A Tale of Two COPs

by Jan Selby* 

Last year, the annual circus of the Conference of the Parties (COP) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) travelled to Baku, capital of Azerbaijan. The proceedings were a disaster.

The meeting opened with Ilham Aliyev, autocratic President of Azerbaijan since 2003, bragging about his country’s recent military victory over Armenia, calling Azerbaijan’s vast hydrocarbon resources ‘a gift from God’, and accusing Western states and NGOs of ‘double standards’, ‘political hypocrisy’ and ‘a well-orchestrated campaign of slander and blackmail’. And things didn’t improve from there. The COP Presidency’s limited action and ambition were denounced as ‘deplorable’ by Canada’s Environment Minister. Israel’s genocide in Gaza was a constant backdrop, as also was the spectre of Donald Trump, re-elected as US President just one week previously. The conference ultimately ended with a pushed-through decision on climate finance which was widely condemned: this ‘stage- managed’ deal was ‘an optical illusion’, said India; it was ‘an insult to the Convention’, said Nigeria. Nothing of great substance was agreed on most other key issues. And all references to fossil fuels – the main cause of the climate crisis – were expunged.

This year’s COP, in the Amazonian city of Belem, promised to be different. And in key respects it undoubtedly was. Democratic Brazil with its centre-left government created a much more propitious environment for talks as well as civil society and indigenous engagement. ‘Mutirão’ plenaries were approached as exercises in peace-building, or even group therapy, with parties encouraged to celebrate the achievements of ten years since the Paris agreement, and to express views and feelings rather than just entrenched positions. A battle over the conference agenda was avoided. Brazil also voiced support for a fossil fuel transition ‘roadmap’ (as well as another on deforestation), despite planning increases in its own oil and gas production. Adding to the mix, the daily rainforest downpours, plus a fire in the conference venue, kept things decidedly real.

Yet despite all this, Brazil’s ‘COP of truth’ was if anything an even deeper failure than the previous edition – at least when judged in terms of formal outcomes. A pushed-though agreement on adaptation was met with consternation by both European and many Southern states. Nothing was agreed on how to respond to the collective inadequacy of national greenhouse gas emission reduction plans, besides establishment of two weak voluntary initiatives. There was no agreement for a roadmap on fossil fuels, nor even for one on deforestation – in the Amazon of all places! Indeed, the only really significant agreement was over establishment of a new ‘just transition’ mechanism – albeit without any funding. Geopolitical tensions, the collapse in Northern climate finance and what the Financial Times called ‘almost comic levels of resistance’ from fossil fuel producer states meant that the whole COP process remained utterly blocked.

The tragedy of COP30, then, is that the conference was led with ambition and sensitivity – but still fell demonstrably short. Whereas the failure of COP29 could be pinned, perhaps, on the Azerbaijani Presidency, no such excuse is available this year. The lesson should be clear: that no amount of careful steering is going to bring political progress within the UN climate regime within current global political and economic circumstances, unless and until a radically new approach is developed.

What should this new approach involve? Above all, three things:

First, COP meetings need redesigning to focus much less on formal inter-state negotiations, and much more on global networking and learning. COPs do this already to a degree. But the combination of blocked negotiations and the fact that there is so much we still don’t know about how to respond to climate change, should mean that mutual learning is made one of these UN meetings’ cornerstones. Much more of these meetings’ content should be devoted to discussing national and sectoral developments and experiences, including by reflecting candidly on failed experiments and shortcomings. In short, what Charles Sabel and David Victor have called an ‘experimentalist’ approach to global climate policy is now desperately required.

Second, more high political involvement will be needed if COP negotiation processes are going to be unblocked. It confounds me that even the most supposedly ‘high ambition’ countries can routinely pass COP talks over to their environment ministers, with not a foreign, finance, defence let alone prime minister in sight (except for at the pre-COP speeches and photo-shoot). Environment ministers no doubt do their best, but typically have no authority to make the compromises necessary to unblock talks - for instance, by increasing their country’s climate finance offerings. This has to change.

And probably most importantly, we need enhanced ‘coalitions of the willing’ outside of COP processes, to help lead to way. Even the COP30 President has intimated that more action by such coalitions is required, on issues where global consensus is absent. Colombia’s actions and coalition buildings in support of keeping fossil fuels in the ground are pathbreaking here, on an issue where global multilateralism does not have – and probably will never have – the answers. The UK should follow suit and place supporting the development of climate-ambitious international political coalitions at the centre not just of its climate policy work, but of its entire foreign policy agenda.

Jan Selby is Professor of International Politics and Climate Change, at the University of Leeds. All opinions are the author's own.