Climate agenda reset ahead of Brazil's COP 30

Business Times

06-05-2025

THE climate diplomacy agenda has been badly on the backfoot since at least November's US presidential ballot which saw the re-election of Donald Trump. However, this Wednesday and Thursday (May 7-8), Europe hosts what may be the biggest meeting of climate ministers before November's Conference of the Parties (COP) 30 in Brazil to try to kickstart this key business and political agenda.
The Brazilian president-designate of COP 30, Andre Correa do Lago, will co-host this week's event in Copenhagen. This is an inauspicious geographical backdrop given that almost two decades ago, the same city hosted one of the worst ever organised COPs. So much so that the then-US secretary of state Hillary Clinton told then-US president Barack Obama, upon his arrival at the-then COP 15 in Denmark, that it was 'the worst meeting I've been to since eighth grade student council' of 13-14 years olds.
Fast-forward to 2025, and with their backs to the wall, Correa do Lago and Danish counterpart Lars Aagaard will seek to energise the summit of more than 40 climate ministers – ahead of COP 30. The latter is the most important annual climate event since at least Glasgow's COP 26 in 2021, and possibly even the landmark Paris COP 21 in 2015.
It is not just the developments on the political right, including the re-election of Trump, that are helping shatter the previous political consensus on tackling climate change. There is wider alarm as highlighted by a report last week by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Diplomacy. As much as ex-UK prime minister Blair was a champion of climate diplomacy in office from 1997 to 2007 as leader of the left-of-centre Labour Party, he warns in the study that 'today's policy strategies have become disconnected from political, public and economic reality', and the debate is 'riven with irrationality'.
While climate activism has succeeded in raising awareness, Blair argues that the result is a widening credibility gap between policy and delivery. He highlights that global trends that undermine today's Western climate approach include that fossil fuel use is set to rise further up to 2030, airline travel is projected to double over the next 20 years, and by 2030 almost two-thirds of emissions will come from China, India and South-east Asia.
Add to this too the setback of COP 29 in Azerbaijan, widely seen as the worst annual climate conference since Copenhagen in 2009. The event was widely seen as kicking the can down the road, if not going backwards, with the summit threatening to collapse several times.
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As former US vice-president Al Gore highlighted about the Azerbaijan event, 'we cannot continue to rely on last-minute half measures. Leaders today shirk their responsibility by focusing on long-term, aspirational goals that extend far beyond their own terms in office. To meet the challenge of our time, we need real action at the scale of months and years, not decades and quarter-centuries.'
So, with the entire COP process now in growing jeopardy, Brazil has the diplomatic challenge of a lifetime seeking to make its event later this year one that helps ensure long-lasting and transformative climate outcomes.
With Trump having already started the clock on a four-year US withdrawal process from the 2015 Paris treaty, as he did during his first presidency from 2017 to 2021, other major nations will probably dust down the playbook they used during that period. This saw other powers including Europe, Japan and China seeking to advance climate diplomacy, and hoping that the next US president from 2021 to 2025 would recommit to the Paris process.
Fortunately, this happened upon the election of Joe Biden as US president. However, whether it happens a second time will depend upon whether a Democrat can win the 2028 election against the Republican who becomes Trump's successor as the Republican standard-bearer.
At the same time, world powers will be aware that US corporations, states and cities will continue with the clean energy revolution that has been underway for many years now across the world's largest national economy. Trump's policies may blunt this tide of investment in the short to medium term, but it is likely to prove unstoppable in the longer term.
It is not just many US liberal and centrist politicians who favour remaining in Paris, but also much of the nation's business community too. Many US multinationals – including in the energy sector – argue that it is better for Washington to keep a seat at the table and influence an accord that big US-headquartered businesses may ultimately have to abide by after the Trump presidency ends anyway.
The business community is aware that the Paris deal retains significant support across the world. In addition, it intentionally has a flexible, 'bottom-up' approach and this greater decentralisation and suppleness provides resilience, as was shown from 2017 to 2021.
While the wisdom of this flexible architecture appears obvious, it represents a breakthrough from the more rigid, top-down Kyoto framework. While Kyoto worked in 1997 for the 37 developed countries and the European Union states which agreed to it, a different way of working was needed for the much more complex Paris deal, which includes more than 170 diverse developing and developed states that agreed in 2015 to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions by 80 per cent by 2050.
By design, the agreement allows countries to move away from a one-size-fits-all approach to develop bespoke plans to realise emissions targets with national and sub-national governments in cities and regions working in partnership with business. In other words, while Paris created a global architecture for tackling global warming, it recognises that diverse, often decentralised policies are required by different types of economies to meet climate commitments, including in US states and cities.
That this approach makes sense is reflected in the diversity of climate actions that countries have made in response to global warming. As the Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics has highlighted, these thousands of measures (legislative, executive actions and policies) globally range from economy wide measures to reduce emissions through to specific targets for renewable energy, energy demand, transportation or land-use, land-use change and forestry.
So as deeply damaging as Trump's presidency will be to the climate agenda, the Paris framework could still provide a resilient, flexible framework for action that remains a lasting foundation stone of future sustainable development across the world. The best way to tackle climate change, going forward, will continue to be a flexible, bottom-up approach to meet targets in innovative ways.
The writer is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics