (the main culprits in climate change) was mentioned explicitly in one of the Convention’s documents.

COP21, the Paris conference, happened at an extraordinary moment of alignment of the stars in the international system: the United States under Barack Obama and China with Xi Jinping joined to sponsor an agreement in which each country was required to submit Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), although they were not required to reach them. They wagered that a more robust system of transparency on such commitments (and their fulfillment) would be sufficient to encourage countries to reach their stated targets. However, to function properly, the agreement would need a stable world with extensive international cooperation. This world no longer exists.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 exacerbated the tension in the international system, consolidating the end of the post-Cold War period. This had such an impact on the climate regime that after the relative success of COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, the subsequent COPs 27, 28, and 29 made little headway. The energy transition, where fossil fuels are gradually retired and replaced by renewable sources, became subordinated to energy security and national security in nearly all countries. Oil companies’ profits skyrocketed: in 2022, Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest State-owned petroleum company, logged the highest annual profit in the history of capitalism, with 161 billion dollars, causing an about-face in the promises of love for decarbonization from fossil giants like BP and Shell. The last three years have witnessed the worldwide acceleration of investments in oil and gas exploration and production, in parallel with the rise in extreme climate events.

We are entering a new international system in 2025, the profile of which is still uncertain but very probably more nationalistic, marked by heavy competition and conflicts (trade, technological, and military) between countries, extensive repositioning of global value chains and investment flows, deepening erosion of international institutions, accelerated development of artificial intelligence, a race between the United States and China to be the first to command an artificial intelligence superior to human intelligence, and the frighteningly real possibility that the United States will no longer be a democracy and will become an electoral autocracy à la Hungary, dragging other countries down with it. Since extreme climate events have clearly increased, high- and middle-income countries will tend to orient their policies toward a kind of climate nationalism, heavily prioritizing adaptation as opposed to mitigation (at least in practice, even if they do not change their discourse), with low- and lower middle-income nations in increasingly vulnerable conditions.

A world focused on national sovereignty, security, and survival of the strongest is the exact opposite of a world that joins the collaborative effort proposed by Corrêa do Lago to combat humankind’s greatest collective challenge, the climate crisis. Yet that is precisely where Trump is pushing us.

Whoever wishes to know the United States’ position in this new age can read the nearly one thousand pages of Project 2025, the autocratic playbook underlying Trump 2.0. Drafted by a pool of conservative thinktanks led by the Heritage Foundation, the program includes a severe crackdown on undocumented immigration, restructuring of government bureaucracy (including the Armed Forces), which should now be based on loyalty to the president rather than to the Constitution, a systematic assault on liberal or “woke” culture, sharp corporate and personal tax cuts, drastic tariff hikes for nearly all countries in the world (purportedly to promote U.S. reindustrialization), widespread economic deregulation with dismantlement of environmental and climate policy (highly regulatory by definition), global energy dominance through the promotion of production, consumption, and exportation of fossil fuels (with the refrain popularized by former Alasca governor Sarah Palin and repeated ad nauseum by Trump, “drill, baby, drill”), the end of international financial aid to poor countries, and systematic attacks on universities and science.

In the international sphere, Project 2025 aims to undermine multilateral institutions like the World Health Organization and World Trade Organization (the Heritage Foundation president even suggested that Trump throw the United Nations out of New York), to unleash a widespread trade war, imposing extreme tariffs to negotiate from a position of strength, to weaken NATO, the military alliance that has guaranteed Europe’s security for the last 80 years, to attempt an agreement with Russia, accepting Vladimir Putin’s intended zone of influence and promoting the end of sanctions and the resumption of American investment, maneuvering to reduce Russia’s alignment with China, concentrating American military presence to contain China in the Indo-Pacific region, annexing Greenland, and retaking the Panama Canal Zone. All this is a paradoxical combination of isolationism and imperialism, based on total domination of international law by force.

As any newspaper reader knows, the White House is attempting to implement the entire Project 2025 playbook. Fortunately for humankind, not without resistance.

