COP30: UN Climate Change Conference, Belém 2025

Climate policy is a collective endeavour. Humanity’s only chance at limiting global warming hinges on everyone playing their part. Anyone who fails to pull in the same direction is holding back progress and putting our future at risk. Ahead of this year’s COP, all countries were required to draw up new national commitments (known as nationally determined contributions, or NDCs) to be achieved by 2035. Many complied, but the response was far from universal. Some influential economic powers such as China and the United States set themselves clear objectives, whereas the EU failed to meet the deadline and has not submitted any new climate targets at the time of writing. In other words, the EU’s strategies to address the climate crisis are now two years out of date.

It is important to understand that these NDCs are not themselves a matter for debate at the COP. That is because of the bottom-up approach of the Paris Agreement, according to which countries are legally obliged to submit their own climate pledges. However, the exact form of these pledges – and, above all, whether they are sufficient – is not for the international community at the COP to determine or negotiate.

In other words, each nation bears the responsibility to set sufficiently ambitious goals and to deliver on them, with no accountability to the rest of the world. That is why we are calling on the community of nations at COP30 to deliver a strong, united response to national commitments that have so far fallen short – so that collectively (and justly!), we can bridge the gap in these global climate ambitions.

The climate crisis is driving more frequent extreme weather events around the globe, with increasingly devastating consequences. That is why it is becoming ever more important to adapt effectively to the effects of climate change. Resolved as part of the Paris Agreement for this reason was the global goal on adaptation. It is aimed at “enhancing adaptive capacity, strengthening resilience and reducing vulnerability to climate change”.

Achieving this rather broad objective in practice requires a way to compare progress globally. That is why governments are to negotiate a set of indicators at COP30 aimed at helping to make climate adaptation measurable and scalable and ensure that the support is provided where it is most urgently needed.

Effective climate action and climate adaptation are non-negotiable, but can appear to be expensive in the short term. However, in the long term, these measures are far less costly that managing the effects of climate change. At the last climate conference, industrialised nations committed to delivering at least EUR 300 billion annually for developing countries’ climate action by 2035.

Although a positive step, the pledge – termed the new collective quantified goal, or NCQG – is a drop in the ocean considering the ever-increasing pace of global warming. The Baku to Belém Roadmap puts funding requirements at EUR 1.3 trillion, with private investment (in infrastructure, for instance) also being called for alongside taxpayers’ funds.

For us, it is clear that funding international climate action is not an act of charity. In fact, it is in our national interests and represents an historical and moral obligation on our part. We are therefore calling for industrialised nations, as the primary emitters of greenhouse gases, to shoulder their responsibility and provide significantly more – and more reliable – funding for climate action, adaptation and addressing climate-related loss and damage. Without this funding, work to tackle the climate crisis comes to a standstill.

International climate policy is facing a grave contradiction: the urgency for ambitious climate action has never been greater, yet political progress remains slow, fragmented, and increasingly hamstrung by geopolitical tensions. Decisions at the COP must be made by consensus, and there is no single authority dictating how to tackle climate change.

Ten years after the Paris Agreement, the UN Climate Change Conference must evolve, otherwise it risks disappearing into insignificance. The time for talk is over! While negotiation remains a key part of efforts to address the climate crisis, we firmly believe that actions and obligations are now needed to implement and monitor climate action and establish accountability – all with a clear focus on climate justice. 

Proposals for reform have already been made, by the Club of Rome for example. We now call for tangible reforms to be initiated at COP30. These include measures to ensure that authoritarian states are no longer permitted to take on COP presidencies and efforts to curb the overpowering influence of the fossil fuels industry. In addition, states should no longer escape accountability if they fail to meet their national climate pledges.

Find out more about these reform proposals and others in the Germanwatch paper on its expectations of COP30.