COP30 had all the elements: There was fire, there was water, there was earth, and … there was some (hot) air, too.
This year’s 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference — which the U.N. secretary-general said he hoped would produce an “ambitious compromise” — finally closed on Saturday night, 27 hours past the deadline. Not exactly unusual for a gathering that has gained a reputation for going into overtime.
So, what took so long?
One of the conference’s main outputs is the mutirão decision — an eight-page document meant to tackle some of the most contentious issues, including the reality that current action climate plans won’t limit warming to the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold, and that developing countries need financial support in order to survive what’s coming.
At the closing plenary on Saturday, Colombia made a last-minute stand against the final text. “There is no mitigation if we cannot discuss transitioning away from fossil fuels,” the country’s negotiator said, prompting Brazilian COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago to halt the session for an hour. When delegates returned, the text remained unchanged, with only a promise to take up Colombia’s concerns elsewhere. Russian delegate Sergei Kononuchenko fired back, accusing objectors of “behaving like children who want to get your hands on all the sweets.”
That exchange underscored one of the central divides at this COP: whether to include a clear commitment to move away from fossil fuels. More than 80 countries pushed for such a road map, but concrete steps lagged. Colombia and its allies wanted it; major oil-producing countries such as Russia and Saudi Arabia remain firmly against it.
Recap: COP30 reporters’ notebook Day 12
When the math isn’t mathing
The underlying math hasn’t changed. Taken together, national climate plans — also called nationally determined contributions, or NDCs — don’t put the world on a 1.5-degree pathway.
“The world needs a strong plan to close the gap between current NDCs and what science shows is required to keep temperature rise under control,” said Barbara Rosen Jacobson, senior advocacy adviser at Mercy Corps.
Yet over a quarter of countries still haven’t submitted their updated NDCs. Some of these are tiny emitters — no one is stressing about Togo’s greenhouse gas emissions — but India and Saudi Arabia, which are also yet to submit, are another story.
“COP30 has not delivered everything Africa asked for, but it has moved the needle,” said Jiwoh Abdulai, Sierra Leone’s minister for environment and climate change. “There is clearer recognition that those with historical responsibility have specific duties on climate finance, and public finance remains at the core of adaptation, not an afterthought to private capital,” Abdulai said.
Adaptation finance was another core part of the mutirão text. Climate adaptation — or the practical ways countries prepare for and cope with the impacts of a warming world — covers everything from strengthening coastlines to researching drought-resilient crops. Developing countries have been pushing for roughly $120 billion a year by 2030, or a tripling of current adaptation finance flows. What they received was a partial win: The document calls for a tripling, but doesn’t specify the baseline, and the target date is 2035 instead of 2030. A two-year work program should sort that out, and the text still avoids specifying whether this tripling should come from public or private sources.
Much of the document is vague by design. A Carbon Brief analysis points out that it leans on inactive verbs — 69 instances of words such “acknowledges” and “welcomes” — which don’t require action. Only 32 active verbs appear, and many of those describe ongoing efforts rather than new commitments.
Still, some argue there’s room for cautious optimism. “COP30 took place as geopolitical tensions continue to rise. Achieving progress in such uncertain and challenging times is never guaranteed, yet the talks in Belém have shown that the Paris Agreement is working and delivering results,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme.
Read: Can climate adaptation attract private capital? COP30 delegates think so
See also: Sierra Leone challenges COP30 push for private sector to fund adaptation
Nothing about us without us
How do we make sure the transition to a green economy doesn’t leave people — especially vulnerable people — behind? The coal worker who could lose his job; the low-income family facing higher energy prices; the Indigenous community threatened by a clean energy project on their land. This has been another key conversation at this COP and several before it, and it is known as the just transition.
Negotiators have been working on guidelines for exactly this. COP30 produced a just transition mechanism — essentially a strategy to ensure that the shift to a green economy is fair for everyone, including frequently marginalized groups such as women and Indigenous peoples. Countries agreed to cooperate on this through technical assistance, capacity building, and sharing knowledge.
“The COP30 breakthrough on the issue of the Just Transition is good news. … This sends a message to workers all over the world that the COP is also working for them, and that it’s in all our interests to ensure the green economy is a fairer economy,” Ben Wilson, director of public engagement at the Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund, said.
The Climate Action Network went one step further, calling it “one of the strongest rights-based outcomes in the history of the UN climate negotiations.”
Background reading: At World Bank meetings, a push for UN-led ‘just transition’ framework
Related: The global finance rethink behind the green transition (Pro)
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Food fights
“I want to applaud Brazil, because they have made this a successful COP for those who I work to support, and those are the most vulnerable people, the hungry people across the globe,” Ertharin Cousin, CEO and cofounder of Food Systems for the Future and former executive director of the World Food Programme, told me on the sidelines.
Food has been a major throughline here, partly because Brazil put hunger front and center and pushed to weave it into climate discussions. It’s also because of Brazil’s status as a global breadbasket and major exporter, a role achieved after rapidly pivoting from being a net food importer over the past few decades. But it came with substantial environmental costs, from deforestation to high methane emissions from cattle.
