Amidst discontent from countries and accusations of procedural misconduct, the Brazilian presidency of this year’s annual meeting of the United Nations negotiations on climate change (known as the Conference of the Parties or COP) brought COP 30 to a close on Saturday, November 22nd. The outcomes were reflective of disappointing compromises between some countries that were working to advance climate action and reduce emissions, and others that were doing their best to protect their national interests and ensure the continued burning of fossil fuels.
For over thirty years, the UN climate negotiations have progressed based on such compromise and through strategic ambiguity that has allowed countries room to interpret policy decisions in a way that best suits them. The 2015 Paris Agreement created further flexibility by allowing countries to determine their own national actions to work toward collective goals. While this has been a strong approach for facilitating international diplomacy, it has not produced strong results in mitigating climate change.
So, the Brazilian presidency framed COP30 as the “COP of implementation.” Such a move would require moving on from policy-making to ensuring the effective implementation of those policies. This means that clear, specific, and direct decisions would have to be made, even though this is precisely not what the UN climate negotiations are equipped to produce.
Avoiding concrete, unambiguous policies for the sake of international consensus for years has allowed countries to side-step effective climate policy-making while giving the appearance of global progress. Now that implementation has become unavoidable – both in the negotiations and as climate catastrophes proliferate – the institution is facing a legitimacy crisis.
The reality is that some countries participate in the climate negotiations in order to obstruct decision-making. Others argue against policies that would bring climate justice to the most vulnerable countries in the world that did little to contribute to the problem. (The US has historically been a part of both groups, even before its recent withdrawal from the negotiations and the Paris Agreement.) In a space where some countries are fighting for action and others are fighting against it, it is no surprise that the world consistently falls short of achieving the global climate goals that it has set out.
A microcosm of this emerged at COP30 in the Global Goal on Adaptation negotiations. Countries were expected to adopt the first set of international indicators to measure global progress in adapting societies to the impacts of climate change. These indicators were meant to be a guide for countries just beginning their adaptation work, a reference for those wanting to identify gaps and resource needs in their adaptation, and a concretization of the importance of adaptation action under the institution. Experts worked for more than a year to produce a set of 100 indicators for countries to consider.
Yet at COP30, countries adopted a set of only 59 indicators, almost all of which had been rewritten so drastically that they lost most meaning and measurability. How did this happen?
Compromise had something to do with it, as many countries had different issues with the original list that they wanted to see addressed. Obstruction played an even greater role, as some countries outright refused to adopt a list of indicators and likely were instrumental in ensuring a weak list in the outcomes. Further, the Brazilian presidency, in its desire to have an outcome on the indicators, created an untransparent process for crafting the list, failed to take into account countries’ dissenting positions on it, and likely violated rules of procedure in validating its adoption. Together, this resulted in unsubstantial outcomes hidden behind a façade of progress.
Ultimately, COP30 has added fuel to the climate negotiations’ legitimacy crisis. Another year of weak decisions and a lack of transparency signal that this institution may not be fit for purpose. Unless the negotiations can pivot to decisive action-oriented policy-making, climate change will only get worse. The very slow, incremental, and precarious progress based on compromise and capitulation that has kept the climate negotiations going for three decades is no longer tenable.
Dr. Danielle Falzon is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. This article originally appeared on the Rutgers-New Brunswick Climate and Energy Institute website.
