COP30 another failure

The UN climate summit, COP30 in Brazil, ended in the same sort of failure to take the decisive action needed to avoid a planetary eco-crisis,  as the previous two summits. It was hijacked once again by energy lobbyists and marred by the total absence of the US, the second biggest polluter on the planet, just as the crisis becomes palpable.

The previous two meetings were similar abject failures. The UAE’s COP28 was a cop-out where the oil rich Arab state used the event to sign oil and gas deals on the sidelines, and Azerbaijan’s COP29 lukewarm attempt to get the major fossil fuel countries to even talk about the issues.

Time has almost run out. This summer was marked by the strongest hurricanes ever seen in the Caribbean that ripped through Jamaica. And if the urgency of action was not already blindingly obvious, as the event came to an end, the Iranian government announced Tehran must be evacuated and abandoned as it has run out of water and is no longer viable as a city for human life.

After temperatures last year were over 1.5°C above the pre-industrial benchmark in every month of the year, the Climate Crisis is already here. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says the effort to hold temperature increases to 1.5°C has already failed and the planet is on course to see temperatures increase to a catastrophic 2.7’C-3.1’C that lead to unpredictable results and positive feedback loops that could lead to runaway warming. At that point extreme temperature events will become routine and large parts of the world will become uninhabitable.

Poignantly, one of the big changes at COP30 was the switch in the discussion from prevention to adaptation, as the delegates conceded that the fight is already lost and going forward policy will be all about how humans can continue to live in an increasingly hostile climate.

Missing words

Two weeks of talks amongst 200 countries in the Brazilian rainforest city of Belém appear to have been a waste of time. The final eight-page communiqué on the Global Mutirão decision, as the Brazilian hosts term the needed collective action, avoided an explicit reference to the words “fossil fuels” which was the whole point of the meeting.

Deep fractures were revealed, particularly over which countries should pay for adaptation and how to get the world off fossil fuels. The rich countries are refusing to pay for the small ones and Island state nations are increasingly panicking as they face the now almost certain prospect of their countries disappearing under the waves.

The focal point of the summit was to draw up a road map to transition away from fossil fuels: oil, gas, and coal. More than 80 countries, including Colombia, the UK, Germany and Kenya backed the idea, so when the final communiqué failed to mention the plan at all delegates were outraged.

In a weak compromise, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago promised to create a road map over the next year, but outside the framework of the formal COP summit process rather formally adopting it at this summit. The strong language to “phase out fossil fuels” adopted in Dubai in 2023 did not reappear.

China and US

As the self-styled “leader of the free world”, the US should have been leading the talks, but absented itself entirely after US President Donald Trump took America out of the Paris Accords for a second time after taking office in January. The White House sent no representatives at all.

China, as the emerging leader of the whole world, also played a muted role at the event despite emerging as the global green energy champion.

The outcome at best prevents a backslide on previous deals, and at worst highlights the global communities in ability to curb America’s “drill, baby, drill” policy of making things worse by upping the production of oil and gas production to record levels that has already resulted in all-time record levels of Green House Gases that continue to rise. All three of the most dangerous gases that do the most damage to the climate – CO₂, methane, and nitrous oxide – are already at all-time highs and continue to increase.

Adaption is the new goal

Probably the most significant change that also marks the beginning of the end, is the switch in focus from prevention to adaptation. The hallmark of the 2015 Paris summit was the adoption of a concrete plan to prevent temperatures from rising above 1.5°C above the pre-industrial benchmark. COP30 in effect was an admission that goal has failed and going forward the work will be all about mitigating the damage that is going to be caused. In effect the governments of the world are giving up on strictly enforcing the efforts to cut emissions that cause global warming.

Part of the reason is the change in rules of the game. The Climate Crisis is accelerating, and temperatures are rising faster than even the most pessimistic models set up by the IPCC. Paris assumed fossil fuel demand would decrease over time. When former German Chancellor Angela Merkel met Putin in Moscow in 2018 to negotiate energy deals, she told him that the EU will have completely phased out gas use by 2025. Amongst other things, the AI revolution has completely changed the energy calculus and demand for power is set to accelerate at an extraordinary rate.