These tensions showed up clearly in the AgriZone. Brazil’s agricultural research agency, Embrapa, set up this agricultural innovation-focused pavilion several miles away from the main COP30 venue. Its corporate sponsors — including Nestlé and Bayer — drew criticism from civil society groups pushing for strictly regenerative approaches to agriculture. More than 300 lobbyists for food and farming interests were in Belém, higher than last year’s COP29 but fewer than in Dubai in 2023. Some civil society organizations pushed back on what they saw as misleading claims, such as “low-carbon beef.”
Others noted that this debate is especially charged in places where soils are deeply depleted. Many parts of Africa have had their soils stripped of nutrients after years of cultivation without replacement, while fertilizer use remains extremely low, said Tilahun Amede, the head of resilience, climate, and soil fertility at AGRA.
Amede said that restoring soil fertility is essential, noting that in Africa both regenerative and chemical fertilizers are necessary to build up those nutrients. But even with that urgency, he added, it remains hard to get the regenerative and more industrial agriculture camps to engage with each other constructively, even at COP30.
The main mutirão decision makes no mention of food at all, a point of frustration for many.
Background reading: Welcome to the AgriZone, where the heat is on
Related: At COP30, Brazil carries forward its food-first agenda
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Tree hugging
A fossil fuel road map wasn’t the only road map on the table. Many negotiators were also pushing for a deforestation road map, which drew strong backing: 93 countries, according to Carbon Brief’s count, including the EU and the Coalition for Rainforest Nations. But despite that support, it ultimately didn’t make it over the finish line.
Still, Brazil’s flagship effort, the Tropical Forests Forever Facility, or TFFF, continued to pick up momentum. Germany — which had seemed to drag its feet on an investment — finally joined last week with a $1 billion commitment, adding to the $5.5 billion announced at the start of COP30.
The TFFF is a forest investment fund aimed at keeping rainforests standing. Hosted by the World Bank, it proposes to pay countries to protect forests using investment rather than traditional aid. Returns are expected to generate $4 per hectare annually.
The model has been praised for its innovation, but it has also drawn questions about whether the incentives are enough to shift real-world economics. As Sierra Leone’s Abdulai put it: “Deforestation is an economic issue. If people are cutting trees, there’s an economic reason for it.” And the math he laid out is sobering: “The solution also has to make economic sense. If you want to pay me $4 per hectare to protect a forest but I can make $200 from destroying it. Which one is someone living in extreme poverty going to select? So that is something that we need to be clear about.”
Background: Germany commits €1 billion to flagship COP30 forest fund
Indigenous COP?
How did Indigenous peoples actually figure into this COP? In the lead-up, some billed it as the “Indigenous COP,” given the Amazon setting. Once inside, though, many Indigenous delegates pushed back on that framing.
“COP30 is known as the Indigenous COP30 … this cannot be further from the truth,” said Willo Prince of the Nak’azdli Whut’en in Canada. “When oil and gas lobbyists outnumber Indigenous delegates by nearly 50%, this is not the call of truth,” urging against the “tokenization” of Indigenous people.
There was meaningful progress. The just transition text delivered strongly on Indigenous rights, including free, prior, and informed consent; self-determination; and recognition of the rights of Indigenous Peoples in Voluntary Isolation and Initial Contact. “This decision provides us with tools to continue advocating, both nationally and internationally, to ensure that all policies related to the energy transition respect our rights,” said Emil Sirén Gualinga, a member of the Kichwa People of Sarayaku, Ecuador.
The mutirão text also includes references to Indigenous peoples, but some felt the language didn’t go far enough: “We had proposed stronger and more specific language for the mutirão text, including on the need for full and effective participation in the development and implementation of the NDCs, as well as direct access to financing. Although there were advances, Indigenous participation in the COPs remains limited, and our proposals are included in the decisions only in a few cases,” Gualinga said.
Until next time
One subplot running through COP30 was the long-awaited decision on future hosts.
Turkey and Australia had both been pushing to host COP31. After years of gridlock, they reached an unusual compromise: COP31 will take place in Turkey, with Turkey serving as COP president, while Australia will take on a newly created role as president of the negotiations. The Pacific will host a pre-COP meeting supported by Australia.
“It’s an awkward alliance, not least because one of the key things that Australia and Türkiye have in common has been their low climate ambition,” said Sarah Colenbrander, director of the climate and sustainability program at ODI Global. But she also pointed to the opportunity: Each brings a different diplomatic network — Turkey with Africa and the Arab Group, the Pacific with small island developing states, and Australia with the developed countries bloc. But this could, of course, also create friction and internal competition with COP’s leadership.
And while Colombia didn’t succeed in getting stronger fossil fuel language into the COP30 text, it did walk away with something: a new venue to keep that fight alive. Colombia and the Netherlands will cohost the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels on April 28-29, 2026, in Santa Marta, Colombia, with Pacific nations planning a follow-up meeting. Colombia’s environment minister described it as a broad intergovernmental platform outside the UNFCCC meant to map the legal, economic, and social pathways needed to phase out fossil fuels.
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About the author
Ayenat Mersie
Ayenat Mersie is a Global Development Reporter for Devex. Previously, she worked as a freelance journalist for publications such as National Geographic and Foreign Policy and as an East Africa correspondent for Reuters.
