The BBC asks this week if a climate summit in which Trump and Xi Jinping, the leaders of the two most polluting powers in the world, are not present, makes sense. Their absence is another example of the international situation in which COP30 and the tenth anniversary of the Paris Agreement are being celebrated. Then, some 200 countries committed to limiting global warming to between 1.5 and 2 degrees; Today we know that even with the new updated commitments, the temperature will increase by 2.3-2.5 degrees.
The climate news is not encouraging: the year 2024 exceeded the feared 1.5 degrees for the first time and was the warmest recorded to date and everything indicates that 2025 will compete for second place with 2023. Emissions do not stop growing and scientists point out that changes in the climate are accelerating even above what they anticipated. On the other hand, climate multilateralism is not going through its best moment and policies are relaxing. The US has abandoned the agreements, but the EU, until now the champion of the climate fight, is also beginning to change its discourse. «This summit is the confirmation of the elephant in the room; the goal set in Paris is unattainable. The administration Trump has already undone much of America’s institutional infrastructure and environmental programs.; not only those of the Biden era but of what was in the 60s and 70s. The debate in Europe is beginning to change from decarbonization to green competitiveness. India and China have made it clear that their priority is industrialization. We see that there are divergent trends, that there is no longer strong multilateralism, but that the climate is already the secondary product of bilateral trade relations,” says Toni Timoner, co-founder and vice president of the Oikos think tank. The entity has just presented the publication «The COP at the crossroads. Brazil’s COP30 Guide”, which argues that “climate diplomacy is entering an era of uncomfortable maturity, where urgency collides with political and economic wear and tear. The misalignment between commitments, capabilities and credibility calls into question the multilateral system. If COP30 manages to anchor three operational minimums, accounting integrity, usable financing and acceptance of adaptation needs, it will have laid the foundations for effective climate diplomacy and less declarative,” says the text.
COP out?
The appointment, furthermore, takes place in a certain climate of expectation and fatigue. A recent survey of Ipsos conducted in 30 countries states, for example, that 63% of the population believes that the COP is a symbolic meeting with hardly any effective changes in the environment. Politicians are perceived as the biggest obstacle and 65% demand that the private sector contribute financially to the climate agenda. A climate of complaints that has been seen for several appointments. In Glasgow, the arrival of world leaders by private jet did not sit well, as did the fact that the last COPs took place in oil-producing countries.
In the months leading up to the COP in the Brazilian city of Belém there have been protests over rising hotel prices. «What kind of climate justice can be achieved when attending the “People’s COP”, the parallel forum of NGOs and popular organizations, costs between $8,400 and $16,800,” Marcos Colón, professor of Journalism and Indigenous Communities at the Arizona State School, wrote in El País a few months ago. Another accusing finger has been placed on the construction of a highway, Avenida Liberdade, around Belém. Although the state of Pará, responsible for the work, claims that the project began before the city was chosen to host the COP, in some media you can read messages such as that it “reflects the growing gap between those responsible for making decisions and the communities most affected by the climate crisis.” In this sense, in June, more than 200 civil society groups and indigenous peoples presented a “call for reform of UN climate talks”, They point out that after more than 30 years of negotiations, the process has not achieved climate justice and urges “to end the commercial spectacle that the COPs have become through the establishment of an accountability framework to address conflicts of interest.”
«There are things that happen like private jets or oil-exporting countries that engage in sovereign greenwashing, which are hypocrisies that must be accepted because they are part of the game. What is interesting are the gradual advances in terms of accounting regulations, how to model predictions, or how we account for natural capital and biodiversity. They are small steps, perhaps they have no impact, but they are a more interesting basis than large agreements. We know the ambitions of this COP are to continue advancing on the issue of accounting, integrity, and greenwashing. The other aspect of COP30, which is what Brazil wants, is to link the fight against climate change more closely to the defense of biodiversity and natural capital. It makes sense, but it’s going to be difficult to articulate it,” says Timoner.
eternal duties
It is undeniable that the constant presence of lobbyists and the meager results in the negotiations materialize this year in headlines that focus on the importance of this summit as decisive, a turning point. It is also true that the pending duties always seem the same. At this summit, in addition to emissions, adaptation is on the table, since it must be implement the Global Adaptation Framework approved in Dubai, and guarantee resources to strengthen resilience and the protection of biodiversity, and the eternal climate financing issue for vulnerable countries (a purse of 1.3 billion dollars). For Jeroen van den Bergh, an expert economist in climate policies at the Autonomous University of Barcelona: «we are not going to solve climate change with the Paris agreement or the COPs, because it is too big a problem that requires a world government and the agreements are isolated and too many. A good solution is to set a price on carbon and, in this sense, there is good news and that is that Brazil has proposed a coalition for carbon markets, like the one in Europe. For me, the only solution to climate change is a coalition of countries with the same level of ambition, which implement a uniform policy that prevents emissions leaks. On the other hand, the fundamental issue of financing has to separate adaptation and mitigation.
The time of adaptation
To all of the above, we must add the division between deniers (some speak more of obstructionists) and those who raise the flag of the climate emergency. Something that Timoner explains in these terms: «if climate change is a pretext to carry out an anti-capitalist and anti-system policy, then denialism is the way in which opposition to that radicalism is made. The two extremes feed off each other.
Voices against alarmism are increasingly common, even psychologists speak of eco-anxiety or a certain mental fatigue when facing such a complex issue and how this can lead to the abandonment of individual action. Some of the best-known voices are the activist Michel Shellenberger who recently published his book “There is no apocalypse”; Hannah Ritchie, senior researcher at the Global Development Program at the University of Oxford, and Bill Gates who published an open letter a few weeks ago in which he talks about a new way of looking at the climate crisis. “The apocalyptic vision is causing much of the climate community to focus on emissions targets and divert resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world,” he says. «We are seeing an acceleration in climate change that is frightening and the message that we must focus more on adaptation is getting through. No matter how much Europe does in mitigation, the climate we will have is dictated by China and India. We would have to think if the adaptation budget must be reinforced and betting on hydraulic works for floods, anti-fire policies that are based on effective forest management…,” says Timoner.