Ben Marshall is a teaching fellow at Harvard University and Aditya Bhayana is a climate fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.
The dust is settling after COP30, and two things have become clear. First, the outcomes of the world’s most important climate conference were disappointing. Secondly, those outcomes had less to do with the limits of climate science and more to do with geopolitics.
If they want to meaningfully push for better climate agreements, future COP presidencies will need to take a more proactive role in orchestrating climate negotiations and do so in a way that accounts for the new geopolitical reality. If they don’t, climate action will remain mostly talk.
The shortcomings in Belém
Brazil’s COP30 presidency placed three big bets on the 2025 climate summit: it would be “the COP of implementation;” the rainforest setting would unify actors; and wider participation would unlock new avenues for progress.
Instead, the summit – held in Belém (the “gateway to the Amazon”), in the most deforested country on earth – ended with no roadmap for fossil fuel phaseout, an agreement that only briefly mentions deforestation, and an institutional apparatus less trusted than it was at the start.
In part, these outcomes reflect rare missteps by COP President André Aranha Corrêa do Lago, who pushed contentious issues like unilateral trade measures (including the EU’s carbon border tax) into a separate negotiation track and dedicated only a small part of the agenda to political conversation.
But COP30 also suffered from broader issues that are straining multilateralism. Conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have made it harder to form cross-regional coalitions, record debt distress in developing countries has weakened trust in global institutions, and collaborative efforts to regulate global shipping emissions and reform international taxation have stalled.
How geopolitics show up at COP
Climate diplomacy is becoming less insulated from these geopolitical pressures. Observers noted this during COP28 (Dubai), and since then, it has become more pronounced, while COP hosts have done little in response.
Great-power rivalry is now shaping even technical negotiations, trust in the idea of COP is waning, and the lines between climate and trade are increasingly blurred. At COP30, we saw this firsthand in the form of three key shifts compared to past summits:
Feasibility is no longer the binding constraint. The scientific, technical, and policy cases for rapid decarbonisation have never been stronger – pathways to limit warming to 1.5°C have been well mapped by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; onshore wind and solar power are respectively 60% and ~80% cheaper than in 2015; and each year of inaction measurably raises the costs of mitigation.
But inside the negotiation rooms in Belém, we saw countries not only weighing climate commitments against fiscal, trade, and energy priorities, but also calibrating their positions to avoid antagonising key international partners (chiefly the United States) or empowering domestic political rivals in upcoming elections.
Narrative power has reached its limits. Narratives once turbocharged climate deals, from stories of shared purpose building momentum at COP21 (Paris) to discussions of climate justice pushing “loss and damage” to the fore at COP27 (Sharm-el-Sheikh). But while Brazil saw some of the most compelling storytelling of any COP – with President Lula framing the Amazon as a global commons to be protected, indigenous flotillas on the river, and even the Pope pushing for concrete action – it was not enough to overcome structural blockages to progress on fossil fuels, climate finance or forests.
Emerging powers have gone from adapting to institutions to reshaping them. China, India, Brazil, and the Gulf states are no longer negotiating at the edges of a Western-designed system, but actively redesigning climate governance to reflect their strategic interests. This showed up in a desire to compartmentalise discussions on trade and emissions, and in resistance to overly prescriptive language on mitigation. Red lines will likely continue to harden as developing countries flex – especially if the US stays away from the table.
-
India, Saudi Arabia and Argentina fail to submit climate plans in 2025
About 70 governments have not delivered new NDCs, despite a Paris Agreement requirement that governments do so every five years -
“New era of climate extremes” as global warming fuels devastating impacts in 2025
Scientists warn human-driven emissions put 2025 among the hottest years, intensifying deadly heatwaves, droughts, storms and wildfires -
Recent COP hosts Brazil and Azerbaijan linked to “super-emitting” methane plumes
Satellites detect huge methane leaks from state-owned oil and gas facilities, even as more countries pledge to cut emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas
Action options for future COP presidencies
COP presidencies historically acted as conveners, focusing on the agreement text – largely with the interests of major developed countries in mind. Convening power and elegant drafting are necessary but no longer sufficient. To be successful in the new reality, COP presidencies must act as orchestrators – managing political interdependencies, sequencing issues strategically, and brokering alignment across rival blocs.
Below are four options available to Türkiye and Australia for 2026, and Ethiopia for 2027, to help set up climate negotiations for greater success:
1. Invest in the pre-work to build momentum and trust. The landmark Paris Agreement was achieved in part because ministers were engaged early and often, and expectations were disciplined. COP presidencies should engage political stakeholders throughout the 12 (or ideally, 18) months leading up to the summit and keep a tighter lid on public ambitions. They should also push countries to make good on their commitments if they are to overcome a growing sense of mistrust. This year, more than 70 new national climate plans for 2035 were still missing by the end of COP, including top-10 emitters India, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.
2. Explicitly engage with influential blocs. The COP presidency can play a much more proactive role in brokering agreements. With China, that will mean focusing on implementation (e.g., clean manufacturing, grid-scale deployment and technology diffusion) rather than rehashing mitigation targets.
With other ‘Like-Minded Developing Countries’, including India, it will mean moving from abstract calls for “ambition” toward specific packages that link mitigation to predictable finance, technology access, and transition timelines – especially in hard-to-abate sectors. And with progressives like the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance and AOSIS, it will mean translating “climate leadership” into real economic signals, with the COP presidency pushing existing multilateral institutions to provide access to transition finance in response to ambitious climate commitments.
3. Use creative approaches, but carefully. Brazil offered a response to brittle relationships in the form of mutirão (Portuguese for “collective effort”) sessions. These included closed-door meetings, informal consultations and sidebars, typically without technical staff present, where ministers and high-level delegates could have off-the-record conversations and negotiate political trade-offs that would not survive plenary scrutiny.
Mutirão showed some promise, but its overuse at COP30 degraded transparency and highlighted a paradox in climate diplomacy that the means of identifying compromise and building consensus among some parties also damages trust with others. Future COP presidencies should be careful not to over-use mutirão itself, but instead to design other approaches that structure informal bargaining and connect it to the formal process.
This could include: making political huddles mandatory; baking in more inclusiveness by inviting fixed or rotating representatives from large coalitions (as happens in the G77 and WTO “Green Room” meetings); withholding details on the deliberations themselves but publicly communicating what issues are in scope and any red lines (akin to the forward guidance issued by central banks); and requiring closed-door sessions to feed outcomes back into open negotiating tracks (which helped rapidly translate ministerial consultations into draft text at COP21 in Paris). The combined candour and accountability of these and other approaches could help COP presidencies broker alignment among blocs with fundamentally different political economies.
4. Acknowledge climate governance is entering a post-consensus era. The assumption that all 198 parties to the UNFCCC can converge on a single, high-ambition pathway is no longer credible. Progress will increasingly depend on coalitions of the willing and plurilateral arrangements that complement the multilateral system. COP presidencies should feel comfortable speaking hard truths to power and pushing for stronger, narrower agreements than broader, weaker ones.
The challenge of climate negotiations is no longer knowing what needs to be done or how to do it, but aligning the interests, power and institutions needed to make it possible.
Responding to these dynamics requires a different kind of COP presidency – one focused less on targets and text, and more on managing real-world political priorities. Until geopolitics becomes the starting point of climate action, rather than an inconvenient backdrop, real world implementation will remain a promise deferred.
The opinions expressed in this article the authors’ own and do not necessarily represent those of Harvard or any other institution.
The post COP presidencies should focus less on climate policy, more on global politics appeared first on Climate Home News.
COP presidencies should focus less on climate policy, more on global politics
India, Vietnam and Argentina are among the roughly 70 nations that did not submit updated climate plans to the United Nations in 2025, despite the 2015 Paris Agreement’s requirement that countries do so every five years.
According to Climate Action Tracker, about three-fifths of countries have submitted their latest nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to the UN climate body. Most of them landed in late 2025 and outline targets and measures to cut planet-heating emissions and adapt to climate impacts through to 2035.
Those countries that have formally submitted new NDCs include all G20 nations except India and Argentina. The Trump administration, meanwhile, has indicated it will not deliver on the US’s Biden-era NDC as it pulls the world’s second-largest emitting country out of the Paris Agreement. Saudi Arabia submitted its NDC, which does not contain any firm emissions reduction targets, on December 31.
Many of the governments that have not submitted NDCs are low-emitting small or poorer nations, especially in Africa. But major economies that have not submitted an NDC – some of which also have energy transition deals with donors – include Egypt, the Philippines and Vietnam.
The United Nations tried to encourage on-time submission of this third round of NDCs by setting soft deadlines. Just 13 countries met a first February 10 deadline and around 60 of the 195 signatories to the Paris Agreement met a September deadline, allowing them to be included in a key UN synthesis report.
The UN’s Paris Agreement Compliance Committee – made up of climate negotiators from different governments – has expressed concern about governments not submitting NDCs, or doing so late, and asked them to explain themselves.
After talking to governments that missed the February deadline, it found a host of obstacles including insufficient financial support; technical challenges like a lack of data or problems coordinating across sectors and including different groups; and other issues like political instability or genocide.
India keeps world guessing
The Indian government has been tight-lipped on its NDC, although an unnamed official told the Indian Express back in February that it was in “no hurry”.
