The decade-long alliance between developed countries led by the European Union (EU) and the developing countries most vulnerable to climate change – including small island states and the world’s poorest countries – frayed at COP30 in Belém, with both sides expressing disappointment.
On the penultimate day of talks, the EU said it would only offer more finance to help vulnerable countries adapt to climate change if there was an agreement to strengthen and speed up implementation of national climate plans, including a transition away from fossil fuels in the decision text.
This approach angered several negotiators from developing countries, who said efforts to cope with extreme weather and rising seas were too important to be traded off in this manner.
After COP, Least Developed Countries (LDC) negotiator Manjeet Dhakal told Climate Home News that adaptation was “not something to trade”. His native Nepal, for example, needs funding to put in place measures like early warning systems for flooding from glacial lakes and river floods, he said.
On the other side, EU negotiators accused climate-vulnerable countries of not giving strong enough support to Europe’s push for a roadmap away from fossil fuels.
Danish climate minister Lars Aagaard told a post-COP podcast in Danish that small islands and others had only supported the EU “in a half-assed way”.
This signals a weakening of the close relationship between the two sides that was cemented at COP21 in 2015 when they stood firmly together in the push for the Paris Agreement to include the lower global warming limit of 1.5C, as partners in what was dubbed the “High Ambition Coalition”.
Adaptation and fossil fuels linked
In Belém, after two weeks of late-night talks, governments at COP30 could only agree to a vague goal of at least tripling adaptation finance by 2035 and – instead of launching work on a fossil fuel roadmap – to create a “Global Implementation Accelerator” which may or may not include such a roadmap at some point in the future.
To get things started, Brazil’s COP30 president said he would draft a voluntary roadmap outside of the UN climate process.
Developed countries resisted a more ambitious call to triple adaptation finance by 2030 to $120 billion a year. The EU noted that an overall climate finance goal – of $300bn a year by 2035 – had been agreed only last year at COP29 and said they did not want to set an additional goal outside of its scope.
At the same time, a coalition of around 80 countries was pushing for COP30 to agree to launch a roadmap away from fossil fuels. This coalition included both developed and developing nations – particularly many LDCs, small islands and Latin American nations.
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On the second Friday morning of the talks, the EU’s top climate official Wopke Hoekstra linked the two issues, telling a closed-door meeting of ministers: “if we deliver on the mitigation [emissions reductions] here together, yes you can ask the EU to move beyond its comfort zone on the financing of adaptation”.
Later that day, the African Group’s lead negotiator Richard Muyungi put out a statement saying that “some want [tripling of adaptation finance] deleted unless we trade it for a fossil-fuel phase-out deal. That is unacceptable. Adaptation is a right, not a bargaining chip.” He added: “This is an implementation COP, the continent has compromised enough. Africa will not leave with nothing.”
Thibyan Ibrahim, a negotiator for the alliance of small island states (AOSIS), told Climate Home News that climate-vulnerable countries were “disappointed and frustrated that developed countries aren’t taking the initiative to fill the gap in leadership after the withdrawal of the US”.
“While they [the rest] are not leaving the Paris Agreement, it is frustrating to see rolling back of ambition and commitments, rather than stepping up and becoming a partner of choice for developing countries,” the Maldivian negotiator said.
“Half-assed” support from small islands
On the other side, some EU negotiators expressed disappointment in the LDCs and AOSIS, accusing them of not being vocal enough in supporting a roadmap away from fossil fuels – something both groups deny.
Lars Aagaard, the climate minister from Denmark who led the EU’s negotiations, told the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) in Danish that “those who normally support us” like the “small island states etcetera” only stood up for us “in a half-assed way” on moving away from fossil fuels. He added that the EU could “feel that the alliances that were there before were not so strong”.
He speculated that the US may have played a role in making countries that would normally support the EU on fossil fuels “conspicuously silent”. In October, after US threats to restrict visas and sanction nations, many Caribbean countries voted with the US and Saudi Arabia to postpone a green shipping deal at the International Maritime Organization in London. The US did not send an official delegation to COP30.
Former Colombian environment minister Susana Muhamad told a Climate Home News event halfway through COP30 that “we have countries in the Caribbean that have been leaders on the finance that cannot speak any more globally about [it] because they have been threatened” by the US.
Some negotiators and observers have said the EU could have got more support for a fossil fuel transition roadmap if the bloc had come with a compelling offer on adaptation finance. But Aagaard dismissed this argument, telling DR in Danish: “There is not a day on Earth when I give any money to Tuvalu or Jamaica, then the Saudis think ‘Oh, how sweet they are… now I vote for us to get off fossil fuels’.”
Some LDC and AOSIS negotiators also denied that their support for a fossil fuel transition plan would have been stronger with more adaptation money on the table. “Not necessarily,” said AOSIS’s Ibrahim while the LDCs’ Dhakal said both mitigation and adaptation are important, and Sierra Leone’s environment minister Jiwoh Abdulai insisted “the two are not mutually exclusive for us”.
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But Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said that at both COP29 and COP30 there had been a “disenchanted vulnerable group of countries”, adding “this dynamic is likely to persist if Western nations remain distracted from climate finance”.
“Faced with diminishing climate aid from the West and the availability of cheap solar panels from China, they are likely to find the latter far more attractive,” he added.
The lesson Aagaard said he had taken from COP30 was that Europe needs to pursue its own interests more relentlessly and not be naive. “The thing about being the moral one and doing the right thing and hoping that others will follow suit – that dream has pretty much been wrecked for me,” he told DR.
The post EU alliance with climate-vulnerable nations frays over finance trade-off appeared first on Climate Home News.
EU alliance with climate-vulnerable nations frays over finance trade-off
SYDNEY, Thursday 30 October 2026 — In response to reports that the Albanese government is set to introduce draft legislation this year that would seek to ban data centres in Australia’s suburbs, Joe Rafalowicz, Head of Climate and Energy at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said:
“These reports are a testament to the growing community opposition to these completely inappropriate AI factories that have sprung up across our suburbs, and Big Tech corporations should take heed — the data centre build-out must not happen without the endorsement of the Australian people.
“But the government can’t simply ship this problem out to regional Australia without addressing the fundamental issues with this extractive new industry.
“We’re already seeing a trend of AI data centre proposals moving to the regions, in areas that are more water-scarce, more environmentally sensitive, and next to sources of fracked and coal seam gas to support their massive BYO gas-fired power plans — a pattern we’ve seen play out in the United States.
“From the Beetaloo Basin in the NT to the Western Downs in Qld, we’re seeing a wave of AI data centre proposals that would see new gas fast-tracked to support their massive energy demand, and threaten to completely derail Australia’s energy transition.
“Just as suburban Australians are asking, “what for?”, regional communities like Berry Springs and Dalby do not want dirty data centres setting up shop with absolutely no benefit to their communities. Greenpeace is calling for a moratorium on AI data centre developments until strict and enforceable safeguards are in place to protect our climate and our communities.”
-ENDS-
Media contact
Kate O’Callaghan on +61 406 231 892 or kate.ocallaghan@greenpeace.org
AI data centre ban in suburbs would not address fundamental issues: Greenpeace
In the thick of the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan in 2024, the UN climate talks were rattled by what can only be described as a major PR disaster. The BBC, Reuters and The Guardian all carried headlines, attributed to leading climate policy experts, that the COPs were “no longer fit for purpose”.
The articles outlined a series of reforms called for in an open letter signed by 22 eminent scientists and politicians, including a former UN secretary-general and previous UN climate chief, with a further 150 lending their support. The headlines shook confidence in the COP process, just as governments were wrestling over a new climate finance goal.
The Club of Rome – which handled the media relations for the letter – hurried to say that its “constructive, supportive ideas” had been “misinterpreted”. Negotiators kept calm(ish) and carried on, in the end landing the finance goal after some high-stakes drama on the final day.
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To my surprise, when I went back this week to read the letter again, I could not find the offending line about the COPs not being fit for purpose. The Club of Rome has yet to respond to my query about its disappearance.
Whatever happened to the wording, that sentiment has been widely shared. COPs have ballooned in size while the importance of their outcomes seems to have diminished since the 2015 Paris Agreement (with the exception of the 2023 COP in Dubai where countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems).
The same on the surface
Two years on from those painful headlines in Baku, has anything changed for the better? You might be forgiven for thinking not. Official decisions are still made by consensus rather than the majority voting some have called for to stop blockers.
Tens of thousands of officials, activists and business execs still scurry around the halls to an ever-growing list of side events, roundtables and dialogues, while deals still come down to rows, all-nighters and jargon-filled texts adopted to rounds of applause.
But it would not be true to say that COPs have completely failed to respond to the very real need to translate the words of the Paris Agreement into action in the outside world.
Global warming is projected to be around 1.3C lower this century than it would have been if the world had not committed to tackle the climate crisis under that accord. Developing countries have a valued space at COPs in which their voices have equal weight in decision-making, unlike in many other international fora. And most importantly, perhaps, there has been a subtle shift, tipping the balance away from negotiating towards doing.
Brazil branded last year’s summit in Belém as the “COP of Implementation”, corralling the sprawling Action Agenda into six axes. This was a bid to impose some structure on the mushrooming efforts between governments, UN agencies, cities, businesses and civil society to set targets and spur faster results on their pet issues, from methane emissions to health and adaptation in conflict zones. COP30 alone saw the launch of 120 “plans to accelerate solutions”.
COP30 roadmaps off the cuff
Meanwhile, as the formal negotiations drew to a close, it was clear that consensus decision-making was evolving into something a little more improvised.
With only around half of all countries on board with the idea of a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago announced his team would put one together over the coming year, along with another on how to meet a global goal to halt deforestation by 2030. Those roadmaps will be launched next week, presented and discussed at COP31, though it’s still unclear whether or how they’ll be incorporated into the formal negotiating agenda.
Some leading policy-makers don’t think that matters too much. Speaking to journalists before the Antalya summit, COP30 CEO Ana Toni and Dutch climate minister Stientje van Veldhoven said “coalitions of the willing” can move ahead without needing consensus from the COPs. This, they said, was evident this year at the first global conference on TAFF, co-chaired by van Veldhoven and attended by 60 countries.
“Consensus or no-consensus in the general COP doesn’t make a difference for the choices I have to make in my country to get my country to phase out fossil fuels,” said the Dutch minister. The Netherlands recently became one of the first to publish a national TAFF plan.
COP31 banks on flagship voluntary initiatives
This thinking has permeated the management and expected outcomes of this year’s COP too. Earlier this year, Türkiye, supported by international energy agencies, floated the idea of a voluntary goal to boost electrification to 35% of the world’s final energy consumption by 2035 – and this is now being touted as one of the main results to be expected from Antalya.
Türkiye is also championing a pledge on AI and climate, while co-host Australia is pushing to ease access to climate finance for least developed countries and small island states.
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None of these needs consensus. But with a political cover decision already in the works, as trailed by the COP presidents, they – and perhaps the fossil fuel roadmap – may find a home in the official text if language acceptable to most can be found, giving them them additional weight.
UNFCCC reform process in the shadows
Formal reform is underway too, if quietly. UN climate chief Simon Stiell is leading a review informed by ongoing consultations with a group of 15 well-respected climate policy experts, three of whom signed the open letter in 2024.
Among them is leading Swedish climate and sustainability scientist Johan Rockström who has strong ideas about how to make COPs function better, including a switch to majority voting. He told the same press briefing nothing stands in the way of this, because the rules of procedure for making decisions at COPs have never been formally agreed.
Still, to get away from the default setting of consensus would require agreement on a new system that may be impossible to achieve given the rise in bullying tactics by fossil fuel heavyweights.