Why COP30 ran through the night, and What Might Help
A blog by Priestley member Sajid Siraj.
I followed COP30, watching a negotiation end 27 hours late with agreements delivering a fraction of the emissions reductions that science says we need by 2035. The United States sent no delegation. The gap between the $1.3 trillion developing nations requested and the $300 billion on offer, was bridged not by analysis or formula but by exhaustion.
I wrote in November about the eight objectives pulling delegations in different directions, finance, mitigation ambition, loss and damage, fossil fuel language, equity, sovereignty, industrial protection, the 1.5°C commitment. What I want to add now is this: beyond the politics, there is a structural problem. Climate negotiations involve hundreds of actors, dozens of conflicting goals, and catastrophic stakes, yet the process has no formal tools for managing that complexity.
A field called Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) is built precisely for situations like this. At its core, MCDA is a family of structured methods for making decisions when multiple conflicting objectives are in play and no single option is obviously best. Rather than collapsing everything into a single number or leaving trade-offs implicit, it makes them explicit: who wants what, how much, and at what cost to other goals. It has been used in environmental planning, public health resource allocation, and infrastructure prioritisation; anywhere that competing legitimate interests need to be weighed transparently rather than resolved by whoever shouts loudest or stays latest. Its absence from the COP architecture is worth examining.
Consider four places where MCDA could make a difference.
- Before talks begin, delegations could use MCDA techniques to map their own priorities, distinguishing where they have genuine red lines from where they have room to move. At COP30, the fossil fuel language collapsed partly because "phase-out," "phase-down," and "transition away from" were treated as a political dispute when they were also a problem of definition, different parties optimising for different things without ever mapping what those things were. A structured exercise before the session could have surfaced that gap in week one rather than letting it detonate in the final hours.
- During negotiations, scenario tools could show all parties, and the public, how a proposed package of pledges scores against the 1.5°C threshold and equity criteria in real time. The 11% figure emerged as a retrospective embarrassment; a live dashboard in the plenary hall updating as NDCs were tabled would have made the ambition gap visible and immediate, rather than a footnote in a post-summit analysis.
- Across COPs, MCDA frameworks could build a structured record of positions explored and compromises considered, so each conference inherits a negotiating map rather than starting partly from scratch. The $300 billion finance figure that emerged had been floated, rejected, revised, and repackaged across multiple rooms with no shared audit trail. A log of explored positions would have made that convergence process considerably faster.
- Finally, where criteria genuinely conflict, MCDA techniques can identify compromise solutions that no party finds ideal - but all can accept as principled. Applied to climate finance, this could mean formula-based contributions linked to historical emissions, current capacity, and vulnerability; replacing the ad hoc pledging that erodes trust with each broken promise, and giving any delegation the ability to interrogate and challenge the numbers openly.
None of this is a substitute for political will. MCDA may not fill the seat the United States left empty, or break a petrostate veto, but - it can make the trade-offs explicit, the consequences visible, and the search for compromise something more than a matter of luck and endurance.
Before the next COP, there is an earlier test. SB64, the UN climate conference in Bonn this June, serves as a mid-cycle checkpoint between COPs. If MCDA has a role in transforming how we negotiate climate outcomes, Bonn is precisely the kind of forum where that case can begin to be made, and where its absence will, once again, be felt.
The next COP (COP31) is in Antalya. The architecture, as yet, remains the same.