From Brussels to Belém: Can the EU Demand Ambition While Retreating at Home?

As COP30 opened in Belém this week, the European Union faces a defining test of its climate credibility. Since the Paris Agreement, Europe has consistently portrayed itself as a bridge between the world’s largest emitters and climate-hit countries — a trusted broker capable of building consensus where others falter. 

Yet to sustain that role, the EU’s diplomatic ambition must be backed by genuine, and coherent action at home. As the EU arrives in the Amazon — a region central to the climate debate, the current weakening of the European Green Deal, and the political hesitation surrounding its implementation, now threaten to erode the image the EU has long cultivated as a global climate leader.

The Commitment to 2040 Is Fragile

The agreement reached on 5 November after more than twenty hours of negotiations among environment ministers from the twenty-seven member states illustrates this tension. While the EU formally upheld its target of a 90% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2040, the deal now includes an important number of “flexibilities”. Chief among them is the provision allowing member states the use of international carbon credits that allows EU countries to offset up to 5 percent of their emissions by injecting money in projects such as reforestation or carbon capture outside the EU’s borders.

In practical terms, this means that only 85 percent of the EU’s emissions reductions must occur domestically. The remaining effort can be outsourced to third countries under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. 

This marks a notable departure from the EU’s stance of the  past decade. After the Paris Agreement, Europe vowed to move beyond the Kyoto-era model of outsourcing cuts abroad. It stopped accepting international offset credits after 2020 and built the Green Deal on one principle: decarbonisation had to happen at home. Offsets were treated as a relic — a tool associated with cheap credits, murky accounting and a sense that responsibility was being shifted elsewhere.

Yet as domestic climate politics tightened, the idea returned. Several governments, including France and Poland, publicly signalled support for revisiting international credits. The Commission’s 2040 proposal formalised the shift by allowing a limited use of “high-quality” credits under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. Although this mechanism is legally sound, it inevitably dilutes the EU’s own mitigation effort and raises a deeper question: can Europe credibly ask others to raise their ambition when it is itself outsourcing part of its responsibility?

Europe risks weakening its moral authority just as it seeks to persuade others to do more.

For a bloc that has long prided itself on setting the global benchmark for climate ambition, this flexibility risks being perceived as backsliding on the international stage. The signal it sends to partners in the Global South is particularly sensitive and can be viewed as a way for rich economies to buy their way out of real emissions cuts. By embracing such a mechanism as offsets, Europe risks weakening its moral authority just as it seeks to persuade others to do more.

Missed Opportunity to Strengthen the EU’s Climate Plan

Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra has insisted that the EU has nothing to hide, pointing out that only the United Kingdom and Norway have set more ambitious national targets. In his view, the EU’s new Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) — adopted alongside the 2040 target — proves the block remains a leader.

Yet the details tell a more nuanced story. The updated NDC retains the previous range of a 66.25% to 72.5% reduction in emissions between 1990 and 2035, rather than raising ambition. Several member states, led by Germany, had argued for a higher target of at least 70%, warning that anything lower would fall short of the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C trajectory. Their proposal was ultimately rejected — a missed opportunity that underscores growing internal divisions within the EU on how far and how fast to push the green transition.

This internal hesitation comes at a crucial time. With global emissions still rising and climate impacts intensifying, credibility increasingly depends not on long-term aspirations but on near-term delivery. If the EU’s targets appear negotiable or politically fragile, it risks undermining the trust that underpins its influence in international climate diplomacy.

Calling Out Others While Falling Short

Just weeks before COP30,  Commissioner Hoekstra criticized China’s climate ambitions as “well below what is achievable and necessary,” pledging that Europe would continue to “encourage China and others to go beyond their current level of ambition.” While such calls for greater effort are legitimate, they ring hollow when Europe itself has just watered down its own plan. The optics of urging others to do more while lowering one’s own ambition are politically damaging — especially for a bloc that has long positioned itself as the standard-bearer for climate integrity.

The Leadership Role Is at Stake

Christiana Figueres, former UNFCCC Executive Secretary and one the architects of the Paris Agreement, warns that the EU’s credibility now hangs in the balance. She welcomed the fact that the new NDC “sends a clear message” that the EU remains aligned with the Paris Agreement, and is backed across the political spectrum. But she also cautioned that the “flexibilities built into the final text” must not slow implementation or blur the investment signal that drives the transition economy.

Similarly, Stientje van Veldhoven, Vice President and Regional Director for Europe at the World Resources Institute (WRI), emphasized that the EU's 2035 target is only credible if the bloc strives for the upper end of its range. WRI analysis shows that a 72.5 percent emissions cut by 2035 is essential to remain consistent with the 1.5°C pathway. Falling short, she warned, would create an unmanageable gap after 2035 and erode investor confidence in Europe’s long-term transition.

From Mandate to Hesitation

The EU’s late manoeuvring on climate targets is not a scheduling hiccup - it reflects a deeper shift. A bloc that once presented itself as the global benchmark for climate ambition is now drifting toward hesitation, flexibility and political safety. The fracture did not begin with this year's NDC or late-night Council bargaining over numbers. It began when the political momentum behind the European Green Deal quietly started to fade.

There was a brief window — roughly between 2019 and 2022 — when Europe appeared willing to legislate at the speed demanded by climate science. The Climate Law, the Fit-for-55 package, reforms to the Emissions Trading System, methane regulation, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism: taken together, they represented the most comprehensive climate framework ever attempted by a major economy. Whether that package truly aligned with a 1.5°C pathway — the benchmark implied by the Paris Agreement — remains contested, but it marked a decisive moment: a decision to act early, regulate aggressively, and treat decarbonisation as a structural political, social and economical project.

Climate moved from consensus to contest, from default to defence.

That moment was driven by pressure from the streets, a European Parliament with a strong pro-climate majority, and a Commission that saw climate ambition as its mandate. Climate was not treated as a niche file; it was the organising story of a political cycle.

Then the political ground shifted. Pandemic recovery politics, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, inflation and an energy shock reshaped priorities. Farmers’ protests across France, Germany, Poland and Belgium turned climate policy into a cultural fault line. A transition once framed as Europe’s competitive advantage and moral capital abroad was reframed as economic burden and rural grievance at home. Consequently, climate moved from consensus to contest, from default to defence.

The backlash did not come out of nowhere; it was organised and rewarded at the ballot box. Farm unions secured exemptions, automotive interests won concessions under the banner of “technological neutrality.” By the time the 2024 European elections delivered a markedly more right-leaning Parliament, the climate narrative had already shifted from transformation to pacing, and from obligation to “proportionality,” with the new mandate accelerating pushback.

In 2015, the EU helped secure the Paris Agreement. A decade later, analysts argue the bloc is struggling to live up to the spirit it championed - ambition backed by delivery, rules without escape-routes, climate governance insulated from short-term politics. This tension is visible not only in delayed NDCs and contested 2040 targets, but across a suite of climate-files now under pressure.

Europe’s Gas Reflex

This tension between stated ambition and political caution is just as clear in the energy system — the backbone of the EU’s transition. On paper, the EU champions a global fossil-fuel phase-out. In practice, energy security concerns have revived investments the bloc once said belonged to the past.

Europe’s break from Russian gas after 2022 was swift and politically unavoidable. But emergency choices have a habit of becoming infrastructure. The pivot meant replacing piped gas from the east with liquefied natural gas from the United States. Germany built import terminals at unprecedented speed. And US LNG—largely shale-based—became the new anchor of European energy security. By 2025, the United States supplied around 70% of EU LNG imports — up from roughly half in 2023–24 — and deliveries hit record levels. The German government described the natural gas build-out as a bridge, not a new direction. Yet LNG terminals are long-lived, and energy systems rarely retire infrastructure quietly. 

Europe spent years reducing reliance on Russia, only to deepen dependence on a volatile US political landscape. Meanwhile, communities along the US Gulf Coast, where export terminals cluster, face pollution, land pressure and public-health impacts tied to Europe’s demand. 

The message blurs when the EU lays new pipelines while insisting others break with fossil fuels.

Forests Promised, Forests Traded

Europe’s hesitation doesn’t stop at energy. On land and forests — issues that will sit at the heart of negotiations in Belém, in the shadow of the Amazon — the same pattern is emerging.

The EU’s forest policy was supposed to be the clearest proof that Europe could align its consumption with its climate principles — a promise that products linked to deforestation would no longer flow into European markets. When adopted in 2023, it was hailed as a world-first: Europe would no longer allow soy, beef, cocoa, coffee, palm oil or timber linked to forest destruction into its market. 

Every delay keeps the market open to products linked to forest loss.

