Marking the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, COP30 is seen as a crucial test of the world’s resolve to tackle climate change. At a time of faltering multilateralism, worsening climate-related destruction and a lack of ambition in national pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the stakes for the UN climate summit in Belèm are higher than ever.

We take a look at the big questions facing this Amazon COP – from efforts to raise weak national climate targets and transition away from fossil fuels, to long-overdue action on adaptation and forest finance.

How will COP30 address the global ambition shortfall?

In the year leading up to COP30, the global climate community watched closely for countries’ new national targets, a key gauge of the world’s commitment to cutting greenhouse gas emissions. As the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) belatedly trickled in, a clear picture emerged: the plans fall far short of what is needed to avoid the worst climate impacts.

If those commitments are turned into action, global emissions are still only expected to fall about 10% below 2019 levels by 2035, a preliminary UN climate assessment found – far short of the roughly 60% cut IPCC scientists say is needed to limit global warming to 1.5C.

“Current commitments still point to climate breakdown,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres, indicating that a temporary overshoot of the more ambitious Paris temperature goal is now “inevitable”.

Heading into COP30, he called on world leaders to deliver “a bold and credible response plan” to close the gap. This leaves the Brazilian COP30 presidency with the unenviable task of trying to push countries to ramp up their ambition and go beyond the NDCs that they have just submitted.

How – or even whether – that will happen is still unclear.

A round of informal consultations in September brought a clash of views into public view. Large emerging economies, including China, Saudi Arabia and India, pushed back on the need to discuss climate plans – arguing the topic is not on the summit’s agenda and will be taken up in the next Global Stocktake. But rich nations, least-developed countries (LDCs), small island states and Latin American nations want a COP30 decision that lays out a pathway for accelerating climate action in the years ahead.

If countries were to ultimately agree on a collective response, a negotiated cover decision could be a natural home for it. Brazil professed its strong opposition to that option for months, but it recently warmed up to the idea of producing an “omnibus” decision that could incorporate all the main outcomes of the summit, including those not covered by the formal agenda.

But some seasoned COP participants want Brazil to take a radically different approach. That could mean, for example, producing an “Implementation Plan“, that, instead of listing vague promises, provides detailed guidance on the way forward while trying to connect the negotiations to the real world.

What’s next for the fossil fuel transition?

At COP28 in Dubai, countries reached a landmark agreement to transition away from fossil fuels in their energy systems in a historic first for a UN climate summit. Yet, nearly two years later, those words have not been matched by meaningful action.

According to the latest Production Gap Report, governments are collectively planning even higher levels of fossil fuel production than they were at the time of the Dubai deal. By 2030, planned production is projected to exceed levels consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5C by more than 120%.

And in their latest national climate plans submitted this year, only about a third of countries express some form of support for the transition away from fossil fuels, an analysis by Carbon Brief found.

Leo Roberts, a programme lead on energy transitions at think-tank E3G, said there needs to be a high-level visible signal emerging from this COP, but that is unlikely to come from the formal negotiations. Oil-producing nations have blocked any progress on the fossil fuel transition at COP29 last year and at last June’s mid-year session in Bonn.

“What we need to see is some process that can act as a bridge between the real world and negotiations,” added Roberts, “a dialogue space that can ultimately produce some form of roadmap on the transition away from fossil fuels”.

This idea should count on political backing from Brazil, despite the country’s plans to expand oil and gas production. The need for a roadmap was first floated in the country’s NDC last year and Environment Minister Marina Silvia has been publicly championing it in the run-up to COP30.

Last week, she called on world leaders to send a clear message on the need for a “just, planned, gradual and long-term decommissioning of fossil fuels” as they take to the stage in Belém this week.

Several other nations should be getting behind this push. Ministers from 23 countries, including the UK, Germany, France and small-island nations, said “international cooperation and global tracking” are needed to make sure the transition happens fast enough in a joint statement published on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

The European Union wants the COP30 outcome to ask all nations, and particularly major emitters, “to operationalise their contribution” to the global call to transition away from fossil fuels. Colombia is set to host the first international conference on phasing out fossil fuels in April 2026, aiming to give countries a global platform for co-operating on the transition away from coal, oil and fossil gas.

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In the formal negotiations, Brazil has made advancing the just transition work programme one of its top priorities, after countries failed at COP29 to agree on a deal to support workers and communities affected by the shift to cleaner energy.

Civil society groups are pushing the idea of a new “Belém Action Mechanism” under the programme, an initiative aimed at unifying and strengthening global efforts to ensure that the shift away from fossil fuels is fair, inclusive, and equitable. The idea is to identify barriers, opportunities and international support by providing countries with global coordination.

Will adaptation take centre stage?

As the world fails to limit global warming to agreed levels, climate impacts are expected to grow even more intense and frequent. This grim outlook translates into an increasingly urgent need to strengthen countries’ ability to withstand worsening floods, deadlier heatwaves and more prolonged droughts.

But adaptation – often described as the “Cinderella” of climate action – remains largely overlooked and severely underfunded. Brazil has pledged to change that, putting adaptation at the centre of this year’s UN climate summit.

“Climate adaptation is no longer a choice that follows mitigation – it is the first half of our survival,” COP30 president André Aranha Corrêa do Lago said in a recent letter calling for “urgent and tangible” outcomes in Belém.

In the formal negotiations, the big-ticket item will be the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA). Governments should agree on a set of indicators that can be used to measure progress towards the GGA’s broad targets on areas including sanitation, food, health and infrastructure.

