COP30 climate summit reaches deal that leaves many nations unhappy

Almost 200 nations gathered in Brazil for the United Nations’ annual climate summit capped two weeks of fraught negotiations with an agreement Saturday on new efforts to help guide their transition away from the fossil fuels driving global warming.

However, the accord dodged an explicit mention of the oil, gas and coal responsible for driving the bulk of climate change, and it didn’t detail plans for shifting away from them, leaving some countries unhappy with the outcome.

The eight-page declaration forged at the COP30 summit on the edge of the Amazon rain forest won grudging acceptance. Many nations argued more must be done to counter climate change, while also conceding that an imperfect package was better than none at all.

“With an increasingly fractured geopolitical backdrop, COP30 gave us some baby steps in the right direction,” said Mohamed Adow, director of the Power Shift Africa advocacy group. “But considering the scale of the climate crisis, it has failed to rise to the occasion.”

Leaders at the summit in Belém, Brazil, had encouraged countries to accept a final deal even if it didn’t have everything they wanted. They insisted it was necessary to show nations were linking arms to fight climate change at a time when other multilateral diplomacy is fraying.

“This deal isn’t perfect and is far from what science requires,” said Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland. “But at a time when multilateralism is being tested, it is significant that countries continue to move forward together.”

The agreement from the COP30 summit responds to a looming gap between what’s necessary to limit global warming to 1.5C above preindustrial levels and what countries are actually doing or committed to pursuing.

Under the decision adopted Saturday, the COP presidency would run a new voluntary initiative meant to “accelerate implementation” of action needed to limit global warming to 1.5C above preindustrial levels — a key threshold identified in the 2015 Paris Agreement. A separate “Belém Mission to 1.5” is aimed at enabling implementation of national emission-cutting pledges.

A group of about 80 countries and the European Union had pressed for a more explicit road map to guide the transition away from oil, gas and coal toward a cleaner economy but met resistance from key oil and gas producing states from the Middle East as well as Russia.

Supporters of the final decision said it keeps an opening for further guidelines and collaboration on how countries can fulfill their two-year-old commitment to transition the world’s energy systems away from fossil fuels. That agreement was a crucial aspect of COP28 in Dubai.

The Global Mutirão decision, named after a Brazilian term for collective action, lacks an explicit, word-by-word reiteration of the commitment to an energy transition some delegates said was important to bolster business and investment decisions.

“Staying silent on fossil fuels” isn’t sufficient, said Harjeet Singh, a founding director of the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation.

COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago separately pledged to create two separate “road map” initiatives, one focused on an orderly, just transition away from fossil fuels and one focused on deforestation. Those initiatives would continue during his presidency over the next year.

“They will be led by science, and they will be inclusive,” Corrêa do Lago vowed. The announcement drew applause in the packed COP30 closing plenary room on Saturday.

The declaration itself omits any significant references to combating deforestation, even though the issue was prioritized by Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The only real mention comes in the document’s preamble, with an acknowledgment of the importance of “enhanced efforts towards halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation by 2030.”

Several countries raised concerns Saturday, complaining that their views had been overlooked inside negotiating rooms and the final session. A representative from Panama said the nation was “extremely disappointed” with the final outcome, saying it pretends to measure work on adaptation while refusing to offer meaningful resources to fund it.

Colombia raised an objection to a text addressing how to limit warming because it was silent on the fossil fuels responsible for the majority of climate change.

A Colombia representative said the country had no choice but to object to the mitigation measure unless the summit agreed to add a reference to discussion of “industry and the pathways for implementing the transition away from fossil fuels” at 2026 dialogues.

“There is no mitigation if we cannot discuss transitioning away from fossil fuels,” she told the plenary. “Today, we’re not even allowed to discuss it.”

Corrêa do Lago suspended the closing plenary after the objection, as negotiators gathered in small groups to consider a response.

U.S. President Donald Trump, who has derided climate change as a “scam,” and is pulling his country out of the Paris Agreement, shunned the summit, creating a power vacuum that empowered other nations during the two weeks of talks.

Energy and environment ministers from around the globe wrestled with difficult questions about how trade policy impacts climate change as well as how to boost the amount of finance available to help countries adapt to the warming world’s rising seas, intensifying storms and punishing droughts.

The declaration adopted Saturday calls for the tripling of adaptation finance by 2035 compared to 2025 levels, equivalent to around $120 billion. That fell short of poor nations’ push for the commitment to be met five years earlier.

The measure also takes a swipe at so-called unilateral trade actions such as tariffs and carbon levies, reaffirming that measures taken to combat climate change “should not constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on international trade.” It also sets up a dialogue and a high-level event in 2028 to consider the role of trade policy.

The trade language responds to developing nations concerned about the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which imposes an extra fee on imports of covered goods coming from countries whose price on carbon dioxide is below that of the bloc.