The world is entitled to ask what its leaders were collectively thinking as the COP30 climate conference sputtered to an end in Brazil at the weekend. The searing heat and torrential downpours that battered the Amazonian host city of Belém throughout the UN meeting were an unsettling sign of the future that ever more food crops, supply chains and livelihoods are set to confront across a fast-warming globe.
This could scarcely be guessed, though, from the way scores of countries behaved in Belém. Efforts to address the climate crisis met almost comic levels of resistance — typified by the scrapping of the words “fossil fuels” from the final headline agreement, though burning oil, coal and gas is the chief cause of climate change.
In talks where decisions are ground out by consensus, not majority votes, a series of efforts to acknowledge how quickly temperatures are rising, and beef up countries’ climate plans, were scotched. Oil exporters and their allies even contested the fact that reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body of the world’s top climate scientists, represented “the best available science”. This is all despite the fact that the final agreement made COP history by acknowledging the world is now likely to “overshoot” the 1.5C warming target in the 2015 Paris Agreement — which now feels like something from another era.