The 30th UN Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Belém was historic for being the first COP held in the Amazon and for refocusing negotiations on forests, Indigenous peoples and civic participation. Bringing together 195 countries and culminating in the unanimous adoption of 29 decisions, the meeting demonstrated that collective progress remains possible despite geopolitical rifts and entrenched interests.
Brazil’s presidency pursued a “mutirão” — a joint-decision strategy that packaged sensitive topics (finance, adaptation, just transition, trade, gender and technology) into a single negotiating effort. The approach delivered a 29-document package intended to advance multiple priorities while addressing urgent demands from the Global South.
Financial commitments at Belém included concrete allocations — roughly $135 million to the Adaptation Fund and $300 million toward climate-resilient health systems — and a proposal to reform climate finance reporting tied to the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) to improve transparency between “provided” and “mobilized” resources. The conference also endorsed a task-force aim to triple adaptation finance by 2035 compared with 2025, but without a clear baseline. That ambiguity, together with the absence of binding adaptation finance targets, underlines the enduring difficulty of converting political pledges into measurable flows. Analysts note an existing adaptation finance gap estimated at about $340 billion today, rising toward $1.35 trillion by 2035 if current trends continue.
Aside from finance, the joint decisions made gains on information integrity and campaigns against climate disinformation — a response to denialism tied in part to fossil-fuel industry influence — and fostered further work on high-integrity carbon-market rules, an area made necessary by global controversies over fraud and weak accounting.
The European Union played a decisive, pragmatic role in securing agreement on the package. The EU backed the negotiated deal provided it avoided what it regarded as unfeasible or insufficiently evidenced measures, particularly on the energy transition. European negotiators conditioned increased willingness to fund adaptation on balanced language around the energy transition, a stance that helped avert a breakdown but also limited the final text’s financial and binding ambition. With the United States notably absent from direct leadership in Belém, the EU’s cautious bargaining shaped the package’s contours.
One of COP30’s sharpest disputes concerned a proposed “roadmap” to shift economies away from fossil fuels, a Brazilian presidency priority. Significant political support for the roadmap, especially from many Global South nations and activists, could not overcome firm objections from major fossil-fuel producers and big emitters — notably Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, but also China, India, Russia and some industrialized states. Their objections — citing timing, socioeconomic impacts, energy security and the political cost of abandoning fossil-fuel revenue streams — blocked the roadmap’s inclusion in the joint decision, relegating it to a parallel initiative that will now face separate political and technical tests.
Brazil’s diplomatic effort was central to forming consensus. The presidency combined intensive bilateral and multilateral outreach, raised global visibility by placing the Amazon at the center of talks, and pushed for institutionalizing “just transition” as a priority. Brazil proposed creating an international just-transition mechanism with a draft due by June 2026 and an input window through March 2026 to organize finance, technical cooperation and capacity-building. The COP also saw 122 countries submit new Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) during the event, and the package raised the institutional profile of just transition.
Yet Brazilian leadership coexisted with domestic contradictions that undercut coherence between international commitments and national policy. Ahead of and during COP30, Brazil authorized oil-exploration auctions at the Amazon’s mouth, renewed gas and coal contracts into the 2040s, and faced a Congress poised to loosen environmental licensing. These internal tensions complicate turning diplomatic achievements into durable national policy.
A notable positive development was a Colombia–Netherlands initiative to stage the first international conference on “Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels” in April 2026. Mobilizing more than 80 countries, this coalition aims to create a technical-political forum outside the unanimity-dependent COP process to build operational consensus, design social and labor protections, and secure finance guarantees for phasing down coal, oil and gas. Such parallel processes can complement COP negotiations and offer pragmatic pathways for an organized end to fossil-fuel dependency.
Civil society and Indigenous participation was among COP30’s strongest features. Belém hosted one of the most active civil-society presences seen at the UN talks in recent years. More than 3,000 Indigenous delegates engaged inside and outside the negotiating spaces, pressing for territorial rights and Amazon protection. Hundreds of side events emphasized the Amazon’s socio-environmental value and bioeconomy alternatives. Outside the venue, an estimated 70,000 people marched for stronger climate action. Scientific voices were visible as well, with a pavilion connecting climate science directly to the presidency.
Civil society calls emphasized ambition, integrity and climate justice, insisting that policy align science, human rights and broad participation. The launch of the Tropical Forests Forever Fund (TFFF), which raised nearly $7 billion, drew praise for mobilizing resources but also criticism over governance arrangements and heavy reliance on private finance — raising questions about whether forest protection responsibility is being shifted away from public budgets. Delivering on Brazil’s pledge to end deforestation by 2030 remains essential for meeting its NDC, but current funding levels and policy trends fall short of what many experts deem necessary.
The COP also exposed logistical and infrastructural shortcomings: the Amazon’s heat and humidity strained facilities, and a minor fire briefly disrupted the venue and caused a few hospital visits, highlighting the challenges of staging global events in fragile ecosystems.
Looking ahead, COP31 in Turkey (with Australia chairing negotiations) and a Pre-COP in the Pacific will be pivotal. Achieving meaningful progress will require host commitments to halt approvals for new coal projects, clearer numerical targets and accountability for adaptation finance, operationalization of the just-transition mechanism, and technical steps to make a fossil-fuel roadmap a practical negotiating agenda rather than only rhetoric. The choice of a negotiation president capable of bridging diverse interests will matter.
COP30 in Belém reset global attention by centering the Amazon and assembling a joint package that sought to reconcile justice, adaptation and transition. But the conference also made plain that without binding finance commitments, robust accountability, sustained social inclusion and domestic policy alignment, progress risks stalling. The parallel Colombia–Netherlands initiative offers a promising route to translate political pressure from Belém into operational measures to end fossil-fuel dependence. If Brazilian diplomacy and global coalitions can convert the joint-decision momentum into concrete instruments and funding, COP30 may come to be seen as an inflection point — propelled above all by the civil society forces that filled Belém and insisted the world must accelerate the move beyond fossil fuels.
[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]
The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
