Brazil is positioning itself as an important player for multilateralism and international law in global crises and geopolitical upheavals. This raises high hopes for COP30 in November under the Brazilian presidency – but the challenges are also immense.
After three years of climate negotiations in authoritarian, repressive host countries, expectations are high for COP30 in Brazil: it is expected to achieve progress in the negotiations, involve international and Brazilian civil society and social movements, and breathe new life into (climate) multilateralism. At the same time, the global conditions for effective climate diplomacy have not become any easier: the results of COP29 on international climate finance were disappointing, the US is pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, calls for reform of the UNFCCC are growing louder, and the Global North continues to lose credibility.
COP30 will be the first COP since the start of climate negotiations in which the US – still the country with the greatest historical responsibility for global greenhouse gas emissions – will not participate. Although the US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement under the Trump administration will not take effect until January 2026, the US already stayed away from the interim negotiations in Bonn in June 2025.
The UNFCCC is in a funding crisis, but also in a crisis of legitimacy: many observers, but also signatory states and civil society, are calling for a reform of the UNFCCC that makes it more effective, improves civil society participation and at the same time reduces the influence of the fossil fuel industry and the private sector.
It will be particularly important to counterbalance the last three years of COPs in authoritarian contexts and to strengthen civil society participation, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly in and around the COP. This has recently been increasingly restricted within the UNFCCC itself – for example, with regard to protests against Israel's war in Gaza, which international human rights organisations and Holocaust researchers classify as genocide.
ICJ decision turns climate justice into law
The opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the responsibility of states in dealing with the climate crisis, published in July, has groundbreaking implications for COP30 and far beyond. On the one hand, the ICJ made it clear in its opinion that all states are obligated under international law to protect the climate and ensure a clean, healthy and sustainable environment – regardless of whether they have signed climate agreements or not (or have withdrawn from them). The signatories to the Paris Agreement are also obliged to make their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) as ambitious as possible so that, taken together, they can achieve the Paris Agreement's goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C. The timing is critical: ahead of COP30, all countries are required to submit their new NDCs – including China and the EU, whose contributions are still pending. At the same time, even with the new round of NDCs, it is unlikely that the ambition gap for 1.5°C will be closed. Many countries in the Global South are also linking the ambition of their NDCs to the provision of financial support from the Global North – and this support has been completely inadequate to date.
At the same time, the report opens the door to the issues of liability and reparations – both of which have met with considerable resistance in climate negotiations from the biggest contributors to the climate crisis: if countries fail to fulfil their climate-related responsibilities under international law, they can be held individually accountable and forced to pay compensation. In view of the disappointing results of the negotiations on the new climate finance target and the completely inadequate funding of the UNFCCC Fund for Loss and Damage (FRLD), the report opens up new possibilities for seeking financial support for loss and damage through legal action. New climate lawsuits against governments and companies can therefore be expected.
Climate finance remains at the centre of the debate
Climate finance remains the focus of the debate in Belém: After the COP29 in Azerbaijan agreed on a new collective quantified goal on climate finance (NCQG) of USD 300 billion per year by 2035, which is not only far too low but also far too vague and ambiguous, further and more concrete results are hoped for from COP30. The ‘Baku to Belém Roadmap to 1.3 Trillion’, which was launched in Baku and is intended to set out a stepwise approach for how the larger financial mobilisation target of USD 1.3 trillion annually, mainly from private sector flows, can be achieved by 2035, will be the focus in Belém. However, this requires a concrete action plan, not the report promised by the COP29 and COP30 presidencies, which has not been negotiated. Instead, a more detailed decision should also address the weaknesses of the climate finance goal adopted in Baku by defining clear sub-targets for mitigation, adaptation, and for addressing loss and damage. Many observers are hoping for a significant increase in adaptation funding in particular, for example a tripling of funding by 2030 as requested by developing countries in Bonn, which would go beyond the old target of doubling adaptation funding by 2025 from 2019 levels.
As was already the case during the negotiations in Bonn, there could also be a delayed negotiation start in Belém: countries in the Global South are pushing for a separate agenda item to force an explicit discussion of the obligation of developed countries to provide public climate finance to developing countries – a move sharply opposed by industrialised countries. This commitment is enshrined in Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement, but is often neglected by industrialised countries in the context of broader climate finance discourses, such as on Article 2.1.c with a focus on making all financial flows Paris-compatible. Overall, questions about the quality of climate finance – grants instead of loans that increase debt, easier access to funds, including for local communities, as well as the integration of human rights and gender equality in climate finance flows – remain central to the debate.
More money needed for adaptation to the climate crisis
Climate adaptation is one of the priorities of Brazil's COP30 presidency. The discussion in Bélem will focus on advancing the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), for which a list of indicators is to be agreed upon. Once again, the discourse about adequate indicators is mostly stuck due to a lack of agreement on indicators for the means of implementation – i.e. the provision of financing, technology transfer and other forms of support. In this context, the Global South is also calling for a new adaptation finance target : a tripling of financial flows for adaptation from 2025 to 2030. The quality of financing is key here: public funds in the form of grants are needed, particularly for adaptation, while it is essential to prevent the countries that are already most affected and often heavily indebted from being further destabilised by loan-based climate financing.
Just transition and emissions reductions
Arguably the greatest progress at the Bonn intersessional negotiations was made in the Just Transition Work Programme (JTWP), where current negotiation drafts still include many civil society demands on social dialogue, human rights, the inclusion of care and informal work, the estabishment of a formal mechanism and the demand for including a timebound roadmap for phasing out fossil fuels. Unilateral trade measures such as the European Union's carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) are also to be discussed – something the industrialised countries are refusing to do. Overall, there is some cautious optimism ahead of COP30.
As far as ambitions for emissions reductions are concerned, the focus will primarily be on the NDCs submitted by COP30 and the resulting ambition gap between current climate protection efforts and what would be necessary for a 1.5-degree pathway. A synthesis report by the UNFCCC Secretariat will be published before COP30. The link to (lack of) climate finance is important, as many countries in the Global South are making the level of ambition of their national efforts dependent on whether financial support is provided by the historical perpetrators of the climate crisis. The COP29 climate finance decision and the vague ‘Baku to Belém Roadmap to 1.3 Trillion’, which relies primarily on private sector financing, give little cause for optimism that the ambition gap for 1.5°C can be closed.
International carbon markets exacerbate the climate crisis
Following the adoption at COP29 of the implementation of international carbon markets under Articles 6.2 and 6.4 of the Paris Agreement, the way is now clear for large-scale climate emissions trading, known as offsetting. The EU has decided to also rely on such certificates from international carbon markets for its 2040 climate target published in July – a decision that has attracted a lot of criticism. In the case of the EU, it is already becoming apparent that international CO2 trading is effectively weakening climate ambition: Instead of reducing emissions within the EU, it will rely in part on hot air from abroad. This also exacerbates climate injustice: the biggest historical emitters must be the first to get their domestic emissions down to zero, instead of buying (often only promised) emission reductions abroad.
The rules for bilateral CO2 trading under Article 6.2 are even weaker: governments can agree among themselves whatever they want – and are not required to publish their deals. There is no provision for transparency or oversight.
At the same time, there is a great danger that revenues from CO2 trading will increasingly be declared and spent as climate finance – thus overshadowing or even replacing the need for actual public climate finance.
At the interim negotiations in Bonn in 2025, only non-market-based approaches under Article 6.8 were negotiated – but here too, there is a risk that market-based approaches will be introduced through the back door.
Loss and damage: new momentum?
Although COP28 achieved a political breakthrough and established a Fund for responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD), political attention has waned significantly. The fund is significantly underfunded – only a small amount of start-up funding has been received so far. The fund is expected to present a long-term fundraising strategy before COP30. International civil society is increasing the pressure with a #FillTheFund campaign. Many are therefore calling for the debate to be reopened as a separate agenda item at the COP. The discussion on reviewing the Warsaw Mechanism on loss and damage, which failed to reach agreement in Baku, must also be resumed.
Global Stocktake: implementation and future process
The first Global Stocktake (GST) ended in Dubai in 2023. In Belém, the focus will now be on the future of this process. Discussions will focus on whether loss and damage should also be included as a separate topic in the stocktake in the future, as well as the role of science, in particular the IPCC. There is also controversy over whether the implementation of the Global Stocktake should focus primarily on climate finance or also pursue other outcomes of the first GST (such as the goal of tripling renewable energy or doubling energy efficiency by 2030).
Renewed push for gender and human rights?
COP30 comes at a time of significant backlash against human rights and gender equality, which has been evident in the UNFCCC negotiations for some time. Nevertheless, there is hope that a new gender action plan (GAP) can be adopted in Belém. Financing issues are also controversial here, including with regard to the action plan's mandate to address gender equality in climate financing as well as to secure the financial support for the GAP‘s implementation once approved. In addition, key issues such as the recognition of unpaid care work, intersectionality and gender-diverse terminology are meeting with resistance from some governments.
It remains to be seen to what extent the ICJ advisory opinion can also be used to renew the push for more comprehensive recognition of human rights in the climate negotiations.
The Brazilian COP Presidency: hopes and challenges
The Brazilian COP30 Presidency under Andrea Correa do Lago and Ana Toni is considered committed and open to dialogue. There are intensive exchange and participation formats for indigenous groups, young people and civil society, although the extent to which they meaningfully shape COP30 priorities and focus is disputed. Not surprisingly, this is also an attempt to defuse domestic political tensions: political pressure from the oil and agricultural sectors is high, the new law to weaken environmental standards is drawing criticism both nationally and internationally, and the Lula government is increasingly losing room for manoeuvre as its power base erodes – to the point where it may lose power in the next election in 2026.
In addition, there are threats of foreign policy upheavals, such as high US punitive tariffs designed to put political pressure on Brazil, as well as political tensions surrounding former President Bolsonaro. All this is putting pressure on the Brazilian presidency to achieve a diplomatic success in Belém.
This is also to be achieved through the official launch of the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF) – a new financing instrument for forest protection in tropical countries, which the Brazilian government first presented in 2023. This differs from previous market-based instruments in that forest protection is not to be financed by revenues from climate compensation for avoided or reduced fossil emissions (offsetting). Instead, the central instrument of the TFFF is an investment fund with public and private participation that invests in government bonds and other instruments. The returns generated will then be used to make payments to countries with tropical forests: USD 4 per hectare of forest preserved per year, minus deductions for deforested or degraded areas. While the proposal is seen by some as a step away from conventional market-based logic for forest protection, others criticise it strongly, both from a forest protection and an investment perspective.
Finally, the logistics of COP30 in Belém remain a big question mark, with unaffordable prices for accommodation and general uncertainty about how the Amazon city will manage the logistics of such a large climate conference. In addition to the official negotiations, a variety of civil society dialogue and exchange forums are planned, including the Cúpula dos Povos, the COP30 ‘People's Summit’.