Technical experts have whittled down thousands of proposed indicators to a more manageable list of 100, which will serve as the basis of discussions in Belèm.

Natalie Unterstell, president of Brazil’s Instituto Talanoa, told a Climate Home briefing that would “really help us to start having a common language to measure progress on resilience” – comparing it to the Paris temperature goals.

Vulnerable countries also hope that clearer parameters will help unlock more funding for adaptation efforts.

Sounding the alarm over a “yawning gap” in adaptation finance, the UN Environment Programme estimates that developing countries will need to spend between $310 billion and $365 billion a year on resilience measures by 2035 — about 12 times current international public funding levels.

But the outlook for adaptation finance is growing increasingly bleak. The COP26 pledge by developed nations to double funding for developing countries by 2025 appears likely to have been missed, as governments cut overseas spending amid mounting geopolitical tensions and domestic fiscal pressures.

While an official assessment will not be available until 2027, the LDCs are pushing for a new goal to be set at COP30 to boost adaptation finance to about $120 billion a year by 2030. Manjeet Dhakal, a Nepalese negotiator for the group, said that would be the “bare minimum, or otherwise it will be very difficult for us”.

Where those resources could come from remains to be seen. But Corrêa do Lago told Reuters he hoped to produce a “package of resources” for adaptation with rich countries, multilateral development banks and philanthropic organisations all contributing.

How will fractured geopolitics influence discussions?

Geopolitical tensions linked to wars and growing trade rivalries are inevitably casting a long shadow over the climate agenda and hampering multilateral cooperation.

The most disruptive force – US President Donald Trump’s administration – will not be present on the ground in Belèm, barring a last-minute U-turn. The White House told several media outlets that no high-level officials will be sent to the talks, which come a month before the US will officially leave the Paris Agreement.

Many diplomats are likely breathing a sigh of relief after seeing the US use what some observers described as “bully-boy tactics” to sink a landmark deal to cut emissions in the shipping sector last month.

The Trump administration may not be in the room in Belém, but its shadow is likely to hang over the summit. Laurence Tubiana, a key architect of the Paris Agreement, warned that she has never seen such an aggressive stance against climate policy as that emanating from Washington. “We are really confronted with an ideological battle where climate change is in the package the US government wants to defeat,” she told reporters.

Tubiana added that other countries need to stand up and make COP “a turning point”.

The spotlight is expected to fall primarily on the EU, which will carry the torch for rich countries, and large emerging economies, including China, India and COP30 host Brazil.

For Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, this year’s summit could mark a “collective graduation ceremony” for Global South countries fast-tracked by the retreat of the US.

“When I look at that part of the world, I’m seeing stronger alignment among many countries between their economic growth and the decarbonisation agenda,” he said.

The EU has been walking a tightrope between trying to reaffirm its climate leadership and grappling with internal discord that has threatened to undermine its credibility.

Tubiana said Europe “must stop patronising” and recognise that “we are all interdependent”. “We cannot execute the green transition without cooperation and help from other countries,” she added. “That means we have to propose ways of working, investing and trading that are truly equitable.”

Echoing her words, Arunabha Ghosh, CEO of the Delhi-based Council on Energy, Environment and Water, said countries need to show a different level of solidarity across the [Global] North and the South.

“We are all under collective siege, and when you are under siege, the more you hunker down together, the better chances you have to survive the real and metaphorical hurricanes,” he told reporters.

Will an Amazon COP turn the tide on deforestation?

When Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva picked the Amazon city of Belèm as the venue for COP30, he wanted to make sure that, for the first time, forests would be literally at the heart of the talks as their crucial role in storing carbon and regulating the climate comes under growing threat.

Global deforestation has not slowed significantly in the four years since countries committed at COP26 to halt and reverse forest loss and degradation by 2030.

Last year, the world lost 8.1 million hectares of forest – an area the size of England – leaving the world 63% off track from meeting that pledge, according to the annual Forest Declaration Assessment. Fires and land clearing for agriculture and other commodities remain the leading causes of deforestation.

How could COP30 start turning this negative trend around? The most highly anticipated initiative falls outside of the negotiations, but is being billed as potentially one of Brazil’s biggest legacies as COP host: the launch of the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF).

World failing on goal to halt deforestation by 2030, raising stakes for Amazon COP

Acting as an investment fund, the mechanism would invest in financial markets and use some of the expected returns to reward forest-rich nations that manage to keep trees standing. It aims to receive an initial capital of $25 billion from governments, which would then be used to attract $100 billion from private investors.

“Think of a bank that runs normal market operations but that directs its profits not to shareholders but to forests,” said João Paulo de Resende, undersecretary for economic and fiscal affairs at Brazil’s Finance Ministry.

The TFFF’s main strategy is to get cheap money from investors and lend money to emerging economies at much higher interest rates. Emerging market bonds would account for as much as 80% of its investments. Exploiting this arbitrage opportunity should guarantee enough returns to pay back investors and channel cash into forest protection, according to its proponents.

But the mechanics of the fund have come in for criticism, with some analysts saying the fund rests on “a fragile illusion” of free revenues to be harvested from the bond market, where higher yields represent bigger real risks.

Potential donors have also been asking “very tough questions” about the fund’s configuration, one of its promoters told Climate Home’s webinar last month. The UK government was reportedly divided over whether to offer cash for the initiative with the Treasury questioning its costs, Politico reported.

So far, only Brazil and Indonesia have committed money to the TFFF, with each pledging $1 billion. But Lula, who has personally championed the initiative, will be hoping to announce more contributions at the flagship launch event on Thursday.

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Five big questions hanging over COP30