‘Climate is our biggest war', warns CEO of Cop30 ahead of UN summit in Brazil

The Guardian

9 hours ago

'Climate is our biggest war. Climate is here for the next 100 years. We need to focus and … not allow those [other] wars to take our attention away from the bigger fight that we need to have.'
Ana Toni, the chief executive of Cop30, the UN climate summit to be held in Brazil this November, is worried. With only four months before the crucial global summit, the world's response to the climate crisis is in limbo.
Fewer than 30 of the 200 countries that will gather in the Amazonian city of Belém have drafted plans, required by the 2015 Paris agreement, to stave off the worst ravages of climate breakdown.
And that crisis is escalating. In the last two years, for the first time, global land temperatures soared to more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – breaching the limit that governments have promised at multiple climate meetings to keep.
Meanwhile, the US president, Donald Trump, has withdrawn from the Paris agreement and is intent on expanding fossil fuels and dismantling carbon-cutting efforts. The EU is mired in tense arguments over its plans. China, the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, is rumoured to be considering weak targets that would condemn the world to much greater heating.
And the attention of world leaders is elsewhere, as the conflict in the Middle East threatens to spiral further. Poor countries are labouring under a mountain of debt, and the continuing cost of living crisis in many countries is fuelling populism and a backlash against green policy.
Toni, a respected Brazilian economist, told the Guardian: 'There's no doubt that the wars that we've seen – military wars and trade wars … are very damaging – physically, economically, socially – and they divert the direction and the attention from climate.'
Vulnerable countries fear their concerns will be lost amid the push for militarisation. 'Spending more on defence means spending less on climate,' said Michai Robertson, adviser to the Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis).
But the questions for Belém cannot be ignored. Can the world cut greenhouse gas emissions far enough and fast enough to stabilise global temperatures? Is the lack of progress inevitable when hundreds of countries are trying to agree a way forward, or are more sinister forces at play, trying to throw up roadblocks? Has a recent meeting in Bonn done anything to bring more resolution and collaboration?
Beyond 1.5C of heating, the impacts of climate chaos – heatwaves, sea level rises, species die-offs, droughts, floods and storms – will rapidly become catastrophic and irreversible. And we now know that the world could already be traversing vital 'tipping points', beyond which runaway climate change will be impossible to recover from within human timeframes.
Anna Rasmussen, the chief negotiator for Aosis, said: 'Around the world, the 'unprecedented' has become our new norm. The economics of small island states are stymied by disasters we did not cause. Not even a year ago, the Caribbean was ravaged by Hurricane Beryl, the earliest category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic ever recorded.'
Since the Paris agreement was signed in 2015, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise. Temperatures are affected by the cumulative quantity of carbon in the atmosphere, so every additional tonne counts: scientists have now calculated that we can only carry on producing current levels of carbon dioxide for two more years, ensuring the breach of the 1.5C limit becomes permanent.
But while temperatures have soared, and weather records have tumbled, any sense of urgency inside the negotiating halls seems to have cooled. Two weeks of preliminary talks, intended to lay the groundwork for Cop30, have just finished in Bonn. They started two days late because countries could not agree an agenda, and ended without clear negotiating texts for the key points.
Some of the frustrating lack of progress is inevitable, as countries grapple with geopolitics and the complexity of getting nearly 200 governments in line. But several negotiators told the Guardian they saw more sinister motives in play – deliberate attempts by some recalcitrant countries or their allies, usually fossil fuel producers, to throw up roadblocks.
'These are not accidents we are seeing, they are attempts to slow things down, no question,' said one. At one point, according to an observer, a key discussion degenerated into speculation about the buttons on a putative website presenting data, rather than addressing the substantive points.
At the core of the Cop30 summit will be the national plans on emissions. Known as 'nationally determined contributions' (NDCs), these are the bedrock of the Paris agreement, setting out not just overall targets on how far governments intend to cut emissions over the next decade, but also indicating what measures might be taken in different sectors to meet those goals, such as boosting renewable energy or improving efficiency.
The Brazilian hosts of the Cop30 summit are urging governments to finish their NDCs by September, so the UN can assess them ahead of the scheduled start of Cop30 in November.
'We are really far from where we need to go, even in quantity of NDCs, let alone how ambitious [they are] and the quality of them,' Toni told the Guardian. 'I don't think there is any excuse [for countries not to come up with new NDCs]. We are expecting NDCs that are improved, both in terms of ambitions and on their quality.'
Most closely watched will be China. The world's second biggest economy and biggest emitter of greenhouse gases is also the global renewable energy powerhouse. China's green economy has outstripped all expectations, with about a third of electricity now coming from clean sources, and renewable generation capacity on track to double by 2030, compared with 2022 levels.
China is also the biggest exporter of renewable energy components and electric vehicles, so stands to benefit from other countries setting stiffer targets on emissions. Experts believe that China could halve its emissions by 2035 without difficulty – yet the government is thought to be considering tabling reductions of only about 10%.
Coal is the reason. While coal fell to its lowest share of electricity generation on record in May 2024, this year a surge of approvals of new coal-fired power plants, and investment in mining, has alarmed analysts.
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Gao Yuhe, of Greenpeace East Asia, said China could cause its emissions to peak this year if renewable energy growth continues. 'The year 2025 marks a pivotal moment in the country's energy transition,' she said. 'There is already enough existing capacity to meet today's peak demand. Approving a new wave of large-scale coal projects risks creating overcapacity, stranded assets, and higher transition costs. That will ultimately undermine progress toward a cleaner, more flexible power system.'