Then came the backlash. Farm lobbies warned of bureaucracy, several governments pressed for delays, and exporting countries framed the law as protectionism. By late 2024 — with farmers mobilising and elections reshaping priorities — the Commission shifted tone. Deadlines were pushed, and implementation staggered. In October 2024, EU governments agreed to postpone full application of the rules by a year — and in autumn 2025 the Commission EU eased requirements for smallholders while formally maintaining a 2025 start. Yet at the time of writing, the law’s trajectory remains uncertain, with renewed pressure inside the EU institutions to delay or dilute implementation further. 

Every delay keeps the market open to products linked to forest loss. It gives producers time to clear land before compliance bites; it weakens Indigenous and environmental defenders; it signals to agribusiness that sustained pressure works — and to trading partners that Brussels adjusts when costs rise.

The EU has long framed Amazon protection — and the rights of Indigenous defenders — as a shared global priority, urging stronger forest and rights safeguards. Yet on the eve of a COP hosted in the Amazon, the EU arrives asking for trust while softening the very law held up as proof of credibility.

Mercosur: Trade First, Forests Later

The EU’s forest credibility at COP30 is being tested on two fronts at once. Just as Brussels has delayed and softened elements of its own deforestation-free products law, it has also revived the EU–Mercosur trade deal — a pact widely seen as expanding access for commodities linked to deforestation in the Amazon and Cerrado. 

The deal’s roots run back decades as talks began in 1999 before climate policy played little role in Europe’s trade calculations. After years of stagnation, the agreement re-emerged as a political priority in the late 2010s, with the EU driving to finalise it in 2019 and again in the years that followed. 

Yet its core economics remain largely intact: lower tariffs and greater EU market access for beef, soy, ethanol and other agricultural exports. As the deal returned to the top of the EU agenda, across the Amazon and wider Mercosur region, indigenous organisations and environmental networks across Brazil warned it risks fueling land pressure, forest loss and violence against land defenders.

The EU once acknowledged these concerns. During the previous push to finalise the deal from 2020 to 2022, member states such as France objected to the deal over deforestation; Austria rejected the deal on climate and deforestation grounds; and the European Parliament declared it could not support the text “as it stands”.

Politics shifted on both sides. With Lula back in office in 2023, Brazil defended its sovereignty and development space, and warned that EU deforestation rules could restrict trade. Meanwhile in Europe, as the Commission revived the deal in 2023, European NGOs criticised the draft for the opposite reason, arguing its sustainability clauses were "unenforceable" and “green-washed”.

Nevertheless, Brussels continued advancing the deal in 2023–2025, adding side declarations but leaving commodity incentives largely unchanged. Paired with the one-year delay and flexibility added to the EU’s own deforestation law in 2024–2025, the message abroad is uncomfortable.

The Backslide on Corporate Accountability

Forest protection was not the only area where Europe promised high standards at home and abroad, and then pulled back when the politics turned. A similar shift unfolded on another front: holding European companies accountable for harm in their global supply chains.

The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive was supposed to be Europe’s answer to a simple truth: if EU companies profit from global supply chains, they must also be responsible for the abuses and environmental damage those chains can cause — from mining sites in Latin America to textile factories in Asia and agribusiness in West Africa. The need was far from theoretical: European firms have been linked to forced labour, land-grabs, toxic contamination and crackdowns on land and water defenders.

Scope narrowed. Liability softened. Enforcement thinned. Entire sectors slipped the net.

Months of coordinated push-back — led by Germany and France, amplified by corporate lobbies — shrank the text before the finish line. Scope narrowed. Liability softened. Enforcement thinned. Entire sectors slipped the net. The final law applies to very large companies - those with more than 1,000 employees and €450 million global turnover - excluding much of the EU corporate landscape. Key obligations on high-risk sectors such as finance were also diluted, and civil-liability provisions were weakened, limiting avenues for communities harmed by EU-linked operations to seek justice. 

With COP30 taking place in the Amazon — where agribusiness expansion, forest loss and violence against Indigenous defenders remain daily realities — the timing lands sharply. 

The Domestic Retreat: Unpicking the Green Deal at Home

The credibility debate does not stop at Europe’s borders. As it asks others to accelerate at COP30, the EU has simultaneously begun loosening the bolts of its own transition at home. The Green Deal was sold as structural — a rewiring of how Europe grows, feeds itself and moves. The pillars remain; the scaffolding is being eased.

Agriculture became the most visible fault line. The Common Agricultural Policy — long criticised for rewarding acreage over sustainability — saw green conditions weakened in 2024 (more flexibility on GAEC rules; small-farm exemptions), and the Commission withdrew its pesticide-reduction proposal entirely after protests. In France, the government granted diesel tax concessions for farm machinery — emblematic of a wider political tilt toward relief over reform.

Nature policy absorbed similar pressure. The Nature Restoration Law — the EU’s first-ever legislation requiring countries to restore degraded ecosystems, from wetlands and forests to rivers and farmland — survived, entering into force in August 2024. But only after months of right-wing pressure to weaken it which softened the original proposal with added flexibilities and longer timelines.

Transport policy shifted from disruption to accommodation. The 2035 combustion-engine phase-out, once a clean line, was reopened to allow e-fuel-only vehicles after Germany’s push, via a dedicated legal route from the Commission. In France, national lawmaking moved to weaken or drop low-emission zones in many cities — a bellwether of local pushback.

Budget priorities moved most decisively. For the 2028–2034 EU budget, the Commission has proposed a new European Competitiveness Fund that would merge and consolidate existing programmes. Civil-society and think-tank analyses warn this would absorb the LIFE programme — the EU’s only dedicated fund for biodiversity and climate — into a broader industrial-policy pot from 2028 (proposal stage, not yet agreed). Environmental networks such as the EEB warned that “folding what’s left into a broader competitiveness fund, stripping out biodiversity and environment, would gut one of the EU’s most effective tools just when we need it most.” The draft budget is still under negotiation, but its contours are clear and contested.

And finance — once the Green Deal’s engine — slowed to defensive mode.  A core pillar of the Green Deal was making finance a lever for transformation — redirecting capital away from fossil-fuel-intensive models and into climate-aligned sectors. That momentum has slowed. EU lawmakers agreed to delay sector-specific sustainability reporting standards under the CSRD by two years and streamline reporting requirements — framed as burden-reduction for business, but seen by campaigners as weakening corporate accountability and transparency.

History in the Room

The EU is not arriving at COP30 as a neutral actor. This is a bloc whose member states built wealth through extraction — of land, labour, and fossil energy — and which remains among the world’s highest historical emitters. Europe’s legitimacy in climate diplomacy never rested on neutrality, but on a willingness to repair harm: to decarbonise early, to finance transition elsewhere, to set rules that extend beyond its borders. For a time, the Green Deal helped that narrative hold. Europe could say it was not only demanding ambition from others — it was taking political and economic risks itself.

Europe’s legitimacy in climate diplomacy never rested on neutrality, but on a willingness to repair harm.

But legitimacy is not a heritage asset; it is a balance sheet. Retreat into caution, loopholes and climate mercantilism sharpens an old critique heard across the Global South: that European leadership ends where European comfort begins. COP30 in Belém — in the Amazon — makes that judgement unavoidable. It is a summit held in a region shaped by colonial extraction, ecological violence and ongoing struggles for land justice. Europe will arrive asking for trust, ambition and forest protection. Many will watch to see whether it brings consistency to match its rhetoric.

A Closing Reckoning and a Choice

This year, COP30 convenes amid a transformed climate reality, with the Earth’s system approaching its first tipping point. In 2024, global temperatures surpassed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for the first time. Sustained breaches of this threshold — the most ambitious target of the Paris Agreement — are now “inevitable,” as UN Secretary-General António Guterres recently acknowledged.

Nearly a decade after the adoption of the Paris Agreement, the conference will unfold in a vastly different geopolitical landscape that characterized 12 December 2015. Today, it is defined above all by a renewed withdrawal of the United States, which now openly threatens trade retaliation to pressure other countries into lowering their ambitions. This shift comes amid a surge in conflicts and trade wars, as well as intensifying competition for access to the rare earths and minerals vital to the energy transition.

Belém won’t judge Europe on speeches, but on direction.

Within this context, Europe’s challenge is not technical. It is political. The tools exist: laws, finance, institutions, scientific clarity. What’s missing is not knowledge but determination - the willingness to treat climate not as a phase of policy, but as the organising principle of economic and diplomatic life.

If Europe wants to speak for the planet in Belém, it must show it still believes in what it once promised - abroad and at home. The next phase will show whether Europe’s climate project bends or breaks; whether hesitation becomes habit; whether responsibility remains a principle or becomes a slogan. Belém won’t judge Europe on speeches, but on direction. The Green Deal began as a promise to the world. Keeping it — fully, not selectively — is how Europe earns the right to lead.