The official added that the NDC would reflect India’s disappointment at the new global climate finance goal for 2035, agreed at COP29 in 2024. India has repeatedly argued that without sufficient climate finance, developing countries cannot be as ambitious as they would like to be in reducing emissions.
Some media outlets and analysts were expecting India to announced its NDC at COP30 in November. Instead, the Indian government said only during the summit that it would submit an NDC “on time”, with environment minister Bhupender Yadav telling reporters it would be “by December”.
Argentina sets emissions caps but no NDC
The right-wing government of Argentina, which has considered leaving the Paris Agreement, unveiled caps on the country’s emissions for 2030 and 2035 in an online event on November 3, but has yet to formalise those targets in an NDC.
At the event and in subsequent communications with Climate Home News, Undersecretary of the Environment Fernando Brom said the country would present its NDC during the first week of COP30. But that did not happen, although Argentinian negotiators participated in the climate summit.
Some local experts have pointed to November’s trade deal with the US as one of the reasons for the delay in submitting the NDC, while others cited the government’s disinterest in the climate agenda.
In contrast, the governments of Egypt and Vietnam have faced less scrutiny and have not publicly commented on whether and when their NDCs will be released.
In August, the Vietnamese government said it was “actively advancing the update” of its NDC. The country has a Just Energy Transition partnership with rich nations, but the International Energy Agency predicts coal use will continue to grow there until at least 2030, driven by power-hungry manufacturing.
The Philippines government has organised consultation events on its new NDC but has not said when it will be released.
This article originally said that Saudi Arabia had not submitted its NDC in 2025. Climate Home News later learned that the Saudi NDC was submitted to the UN climate body on December 31 by email but not published on the UNFCCC website until the start of 2026. The article has been amended to reflect this information.
The post India, Vietnam and Argentina fail to submit climate plans in 2025 appeared first on Climate Home News.
India, Vietnam and Argentina fail to submit climate plans in 2025
Dr. Farah Waseem has advocated for climate awareness since childhood. Now, it’s a matter of life and death for her patients in Pakistan.
Dr. Farah Waseem can feel the smog the moment she steps outside each morning.
In Lahore’s Smog Season, This Gen Z Doctor Is Centering Climate Change
After a tough 2025 dominated by the US opposing climate action at home and abroad, 2026 looks set to be shaped by coalitions of countries willing to bypass the COP’s need for consensus and take voluntary action as a group.
While troubled multilateral talks on cleaning up plastics and shipping limp on, smaller groups of governments will gather to discuss taxing luxury air travel and planning a fair phase-out of fossil fuels. Australia and the Pacific’s initiatives for COP31 – which could continue discussions on the fossil fuel transition – will be crucial too.
As always, elections will shape the year too, particularly in the Americas. Presidential elections in Brazil and Colombia will determine whether Lula and Petro’s climate progress is reversed and Congressional elections in the USA will shape whether Trump’s climate vandalism can be checked.
-
Recent COP hosts Brazil and Azerbaijan linked to “super-emitting” methane plumes
Satellites detect huge methane leaks from state-owned oil and gas facilities, even as more countries pledge to cut emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas -
Nine of our best climate stories from 2025
This year, we reported on palm oil being passed off as ‘sustainable aviation fuel’, on creative accounting in climate finance and on African countries’ challenges using transition minerals to develop
January
From January 10-12, the International Renewable Energy Agency will gather ministers and officials at its Abu Dhabi headquarters for its annual assembly and related side events. The organisation will announce new insights into whether the world is on track to meet the COP28 goal of tripling renewable energy capacity by 2030, and our editor Megan Rowling will be there to cover the summit.
The next week (January 19-23) is the World Economic Forum, where the global elite gather in the Swiss mountain town of Davos. With the Trump administration trying to push climate change down the agenda in return for his participation, we’ll be looking to see if he has got his way.
February
On February 7, government representatives will gather in Geneva to elect a new chair of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution. The previous chair – Ecuadorian Luis Vayas Valdivieso – stepped down in October after failing to get governments to agree to a plastics treaty.
The new chair will face a tough task reviving those talks, with governments whose economies rely on oil and gas opposing any measures to reduce plastic production.
March
At a still undecided date in March, the Danish government will gather a representative group of climate ministers in their capital for the Copenhagen Climate Ministerial. Expect topics to include next steps in transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems.
Meanwhile, on March 23-27, the oil and gas industry, energy ministers and other high-flyers in business and politics will travel to the Texan oil town of Houston for the CERAWeek conference. The annual gathering offers signals of what’s happening in the real economy.
Around the same time, on March 26-29, trade ministers will head to Cameroon for the World Trade Organisation’s ministerial meeting. With trade issues increasingly overlapping with the climate space, especially with the European Union’s carbon border tax coming into force at the start of 2026, the statements and discussions here will shed light on climate policy around the world.
