Edinburgh, 3 November (Argus) — The UN Cop 30 climate summit’s success will depend on how Paris agreement parties close huge gaps between ambitions and actions for cutting emissions and bolstering finance. But the shape that this response should take is still unclear.
Leaders are heading to Cop 30 on 6 November in Belem, Brazil, with the responsibility of putting the world on track to meet the goals of the Paris agreement, 10 years after it was signed. Brazil, which holds the summit presidency this year, wants to see concrete signals from parties on implementation.
New nationally determined contributions (NDCs) — climate plans — due to be submitted to the UN by Cop 30 are a clear measure of progress. But only around 65 countries, out of just under 200, had submitted new plans and targets to 2035 by the end of October. More, including India, South Korea and Mexico are working on it. If implemented, plans revealed to the end of last month — which include targets from China and the EU, but not their NDCs — could contribute to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 10pc by 2035, compared with 2019 levels, according to the UN. China released its NDC on 3 November.
The reductions only account for around 10pc of what is needed to put the world on track to stick to the 1.5°C temperature limit by 2035, non-profit World Resources Institute (WRI) says. “It’s now for Cop 30 and for the world to respond and show how we are going to speed up,” UNFCCC executive secretary Simon Stiell said.
The Brazil presidency intends to help parties rise to the challenge, armed with the historic global stocktake (GST) agreement that countries agreed at Cop 28 in Dubai two years ago and its action agenda. But, unlike the two last Cops, which tackled big headline issues — the GST in Dubai, where the call to transition away from fossil fuels was made, and the new international public finance goal in Baku — Belem will have to seek progress on myriad topics, with key ones outside of its official scope.
The NDCs, although central to the negotiations, do not figure on the Cop agenda, and parties continue to disagree on how they should react to the current lack of ambition. The same goes for unilateral trade measures and the much-awaited “Baku to Belem roadmap” aiming to scale up finance to developing countries to $1.3 /yr by 2035 — a compromise reached after developing nations, including India, decried the Baku outcome.
Fights over these topics could delay or even derail other negotiations. The presidency will have to support parties with advancing adaptation — a key Cop 30 mandate — and loss and damage talks, and by pursuing work on Cop’s just transition programme and implementation of the GST, where mitigation topics, most critically transitioning from fossil fuels, are likely to prove contentious again.
Paris match
“We can’t have one response to the implementation and ambition gap. It needs to be a series of responses because it has to work not only for different actors, different geographies, different communities, but also for different economic sectors”, Cop 30 strategy chief Tulio Andrade said.
The Cop presidency wants stakeholders to see the “complex response” as a “bundle of responses” coming from the negotiations, but also the action agenda and initiatives it has launched and partnerships, including with scientists.
But these will have to materialise in an increasingly challenging geopolitical context, and while US president Donald Trump, who took his country out of the Paris agreement in January, is dialling up anti-climate opposition in multilateral forums. It is unclear which role the US, which did not send a delegation to the Bonn climate talks in June, will play in Brazil, but its influence will be felt. The US is the world’s second largest GHG emitter after China. “Our main priority will be to have Cop 30 sending a very strong signal in support of multilateralism and the 10-year anniversary of the Paris agreement. But we know it’s not the best moment [geopolitically],” Andrade says. In terms of concrete deliverables, he says, “it is an outcome that preserves and strengthens the legacy of what we have achieved so far and that accelerates implementation in response to urgency”.
By Caroline Varin