Already worsening storms, floods, droughts and fires pose huge risks, especially on developing countries and small island states, and will only get worse. It’s only a matter of time before the first city-killing category six hurricanes appear and the collapse of the AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) now appears to be inevitable that could usher in a mini-ice age in Europe, to name two of the most visible problems.

To deal with these problems, COP30 called for a tripling of “adaptation finance” by 2035 – five years longer than what developing nations say is needed.

Critical minerals on the agenda

The agenda of COP30 was also broadened to take in some of the geopolitical themes du jour, specifically critical minerals and rare earth metals (REMs). Tackling the Climate Crisis requires coordinated global action. But the new economic paradigm ushered in by Trump has led to an aggressive transactional modus operandi where countries, especially in the Global North, are increasingly fighting trade wars – the antithesis of the cooperative spirit that is needed to deal with the climate global emergency.

That is less true in the Global South where China has grasped the bull by the horns and is already approaching, or has even passed, peak emissions. China as the world’s biggest emitter of GHGs could by itself materially impact the rate of global warming, but it cannot solve the problem on its own. Moreover, while Trump increasingly isolates America with his protectionist trade policies, the rest of the world is building Global Emerging Markets Institutions (GEMIs) to better integrate their interests and trade that should have a positive impact on the climate. That is bolstered by the fact that green energy is now the cheapest source of power on the planet, encouraging more and more developed markets to throw themselves into building out green generating capacity. For instance, Uzbekistan has become the green energy champion of Central Asia after a reluctant start a few years ago.

The minerals issue was manifest in China and Russia’s displeasure with the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) that will impact the trade in these key elements, central to the tech sector. Both countries dominate the processing of these minerals, in large scale and extremely dirty production processes that will be hit by CBAM, and not only those products.

Those concerns made it to the final communiqué, which takes a swipe at unilateral trade actions, Bloomberg reports. The document says that measures taken to combat climate change “should not constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on international trade,” the newswire reports. References to lithium and cobalt were included in the COP30 discussions for the first time.

Deforestation

The event was held in the Amazon, the “lungs of the world.” However, extensive deforestation for agriculture and mining has seen vast swaths of the forest cut down and rising temperatures have also caused the worst drought on record.

Brazil announced it would work on two initiatives to combat deforestation and transition away from fossil fuels that will take shape over the next year and would report the results at the next COP31 to be hosted by Turkey.

The area of forest lost globally has continued to rise since the 2015 Paris Agreement, with Brazil and the Amazon basin at the epicentre of the decline and accounting for 60% of global forests. According to data from the World Resources Institute’s Global Forest Watch, the world lost over 26mn hectares of primary tropical forest between 2015 and 2023. Of this, more than one-third—approximately 9.3mn hectares—occurred in Brazil alone. Increased logging, mining, cattle ranching, and soy production is to blame.

Since taking office in January 2023, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has introduced measures to combat illegal deforestation. The Region is nearing a “tipping point” at which forest loss could become irreversible, according to a 2022 study published in Nature Climate Change.

A “Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF),” was established, a fund to support rainforest conservation worldwide, but the commitments fell far short of the tens of billions Brazil was hoping for. Norway, Germany and Indonesia have pledged $6bn so far, but Norway in particular has tied its contribution to a commitment by more countries also joining the initiative.

TFFF seeks to make use of the capital markets to generate returns and pay countries a fee per hectare of forest protected – an alternative to the carbon market which has so far failed to deliver when it comes to protecting already-standing forests. The increasingly cash-strapped advanced countries that would have to make the payments have blocked the measure.

A road map to stop deforestation also did not make it into the final text, with Corrêa do Lago again proposing a second informal initiative like the fossil fuel one outside the formal COP30 framework. It’s an omission that some found galling given the setting of the talks, Bloomberg reported.