The EU is locked in tense negotiations over its carbon target for 2040, which will be thrashed out next week. That target, which is expected to involve a cut in carbon of at least 90% compared with 1990 levels, would be the steepest yet presented, but arguments are raging over whether, and how much of, this could be met by trading carbon credits with other countries. When the 2040 figure is agreed, it must then also be translated into a commensurate 2035 goal – the end date for the current commitment period under the Paris agreement – and published along with further policy details as a fully fledged NDC in September.
Other countries, including major emerging economies such as India, are still to submit their plans. 'There is a lot of watching and waiting going on,' says Arunabha Ghosh, the chief executive of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, a prominent thinktank in India and one of the Cop30 envoys chosen by Brazil to support the aims of the talks. 'We should be judging countries on implementation – climate leaders are those who get things done, rather than those who say things.'
A few countries have already presented their NDCs. The UK's is judged to be fairly ambitious, with an 81% cut in emissions compared to 1990 levels by 2035. Canada's effort and Japan's have both been found 'insufficient', however, by the Climate Action Tracker, which monitors the levels of countries' emissions reduction.
A further problem is that none of the NDCs so far, which are pegged to 2035 or 2040, have contained revisions of countries' existing near-term targets. Current NDCs, set at Cop26 in Glasgow in 2021, are inadequate to stay within 1.5C. At Glasgow, countries agreed that the 'ratchet' – the system for updating NDCs – should allow for the upward revision of targets more frequently than the five-yearly system laid out in the Paris agreement.
Disappointingly, no countries have availed themselves of the opportunity, said Niklas Höhne, of the NewClimate Institute. '[To stay within the 1.5C limit] needs drastic reductions. None of the NDCs on the table have updated 2030 numbers. But if we do not do more by 2030, it will be very difficult to catch up later.'
Last year's conference of the parties (Cop) focused on finance, and that will also play a major role this year. Developing countries need assistance from the rich world, to help them cut emissions and cope with the impacts of extreme weather. At Cop29, they were assured of $1.3tn a year by 2035, with $300bn of this coming in the form of public finance from developed countries.
Those numbers will be harder to reach now that the US has pulled out of climate finance and other forms of overseas aid. Poor countries want to see concrete plans for how the financial flows will be reached, and Brazil is working with last year's host, Azerbaijan, on a 'Baku to Belém roadmap' due in October.
Yalchin Rafiyev, the chief negotiator for Azerbaijan at Cop29 last year in Baku, warned that not enough was being done to meet the financial commitments made last year, particularly from the taxpayer-funded development banks. 'We have seen very low-profile engagement of MDBs [multilateral development banks, such as the World Bank] in climate-related issues,' he told the Guardian in an interview. 'We have opened the Baku to Belém roadmap to $1.3tn for wider stakeholders for their written submissions. So far, we have received 102 submissions, and only two of them are from MDBs. That's quite surprising, because they have always expressed their interest to be part of the process.'
Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, the chief negotiator for Panama, said being able to show substantial progress on finance was crucial. 'We need to define what is the roadmap to close the finance gap towards developing nations, because if we don't address that, if we don't fill that gap, if we don't provide these resources, then we cannot expect developing nations to fulfil the goals of the Paris agreement,' he said. 'It's all about the money.'
Brazil's agenda for Cop30 also gives little room for what many activists still see as the key question: fossil fuels. At Cop28, in Dubai, countries made a landmark commitment to 'transition away from fossil fuels'. At Cop29, attempts to flesh that out with a timeframe and details of what it would mean were stymied by opposition from petrostates, including Saudi Arabia.
Activists had hoped to bring the commitment back to Cop30, to be elaborated and formalised into a coherent plan that countries would sign up to. But Brazil appears wary of reopening the debate, and would prefer to regard such past resolutions as settled. The presidency has been resistant even to the idea of a 'cover text', the catch-all outcome document that in most Cops captures the key resolutions.
At Bonn, it was not clear where in the Cop30 agenda it would be possible to discuss the transition away from fossil fuels. 'We tried to get to discuss it [in various forums] but we keep getting it moved away,' said Stela Herschmann, of the Observatório do Clima network of civil society groups in Brazil. 'It's like nobody wants us.'
Despite the frustrations of the last two weeks of pre-talks in Bonn, the goodwill that Brazil enjoys as host nation was much in evidence. The presidency has drawn on expertise from around the world, creating a 'circle' of the former Cop presidents since the Paris agreement was forged in 2015, a 'circle' of finance ministers from around the world, and a group of economists. Indigenous people will play a key role, with a 'global ethical stocktake' intended to reflect their concerns, involving Brazil's environment minister, Marina Silva, and well-known climate activists including Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland. Brazil has also set out an 'action agenda' to track progress on initiatives from previous Cops and to foreground key issues related to the climate crisis, such as food and agriculture, forestry and nature, water, oceans, social justice and equity.
The irony is that the most substantive issue of Cop30 – the NDCs – will be out of Brazil's hands, decided in national capitals long before any leaders hop on planes for Belém. 'We don't negotiate NDCs at Cops – this is nationally determined, so what we will have at Cop30 is the report of those nationally determined decisions that have been taken,' said Toni. 'And yes, that can be frustrating. There can be a good picture or very bad picture, we will see, but it will be a reflection of national politics more than anything. We are obviously the designated president of Cop30, but it is a collective responsibility.'