The negotiating performance of the Brazilian presidency of COP30 was exceptionally competent, confirming the wisdom of the decision to entrust the negotiations to an experienced diplomat, supported by a well-coordinated and highly qualified team in dealing with the complex technical and political issues discussed at these conferences.
At least two major achievements should be credited to the Brazilian presidency. The first was defending the multilateral backbone of the Paris Agreement at an extremely difficult moment of geopolitical tensions, dismantling a deadlock in the final days of the conference that, even after it appeared to have been overcome, resurfaced publicly during the last plenary session, almost putting the Conference’s very conclusion at risk.
The second was to make COP30 a moment in which where the Brazilian leadership seized an emerging consensus on structural issues of the multilateral climate agenda. This allowed for an accelerated implementation of decisions from past conferences, and a clear mandate for the COP30 presidency to lead this process throughout 2026. This mandate includes defining the thorny issue of transition financing mechanisms for emerging countries, from which the bulk of emissions is expected to come over the next few decades.
Defusing the tensions
The deadlock mentioned above originated from two unexpected sources of major antagonism and tension. On the one hand, from the pressure to approve a roadmap for phasing out the use of fossil fuels, defined in generic terms at the Dubai COP in 2023. That there should be opposition to this may seem curious, since the burning of fossil fuels is by far the largest cause of global warming and we are already dangerously beyond the maximum warming targets of the Paris Agreement.
However, in diplomatic jargon, a roadmap is defined as a structured plan that, in addition to defining responsibilities and performance criteria for the parties, sets clear objectives, sequencing of actions, and deadlines for their implementation. In this sense, the deadlock that occurred was predictable, since its approval by consensus—as required by the rules of the UN Climate Convention—is today impossible.
The reason is simple. The mere announcement of a prescriptive roadmap of this type can have a significant effect on the asset prices of the oil, gas, and coal industries, and in sectors and countries where the use of fossil fuels is difficult to replace in the short term, disrupting national energy transition processes. A proposal that, therefore, crossed, in diplomatic jargon, a “red line” defined not only by producer countries, led by Saudi Arabia, but also by major consumers (and emitters) such as China and India, in addition to Russia, Nigeria, and others. This generated weighty opposition at a COP held without the presence of the United States, which today would certainly be aligned with the producers’ view.
On the other hand, during the COP a coalition of developing countries took shape demanding financing mechanisms for adaptation to the effects of climate change, to which the European bloc, in the words of its head of delegation as reported by Le Monde, “extended a hand”.
During the first week of the Conference, the movement in favour of a roadmap for the phase-out of fossil fuels grew and became quite vocal after the Europeans joined the group. Surprisingly, as widely reported, the European Union even threatened to leave Belém together with the United Kingdom on the eve of the closing plenary session, which would have destroyed the legitimacy of COP30, if the fossil fuel roadmap were not formally included in the decisions. However, the conflicts over this issue and some technical points regarding the adaptation programs were apparently addressed in high-level negotiations during the final day of talks. Regarding fossil fuels in particular, there was an agreement to further deepen the discussion during the Brazilian presidency
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Even so, to the surprise of the Conference chair, the issues resurfaced forcefully during the closing plenary, where only the resolutions negotiated at the Conference are formally adopted. A Latin American bloc formed around Colombia, with support from the European Union, blocked the decision-making process by invoking the requirement for consensus, accusing the COP presidency of gavelling through matters that had not yet reached consensus.
The deadlock was only overcome, after more than an hour of suspension of the proceedings, when the Brazilian presidency reiterated its promise to return to the discussion on ending the use of fossil fuels during a special conference in Colombia in April 2026, thus avoiding the formal approval of a roadmap at COP30.
Accelerating implementation
But this was the part played for the audience. On the substantive issue of making COP30 the “COP of implementation,” as repeatedly announced by Brazil throughout 2025, Belém was a resounding success. Indeed, this conference may go down in history as the turning point at which an alignment around several emerging consensuses among the signatories of the Paris Agreement was leveraged both to accelerate the implementation of decisions already taken in recent years and to confer a clear mandate for the Brazilian presidency to design the instruments for financing the transition.
The synthesis document of COP30 is the so-called “Mutirão Decision”. The particularly important part of this document is a set of decisions synthesized in the Global Implementation Accelerator, a package of measures consistent with past decisions of the Conference of the Parties to the Paris Agreement which, for the first time, are integrated so as to give urgency, coherence, and centrality to national mitigation (NDCs) and adaptation plans, and to associate their implementation with financing for developing countries.
Financing for developing countries was a central item on the Belém agenda. After an auspicious start at the Glasgow COP, where an optimistic vision prevailed regarding the role of the private financial sector, financing flows have evolved erratically, partly due to the influence of the unstable global macroeconomic environment but, above all, because most developing countries face a structural disadvantage in accessing private capital markets. At the same time, the advance of global warming makes additional investment in adaptation urgent, which is normally only made viable through public investment.
This roadmap defining the path to generating the necessary investment, again according to the Mutirão (paragraphs 54 and 55), is to be technically formulated by a working group to be convened shortly by the COP30 presidency, in order to “establish a two-year work programme on climate finance, including on Article 9, paragraph 1, of the Paris Agreement, in the context of Article 9 of the Paris Agreement as a whole.”
This report, once completed, is likely to be a final, implementable form of the so-called Baku-to-Belém Roadmap to $1.3 trillion, published just prior to the opening of COP30, defining, dimensioning, and proposing how to implement public and private financing instruments to transfer resources from high-income countries to emerging economies, in order to reach US$ 1.3 trillion in transition investments by 2035, seen as the volume consistent with the trajectory proposed by the Paris Agreement. Now, it is time to roll up our sleeves.
* The author is a Brazilian economist and Trustee Emeritus of CEBRI (www.cebri.org), Latin America’s #1 ranked think tank on Climate and Environment. He is a frequent contributor to Capital Reset.