After the first two months, when Trump’s offensive seemed unstoppable, various opposition fronts appeared in the third and fourth months. The Republican’s approval ratings suffered a sharp drop, from approximately 47% at the start of his term to only 41% in late April – the sharpest decline in history in an American president’s popularity in the first 100 days in office. According to the polls, 60% of the U.S. population disapprove of his economic policy, even though the economy had been Trump’s main advantage over Democrats in the 2024 elections. Major corporate executives began to openly criticize his economic policy, particularly the tariff war. The courts, even judges Trump named during his first term, have ruled against him in most of the litigated cases. Widespread simultaneous public demonstrations against his government have erupted in many American cities, organized by the left wing of the Democratic Party and led by Senator Bernie Sanders. And Trump’s planned alliance with Russia floundered: in the first four months of the Trump Administration, Putin’s systematic bombing made brutally clear that he is still bent on subjugating and destroying Ukraine, that an agreement with the United States is irrelevant to him, and that his alliance with China is very solid. However, the Democratic Party remains disoriented and divided in Congress, without a clear strategy to confront Trump, even though the polls and most analysts predict a Democratic victory in next year’s midterm elections.

On the foreign front, most countries have partially resisted Trump’s bullying thus far. Most of the resistance has come from China, which forced the United States to pull back from the attempt to slap 145% tariffs on all Chinese imports. Trump has heavily undermined American prestige and credibility in the world. The first 100 days of Trump 2.0 can be considered the greatest decline in U.S. global power in history, but the cost is also high for the rest of the planet.

The second bombshell on the path to COP30 is Brazil itself. By insisting on holding the conference in an impoverished metropolis in the Amazon, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made a daring wager on bringing negotiators and the world’s press to the heart of the climate crisis. Out go the deluxe resorts where so many COPs have been held, and in comes life as it really is. But even in two years and with billions in funding from BNDES (Brazil’s Economic and Social Development Bank), the hosts have been unable to deliver a minimum infrastructure to accommodate an event of such size in the city. Belém is on a crash course with the COP today: the available hotel rooms are insufficient in quantity and quality to accommodate the delegations. There is no airport that can handle the increase in flights or the heads of States’ airplanes. There are doubts about public transportation and even the number of restaurants in the city to handle the event.

Since Paris, the Conferences of the Parties have grown in the number of participants, partly reflecting the success of the UNFCCC in raising public awareness on the climate issue, and partly due to the increasingly deadly impacts of extreme events. Paris drew more than 30 thousand participants, compared to 26 thousand at its biggest predecessor, Copenhagen. Dubai received 85 thousand, Baku, 54 thousand. Nobody knows how many participants to expect in Belém, but the Brazilian government is working with a ballpark figure of at least 50 thousand. In May, six months before COP30, the deficit in beds was 18 thousand, and the flats available for temporary rental on platforms were charging around BRL 2 million, or U$ 400 thousand for 11 days (while an upscale apartment in Belém can be purchased for a fourth of that). Such conditions tend to discourage participation by delegates from less developed countries and civil society. The global demand for an inclusive COP thus tends to capsize, with the problem exploding in the laps of Corrêa do Lago and Ana Toni.

In fact, it has already exploded: in June, during the official opening of COP negotiations in Bonn, Germany, Brazil was harangued by both wealthy and poor countries and NGO representatives because of the prohibitive lodging prices in Belém. Some threatened to reduce the number of participants, adding that this would have a direct impact on the legitimacy of the decisions made in COP30. Lula began to listen to complaints from the countries, but as of July he was still wagering on Belém. Cruise ships with 6,000 beds and 3,800 rooms were hired and will be anchored at Outeiro, near the capital of Pará, to fill part of the accommodations gap. However, as of this writing, the digital platform promised since February to manage the hotel rooms and private accommodations had still not been delivered.

Lula, the host, is now a shadow of the figure who drew applause from the entire planet in Egypt in 2022 when he proclaimed that “Brazil is back”, swore to decrease deforestation to zero by 2030, and offered Brazil as the venue for COP30. The president is facing a crumbling base in Congress, with the teratoma formed by the Centrão (the “Big Center”) and the agribusiness caucus voicing independence from the Executive. Whenever thorny negotiations emerge in the Brazilian Congress, the environmental agenda is invariably sacrificed. The meltdown came to a head in May with the Senate’s lightning-fast passage of a bill to dismantle environmental licensing, which had not even happened when Jair Bolsonaro was in office.

Considered by environmentalists to be the worst environmental legislative setback in Brazil’s history, the end of licensing was spearheaded by the president of the National Senate, Davi Alcolumbre of the União Brasil party. The bill meets the senator’s petty interest in authorization for oil drilling at the mouth of the Amazon. The Executive had been alerted by the Ministry of the Environment, but the Administration gave free reign to its own Congressional caucus when the bill came up for the vote, which Alcolumbre won by 54 to 13. In May, the Sumaúma portal reported that the Administration’s omission in this vote was intentional. In the early morning hours of July 17, the last act by the Chamber of Deputies before the Congressional recess was to pass the dismantling of environmental licensing by 267 to 116 votes. All that is left to Lula now is to veto the bill – or to admit the impossibility of controlling greenhouse gas emissions in Brazil, since the new bill grants a free pass to virtually any CO₂-emitting activity.

Although Lula is certainly in his “greenest” phase now in his third term, his Administration follows the national-developmentalist line that has marked the Workers’ Party’s previous administrations. This tendency’s poster boy is Chief of Staff Rui Costa (PT-Bahia), who frequently clashes with Finance Minister Fernando Haddad and Environmental Minister Marina Silva. The Interministerial Committee on Climate Change, chaired by Costa, spent the current government’s first nine months without convening a single time. It was the Chief of Staff that lobbied to curtail the ambition of Brazil’s Nationally Determined Contribution, the climate target that Brazil presented at COP29 in Baku last November. Marina Silva wanted a major reduction in emissions with zero legal and illegal deforestation. The Chief of Staff from Bahia and his team wanted to pull the handbrake, with zero illegal deforestation only, and only by 2035 (recalling that Lula’s promise was zero everything by 2030) and with minimal cuts to emissions. The result of this tug-of-war was the curious target of the most recent Brazilian NDC, which would allow emissions by 2035 using a ceiling of 850 million tons or 1.05 billion CO₂-equivalent tons – the government justified the NDC calling it a “range”, but in reality it means two quite different targets, and it also depends on distinct policies to reach those targets.

Yet nothing exposes the contradictions in Lula’s climate leadership more than his obsession with expanding Brazil’s oil and gas production. While global warming is accelerating unabated, Lula has put scarcely ingenuous pressure on the president of the Brazilian Environmental Institute (IBAMA), Rodrigo Agostinho (Brazilian Socialist Party-SP), to approve a license for Petrobras to explore block 59 in the sedimentary basin of the mouth of the Amazon. On June 17, while Corrêa do Lago and Ana Toni were facing difficult negotiations in Bonn, Brazil’s ANP (National Petroleum Agency) sold 19 blocks on the Amazon mouth, out of a total of 47 blocks under the Permanent Offer. The oil companies’ interest in an environmentally contested area shows that the market believes that authorization of the license for block 59 is merely a matter of time.

The battle for block 59 is symbolic for several reasons. Located in an environmentally sensitive reef bank 100 miles off the coast of Amapá state, it symbolizes the political crossroads for a country that proposes to save whatever it can in the multilateral process to fight climate change, even while it intends to leapfrog from eighth- to fourth-ranking global oil producer. Brazil wants to host a Conference of the Parties in the Amazon while it opens that same Amazon to the industry that causes the most global warming. The government has been performing rhetorical acrobatics to justify its oil drilling, from claiming that “it’s only for research” to promising that the petroleum royalties will rescue Amapá from poverty (that is not what has happened in Coari and Silves in the state of Amazonas, where oil exploration has proceeded for decades while those two towns suffer two of the worst Human Development Indices in Brazil); or from proclaiming that Brazil already has the world’s cleanest energy matrix to swearing that the money from petroleum is the only thing that can bankroll Brazil’s energy transition (while only 15% of the investments planned by Petrobras until 2029 are earmarked for decarbonizing production and producing renewable energies).

The International Energy Agency (IEA) published a report in 2021, updated in 2024, showing that no new fossil fuel project can be licensed anywhere on the planet if the world means to talk seriously about stabilizing global warming at 1.5ºC. Although it is difficult to argue with Lula when the wealthy countries, especially the United States, are expanding their production, it has been just as hard for Corrêa do Lago to avoid questions on Brazil’s hypocrisy in hosting a COP while planning to expand oil and gas production even more than Saudi Arabia.

Against this backdrop of geopolitical drama, mistrust among countries, a crisis in the Climate Convention itself, and Brazil’s domestic difficulties, Belém will need to find leaders capable of pushing ahead with the COP negotiations.

In 30 years of diplomatic conversations, the United States has only been a constructive partner in 12 (four years with Bill Clinton, Barack Obama’s second term, and four years with Joe Biden), but the weight of the world’s biggest historical emitter is so insurmountable that the entire framework of the Paris Agreement was shaped according to American idiosyncrasies. The UNFCCC negotiations were being conducted under the assumption that a transformation in the U.S. energy economy toward decarbonization would be followed by the entire world, but only the European Union has moved in this direction in the last two decades (and even then, less than necessary).

When Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement for the first time in 2017, a coalition was formed inside the United States by corporations and state and local governments (representing the largest share of U.S. GDP) that were still willing to push the agenda forward. This movement, known as “We’re Still In”, sought to ensure the world that the United States is bigger than Washington’s denialism and that the human species’ survival still mattered to most Americans. This allowed the UNFCCC to wait for sanity to return to the White House, with Biden, to resume the COP process in Glasgow in 2021. However, there is no evidence this time around that the “We’re Still In” movement will be repeated: on the contrary, the U.S. corporate sector threw its weight behind the Republican agenda, from big techs to banks, abandoning a coalition driven by the United Nations to promote investments to neutralize emissions. In this scenario, who will step forward in Belém to lead the world toward a less terrifying climate future?

There are four global power hubs: China and the United States are economic, technological, military, energy, and climate superpowers. Russia is a military and energy superpower. The European Union (plus the United Kingdom) is an economic, technological, and climate superpower. China and Russia are allies in all these areas except climate. Trump moved to sour the alliance between the United States and the European Union when he threatened to annex Greenland and sent Vice President JD Vance to an international security conference in Munich early this year, basically to say, “You’re on your own against Russia,” leading Germany to take an unprecedented move of fiscal relaxation to rearm itself (in June, also during the climate conference in Bonn, Trump raised the bar on bullying and demanded that Europe increase its share of military spending from 2% to  5% of GDP; only Spain refused). During the Biden Administration, there was a limited convergence in favor of climate policy between the United States, European Union, and China, but Trump’s policy converges with that that of Russia (the greatest villain in international climate negotiations, besides Saudi Arabia). The balance of global power is thus leaning against decarbonization.

The European Union has been a major leader in international climate policy since Rio-92, as the only big polluter that has actively (although insufficiently) decreased its emissions since 2006. But starting with the invasion of Ukraine, the European Union has reduced the climate agenda’s priority (in practice, if not in discourse) due to the need to confront the economic crisis and to increase military spending, besides the rise in far-right parties, which are climate denialists. In 2022, the European Union and United Kingdom accounted for approximately 7% of global carbon emissions, corresponding to six tons per capita, equal to the world average. The U.S. accounted for approximately 12% of emissions, with 14 tons of CO₂-equivalent per capita.

China accounted for more than 40% of global CO₂ emissions from 2000 to 2019, an extreme in world carbon history. The growth rate of Chinese emissions has decreased; even so, in 2022 the Asian giant accounted for 27% of global emissions, with annual per capita emissions still lower than those of the United States, at 9 tons, but higher than the world average. In 2024, China’s historical emissions, accumulated since 1850, surpassed those of the European Union. Until the 2010s, China played a relatively limited constructive role in the climate regime, but this has changed in recent years. The country became a superpower in low-carbon energy (wind, solar, nuclear, batteries, and electric vehicles) in both production and exportation. China thus enters 2025 as an ambivalent power that promotes renewables but still builds coal-fired thermal power plants on a large scale.

Four conditions are necessary to become a leader in the climate regime: an important share of the world economy, an important share of global emissions, low-carbon technological capacities, and consistent climate policies. The European Union had been a leader starting with Rio-92 through COP26 in Glasgow because it met precisely these four prerequisites. The United States always met the first three requirements but never the fourth, although Biden started a partially consistent climate policy, swiftly destroyed by Trump.

China clearly meets the first three requirements but lacks a consistent climate policy and does not consider itself obliged to contribute to climate financing. The Chinese rely on the famous principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDRs)”, provided explicitly in the Climate Convention, according to which the countries that have done the most to cause the current climate crisis (the wealthy countries throughout their industrialization) need to do more to solve it, including paying what they owe for appropriating the poor countries’ carbon space.

But the interpretation of this principle’s scope changed under the Paris Agreement, mainly with its dichotomous view of the world, i.e. rich versus poor countries (or developed versus developing), a divide that was consecrated in an annex to the UNFCCC that lists all the countries that were considered “developed” in 1992. Numerous things have changed since the treaty was signed. Considering China’s cumulative responsibility for emissions in the atmosphere and its per capita emissions, it is scandalous that the Asian giant continues to take advantage of the CBDRs to shirk the obligations of its status as global superpower competing for hegemony, i.e., to contribute to the climate financing effort. This impasse concerning the emerging economies’ responsibilities has been a major obstacle to progress in the UNFCCC negotiations.

However, China has signaled its willingness (to a certain extent) to fill the power gap left by the United States. In April, following an online event on NDCs organized in New York by Lula and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, President Xi Jinping announced that by September his county will announce an NDC covering the entire Chinese economy, including greenhouse gases, plus absolute targets for reducing emissions – thus far the planet’s largest polluter had relied on its status as a “developing” country to submit vague NDCs based on a metric of “reduction of carbon intensity”, that is, of CO₂ generated per dollar in the GDP, which in practice means an increase in emissions. Although the promise is nothing more than compliance with the guidelines approved in Dubai in 2023 for new NDCs, China’s move was seen as a gesture for Belém’s success. However, it is unlikely that the Chinese will agree to lead any movement towards a timetable for the elimination of fossil fuels. The mystery involves what Beijing’s reaction will be in case other countries make such a proposal at COP30.

What China will do in relation to climate financing is even more uncertain. This upper middle-income Asian country may change its policy, with more consistent commitments and positioning itself as a developed country, consenting to multilateral financing obligations. The odds are very low at present, but the geopolitical context where Trump has decreased U.S. presence in the world creates an excellent opportunity for China to change its policy and to obtain a major gain in prestige and soft power, even decreasing democratic countries’ rejection of its autocratic model. If China does decide to make such a change, it will be after a long and opaque debate in the upper echelons of the Communist Party and will probably not be announced before COP30, although there may be some hints in that direction.

The best scenario for Belém at this juncture is a shared leadership between Brazil, China, European Union, United Kingdom, and South Africa, the largest emitter on the African continent and currently occupying the G20 presidency. This group would spearhead the formation of a coalition with the rest of the world against the Trump government (except, of course, Russia, Gulf Coast oil producers, and some countries aligned with the United States, like Argentina). There is a precedent for such a movement: something similar happened at COP8 in Marrakech, soon after the George W. Bush government pulled the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol, the climate agreement that preceded Paris. Signs that the world is willing to isolate the United States and push forward in the attempt to avoid the exacerbation of the climate crisis appeared in March in the ministerial meeting in St. Petersburg. But there is an obstacle: Narendra Modi’s government in India is negotiating an extensive approach with Trump in various areas. Besides, India is still upset over the result of the Baku conference, where the country was not only left empty-handed but was trampled by the final decision when the conference president’s gavel fell precisely while the head of the Indian delegation was requesting to speak.

In June, at the climate conference in Bonn, the Indians fired a warning of their potential behavior at COP30: they were the main backers of a proposal by Bolivia to include a new item on the meeting’s agenda, to discuss public climate financing. It was blackmail: Bolivia, India, and the other LMDCs (“like-minded developing countries”, or “aligned developing countries”) would only agree to open the conference if the Bonn conference and COP presidents would go along with the new proposal (which the wealthy countries rejected categorically). The solution Brazil found was to postpone the problem by promising that the issue would be discussed in Belém. COP30 is thus burdened with a new impasse to overcome, when Europe is preparing to earmark more government funds for missiles and less to disarm the climate bomb.

In recent years, COP presidents have addressed letters to the Climate Convention’s member countries (the so-called “Parties”) to lay out their visions and action strategies for the conferences. As of this article’s writing, Corrêa do Lago had already sent four such missives. The first letter called on countries to join a global “mutirão” to tackle the climate crisis, recalling the word’s origin in the indigenous Tupi language, denoting a joint community effort. In equally important terms, the president emphasized that Belém should effectively change gears in the climate regime, finalizing the negotiations and moving forward with the implementation phase of the Paris Agreement. Approaching the UNFCCC identity crisis and the difficulties resulting from the consensus-based decision-making model in which further progress seems impossible, the letter also mentions Brazil’s initiative to create a Climate Change Council in the United Nations to function under the Secretary-General’s umbrella. It is still uncertain what this council would do or how it would do it, but Brazil feels that the new space could be a place for making more difficult policy decisions, by majority vote rather than by consensus.

This does not mean that the Paris Agreement is obsolete. On the contrary, as Corrêa do Lago highlights in his letter, the fun starts now with the implementation of a treaty that took a decade to negotiate.

Although it is true that the basic rules for implementation of the member countries’ commitments have already been adopted, including the “Rulebook” and other remaining regulations that were finally concluded in Baku, there are still elements that require more details to enable the implementation and guarantee the agreement’s effectiveness. These include indicators to measure the degree to which the global adaptation goals have been reached and the Just Transition Work Programme, both of which are scheduled for negotiation at COP30.

Another crucial element is “paragraph 28d” of the Paris Agreement’s Global Stocktake, the main decision by the Dubai conference. The wording provides for the transition away from fossil fuels. However, it does not state how long the transition should take, on what time horizon, or in what way, nor does it specify what it means to do so in a “just, orderly, and equitable manner”. It merely says that it is necessary to “accelerate action in this critical decade”. That is, the world has five years to address the issue. Since the decision is not self-implementable, it will require negotiation. But there is no place on the Belém agenda for that. Worse yet, since Dubai, the like-minded developing countries, especially Saudi Arabia and its satellites, have attempted to backpedal on paragraph 28, as if they had never agreed to it at all. In Bonn, even a proposal to establish an uncommitted dialogue on the Global Stocktake’s implementation floundered due to Saudi resistance, but with enthusiastic support from India and China. Brazil thus wants to try to move this sensitive issue to the so-called Action Agenda, a set of voluntary commitments that are customarily announced with great pomp and soon forgotten. The Action Agenda itself needs to gain some teeth for this to happen. Beyond the goals related to the transition toward renewable energies, several other aspirations and calendars are embedded in the decision on the Paris Agreement’s Global Stocktake, such as paragraph 33, providing for countries’ efforts to halt and reverse deforestation in the world by 2030, but again, without specifying how this will be operationalized. This should interest Brazil, home to the planet’s largest tropical forest.

Over time it will probably be necessary to adjust some points in the Paris Agreement. It’s like when you negotiate a job with someone, for example, when you hire somebody to renovate your house. Even after the agreement is all laid out in writing, it is often necessary to switch certain kinds of building materials, expand the service, or adjust the deadlines. That is when you need to sit down to talk again and reach a new agreement. International agreements are like that: the world changes, new challenges emerge, and what was decided before often needs to be updated. Like the Brazilian singer Lulu Santos says, “Everything changes all the time in the world,” and no document, no matter how good, can foresee everything, whether it is a contract, the Paris Agreement, or even a decision by a Conference of the Parties.

But that is not the only reason why COPs are still necessary. They also have the role of monitoring the Paris Agreement’s implementation and effectiveness. They receive and review annual reports on the functioning of agencies and committees, often identifying necessary adjustments and making recommendations. Decisions by the COPs act as contractual “additive terms” that guarantee constant updates to the agreement as reality plays out. An example is the Paris Agreement Implementation and Compliance Committee (PAICC), whose mandate is to investigate “systemic problems” in the treaty’s implementation.

One possible systemic problem is the countries’ recurrent difficulty in meeting the deadline for presenting new NDCs, namely every year within nine months before that year’s COP. The current round’s deadline was February 2025. To date, fewer than 30 of the 196 countries have presented their targets. With an 85% noncompliance rate, it is unavoidable to reflect on possible structural flaws in the system for updating the NDCs. Four months before the Belém COP, it is symptomatic that precisely the two remaining candidates for climate leader, the European Union and China, have still not presented their own climate targets (NDCs) for 2035. The Europeans are reluctant to table their plan for a 90% reduction in emissions by 2040, which would serve as the basis for the NDC.

A possible explanation for the general delay is the fact that drafting an NDC is a herculean task. It requires robust institutional preparation, with organized institutions, well-defined roles, and linkage between agencies, which is a huge and sensitive domestic political effort, since it involves important economic issues and decisions that cut across different areas of government. Knowing that these targets will be examined under a magnifying glass, some countries delay their delivery to present more robust results, while others procrastinate because conservative forces dominate their domestic scenario. If such postponement does not result in more ambitious climate targets, we will have an implementation crisis. The Conferences of the Parties should also serve to diagnose and deal with these systemic crises.

The COPs should not only “monitor” implementation: they can and should promote it. This means to create formal instruments, spaces, and initiatives to urge broader participation by governments and non-State actors in taking actions on the ground, contributing to the achievement of the Agreement’s goals. This role was attempted partially with initiatives like the Marrakech Partnership and more recently with the non-market approaches or NMAs (a kind of “Tinder” to foster “matches” between developing countries and organizations or governments offering support), which have aimed to encourage recording of actions by governments and companies. Although underutilized, such initiatives serve as a basis for designing more robust and effective instruments focused on implementation. A potential legacy of COP30 would be a unified system for promoting, recording, and showcasing climate action in mitigation, adaptation, and financing, also connecting to the actors in charge of frontline implementation, and not only governments.

The “Belém Mutirão for Climate Implementation” should be the package of COP30 decisions capable of reforming the UNFCCC multilateral system ten years after the adoption of the Paris Agreement and at a moment that requires pragmatism and reinforcement of the spirit of international cooperation. Based on the current correlation of forces, between carbon-intensive conservative forces and decarbonizing reformist forces, we know that making this package stick will be quite challenging, apparently almost impossible. Yet history shows us that apparently impossible missions can also work out, often in unlikely conditions. We saw this at the Dubai conference, chaired by a petroleum executive in an oil-producing country, which nevertheless led to progress with fossil fuels.

COP30’s “impossible” package might include:

COP30’s fate remains to be written. The Belém conference may cave in to conservative inertia and join the list of forgettable COPs, when (at best) the beleaguered multilateral climate system will continue adrift in hopes of an unlikely future improvement in geopolitical conditions. In the words of Coldplay songwriter Chris Martin, a “cursed missed opportunity”. Or it may even be remembered as a moment when the UNFCCC multilateral system launched a new phase – more pragmatic and operational – and when the COPs embraced the role of facilitators of implementation and engagement. This requires building institutional bridges between goals and action, between commitments and results.

In the remaining months, Brazil needs to decide whether it wants to be part of the cure or of the disease. The country has a skillful presidency that will be advised by seasoned experts, including Frenchmen Laurent Fabius and Laurence Tubiana, the pair that crafted the Paris Agreement in 2015. Brazil is well-positioned to move forward, but it needs courage to do so and to agree with the Russians, Indians, Chinese, Europeans, Africans, Japanese, Indonesians, and our neighbors in Latin America.

While it is true that 2025 is a daunting year to try to save the planet, it is also a fact that with the 1.5ºC threshold just around the corner, the world has no other choice but to try.