April
On April 13-18, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund will hold their annual spring meetings in Washington DC. Over the last few years, both institutions have tried to get more money to climate action. But, with the head of the World Bank effectively chosen by the US president, will this push survive Donald Trump’s presence in the Oval Office?
On April 28-29, the governments of Colombia and the Netherlands will co-host the first “International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels” in the Colombian port city of Santa Marta. With 24 countries signing a related voluntary declaration at COP30, the conference could launch a coalition against fossil fuels that grows outside of the notoriously slow COP process.
-
Nine of our best climate stories from 2025
This year, we reported on palm oil being passed off as ‘sustainable aviation fuel’, on creative accounting in climate finance and on African countries’ challenges using transition minerals to develop
May
On May 11-12, the France-Africa summit will be held in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. With Kenya and France both key backers of a coalition of countries seeking to tax luxury air travel to fund climate action, we will be looking out for progress on those proposals.
The Colombian government of Gustavo Petro has inspired many climate campaigners with plans to phase out fossil fuel production. But Petro can’t run for another term and the first round of elections to replace him will take place on May 31. Who will replace him is currently highly uncertain.
June
On June 8-18, climate negotiators, campaigners and a select group of journalists – including Climate Home News – will travel to the German city of Bonn for the annual mid-year climate talks. Discussions on the Global Goal on Adaptation – unresolved at COP30 – will continue and the first trade-climate dialogue will be held.
Overlapping this gathering will be the G7 leaders summit on the French shores of Lake Geneva (June 14) and the following week’s London Climate Week (June 21-29). The men’s football/soccer World Cup will begin in North America (June 14), with high temperatures expected.
July
On July 8-10, the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage will have a board meeting in the Philippines, at which it is expected to approve its first set of projects, three and a half years after the fund’s creation grabbed headlines at COP27 in Egypt.
August
Dates are unconfirmed but there may be the next round of plastics treaty negotiations at some point in August or September and – with Australia and the Pacific involved in COP31 – Pacific leaders will gather for the annual Pacific Island Forum summit around this time.
September
Throughout September, diplomats will gather in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. Coinciding with that will be New York Climate Week (September 20-27), where power brokers in the climate world hold meetings, strike deals and make speeches.
October
Brazil’s president Lula has reversed the rising rainforest destruction of his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, hosted COP30 and pushed for a roadmap towards fossil fuel phase-out. Whether he will be able to continue in that vein depends on the two rounds of presidential elections, scheduled for October 4 and 26. Polls suggest he is the clear favourite to win.
On October 13-18, the World Bank and IMF host their annual autumn meetings and on October 19-30, the biodiversity COP comes to the Armenian capital city of Yerevan, where countries will produce the first global stocktake of the landmark Global Biodiversity Framework. Research suggests some of its goals, including a target to protect 30% of land and sea ecosystems, are highly off track.
November
An important month starts with US midterm elections for both branches of its Congress on November 3. The Democrats are currently expected to regain control of the House but not regain the Senate, where fewer seats are up for grabs. Losing either would limit Trump’s power in the world’s second-biggest emitter.
Around the same time, the annual pre-COP meeting will be held in a still-undetermined Pacific Island nation. Pacific governments hope to attract world leaders to come and see firsthand how climate change is threatening their islands.
Then on November 9-20, the climate COP will take place in the Turkish seaside city of Antalya, at its Expo Center. Australia is presiding over the talks – as part of a deal with Turkiye. Expect fossil fuel phase out and adaptation to be key themes.
Overlapping with COP31 will be the Marine Environment Protection Committee of the International Maritime Organisation in London (November 16-20). In 2025, the US and Saudi Arabia won a year’s delay to green shipping measures. This meeting will determine if that delay becomes permanent.
December
On December 14-15, the leaders of the G20 (except South Africa) have been invited for a summit in Miami. The US, which is barring South Africa partly because of its green policies, has indicated it will use the G20 to promote fossil fuels.
The post What’s on the climate calendar for 2026? appeared first on Climate Home News.
What Has Happened in the United States Recently
Current Events Can Be Depressing
The United States Descends into Darkness
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
Spanish-language misinformation on renewable energy spreads online, report shows
-
Greenhouse Gases5 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Climate Change5 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Climate Change2 years ago
Spanish-language misinformation on renewable energy spreads online, report shows
-
Greenhouse Gases2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change Videos2 years ago
The toxic gas flares fuelling Nigeria’s climate change – BBC News
-
Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Carbon Footprint2 years agoUS SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules Spur Renewed Interest in Carbon Credits
-
Climate Change2 years ago
Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval