After governments failed to agree on a roadmap away from fossil fuels at COP30, Australia will “continue to argue” for a transition away from coal, oil and gas in energy systems at next year’s COP31 climate talks, the incoming “President of Negotiations” has said.

Sitting alongside ministers from the Pacific islands of Vanuatu, Palau and the Solomon Islands on the last evening of COP30 in Brazil, Australian climate minister Chris Bowen was asked about negotiations to transition away from fossil fuels. He told the press conference that he “wasn’t going to start getting into the COP31 negotiations because we haven’t quite finished COP30 yet.”

But he added that Australia and the Pacific helped design a global target to transition away from fossil fuels, which was agreed two years ago at COP28 in Dubai. “We’ll continue to argue for things that are in the best interest of Australia and the Pacific together,” he said.

In a last-minute deal in Belém, Australia and Türkiye agreed to share responsibilities at next year’s UN climate summit, with the conference taking place in the city of Antalya – located in the Turkish Riviera – but with the Australians taking a leading role in the negotiations.

Governments at COP30 failed to collectively agree to launch a roadmap away from fossil fuels, with the Brazilian presidency stating that around 85 countries were in favour and 80 against. The list of countries in favour was published by Carbon Brief, but the countries Brazil says were against have not been named.

Countries did collectively set up a Global Implementation Accelerator, which is linked to the COP28 decision where the fossil fuel transition is mentioned. Voluntary initiatives were also launched at the summit, with Brazil promising to draw up a fossil fuel transition roadmap by COP31 and Colombia hosting an international conference on the transition in April.

Bowen said that COP31 “won’t be an easy negotiation” but “in one way, that’s why I’m looking forward to it so much because hard negotiations can lead to very good outcomes, as recent days have shown”.

Division of COP31 duties

After Australia and Türkiye agreed last week to share COP31 responsibilies, details of their arrangement emerged. Bowen will be COP “President of Negotiations”, which a joint statement describes as “exclusive authority in relation to negotiations”, while the Turkish environment minister Murat Kurum will be “COP President” and will hold the gavel which is banged to formally agree decisions.

Joanna Depledge, a COP historian and research fellow at the University of Cambridge, said on social media that this division of authority “created the potential for damaging confusion”, adding that “COP decision-making is already messy at climate COPs. It needs more certainty, not less”.

“If there is a difference of views between Türkiye and Australia, consultations will take place until the difference is resolved to mutual satisfaction,” the joint statement put out by the UN’s climate change body said.

“We are friends,” Kurum told Saturday’s press conference in Turkish, expressing his hope that the “shared pain” that Turks and Australians suffered in the First World War’s Canakkale or Gallipoli campaign be turned “into a means for friendship, cooperation and service to humanity”. He then left so that Bowen and the Pacific ministers could talk further and take questions.

According to the arrangement between the two nations, the speech-making summit of heads of state, the two week COP trade fair and negotiations will be hosted in the coastal resort of Antalya, while a lower-profile pre-COP meeting will be held in a Pacific nation, presided over by Australia.

At COP31, there will be a dedicated session on the the climate finance needs of small island developing states, at which pledges to the regional fund Pacific Resilience Facility are expected.

Australia and Turkiye will divide up the appointment of ‘champions’, people who represent the COP Presidency and try to inspire global climate action. Australia will appoint youth champions while Turkiye will appoint High-Level Champions and run the Action Agenda – the push for climate action from businesses, civil society and local governments as well as national governments.

Colombia seeks to speed up a “just” fossil fuel phase-out with first global conference

Pacific hosts a Pre-COP

The agreement has dissapointed people in both nations. The leader of the Australia’s opposition Green Party called it an “embarassing result” for Australia while a former Turkish climate negotiator told Climate Home News that, without presiding over negotiations, Turkiye would do all the work while Australia makes the decisions.

But Pacific ministers celebrated the agreement. Vanuatu’s climate minister Ralph Regenvanu said that the arrangement is “unprecedented but I believe there will be many more to come because it’s a great model, especially for smaller countries who can’t afford to host a COP”. “I would like to be involved in the agenda setting which is, for us, the most important thing”, he added.

Palau’s climate minister Stephen Victor said he hoped that government leaders would come to the pre-COP in the Pacific, which would be an opportunity to “showcase the impacts of climate change on the Pacific Island region and hear voices and solutions from the region”. Pre-COPs are usually attended mainly by ministers rather than presidents or prime ministers.

Led by Bowen, Australia has long argued for a joint Australian-Pacific COP. Bowen thanked Kurum for “immedately agreeing” to all Australia’s demands on Pacific involvement. Kurum said he wanted to work so that “regions that are most affected by climate change, such as the Mediterranean and the Pacific are given a louder voice on the global agenda”.

The post Australia’s COP31 Co-President vows to fight alongside Pacific for a fossil fuel transition appeared first on Climate Home News.

Australia’s COP31 Co-President vows to fight alongside Pacific for a fossil fuel transition

Yamina Saheb is CEO of the World Sufficiency Lab, an IPCC AR6 mitigation report author, lecturer and researcher at Sciences Po in Paris. Ana Díaz-Vidal is a PhD candidate at the Universitat de Barcelona and has previously worked on energy and climate issues at the OECD and REN21

COP30 was heralded by President Lula as the summit that would transform climate diplomacy from promises into real change. Yet without confronting fossil capital and forest destruction, it reduces climate diplomacy to a technocratic exercise in crisis management.

COP30’s Mutirão declaration fails to name the root causes of climate change. There is no acknowledgment of the global economic system and governance structures that drive fossil fuel demand and production. Instead, we get euphemisms: efforts, contributions, transitions.

This is talk without truth.

It is true that the Mutirão is not the only text that comes out of this COP, but it is a text that represents the negotiations that have occurred in the past two weeks, as well as the text that civil society and media will pay most attention to.

A close look at the COP30’s declaration’s legal verbs and phrases that come with them shows how climate diplomacy has become fluent in evasion. Verbs like recognizes, welcomes, and reaffirms dominate the text, paired with already established sets of words such as climate action, Nationally Determined Contributions, and implementing the Paris Agreement. These combinations sound official, even urgent, but they lack precision, and just repeat what was established back at COP21, ten years ago.

The most legally potent verbs, decides, requests, appear infrequently and are rarely paired with concrete terms like emissions reduction or financing. Instead, the declaration leans on soft verbs that signal recognition without responsibility. It is easier to acknowledge climate change than to commit to phasing out fossil fuels.

From the first draft, on the 18 November, to the last draft, on the 22nd, we see action verbs declining from 27 appearances to only 14, with decides, going from 20 to only eight instances.

This linguistic fog allows governments to claim alignment without changing course, keeps polluters at the table without being named, and leaves civil society deciphering documents that should be transparent by design.

A key imbalance is the small presence of mitigation, as if adaptation, especially for vulnerable communities already enduring climate impacts, was possible without drastic emission cuts. The Paris Agreement’s central promise was to keep warming below 1.5°C, a goal that demands rapid, binding commitments to reduce emissions.

The declaration is filled with hopeful language on action, adaptation and global cooperation. But it barely mentions mitigation, preferring to dwell on resilience and implementation. Yet while adaptation alone comes up 18 times, mitigation is mentioned only seven times and reductions five times, a telling measure of the shift in attention away from fossil fuel phase out.

Without mitigation, adaptation becomes mere survival in a world that keeps burning.

The declaration gestures toward international cooperation, but it is thin on climate justice. The need for a just transition is merely noted in paragraph 17. There is no binding commitment to loss and damage fund, no recognition of historical responsibility, and no structural support for communities already living through climate collapse. Justice, once again, is deferred.

The heatmap of COP30’s legal language is more than a visual, it is a warning. When climate declarations speak in circles, they fail the very people they claim to protect. If we want real action, we need real words. And we need them now.

COP30’s declaration is not just a missed opportunity, it is a dangerous precedent. If we want declarations that matter, we must demand language that tells the truth. Until then, COPs will remain a diplomatic theatre for climate action avoidance.

Future generations cannot afford another summit of euphemisms. It is time for civil society, youth movements, and frontline communities to be heard and to secure instruments of accountability, not shields for delay.

Only then will climate diplomacy move from talk without truth to action with justice.

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The COP30 Mutirão agreement was just talk without truth

COP30 came to a close on Saturday afternoon in the Amazon city of Belém with government delegates grumpy and exhausted after all-night talks. It ended with a political deal that was weaker than many had hoped for and which failed to tackle – or even directly mention – the elephant in the room: fossil fuels.

Strong resistance from oil, coal and gas-producing countries, including Saudi Arabia, Russia and India, made it impossible to include a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels – which European nations had fought for hard – in the final negotiated package. Brazil, instead, said it would create one, along with another roadmap on halting deforestation.

There were some wins – not least that against a hostile geopolitical background, this year’s UN climate conference managed to land a deal with modest steps towards increasing ambition on cutting emissions and helping poor countries cope with worsening climate impacts. 

COP30 fails to land deal on fossil fuel transition but triples finance for climate adaptation

At this weekend’s G20 summit, where the US was also absent, leaders of the world’s biggest economies confirmed their support for the Paris Agreement and efforts to limit global warming to its temperature goals, as well as enabling the Global South to access more finance for climate action.

In one of the few political wins from COP30, the poorest countries secured a promise to triple international funding for them to adapt to more extreme weather and rising seas by 2035, though that deadline was five years later than they wanted and lacking a firm number.

Perhaps the most celebrated result, however – slipping largely under the radar – was an agreement to set up a “just transition mechanism” to ensure that workers and their communities do not lose out from the shift from dirty to clean energy and get a fairer share of the benefits. 

Trade was another new kid on the block, with governments deciding to hold a series of dialogues on cooperating “to promote a supportive and open international economic system that would lead to sustainable economic growth and development” in all countries.

Here’s a selection of reactions from top politicians, UN officials, experts and campaigners to the COP30 outcome:  

Marina Silva, Brazil’s Minister of the Environment and Climate Change:

“I believe we can show today that, despite delays, contradictions and disputes, there is continuity between the ambition of Rio-92 and today’s effort. That we remain capable of cooperating, of learning, and of recognising that there are no shortcuts – and that the courage to confront the climate crisis is the result of persistence and collective effort.

“But even if those earlier versions of us were to say we have not gone as far as we once imagined we would – or needed to – they would nevertheless recognise something essential: we are still here. And we continue steadfast in our commitment to undertake the journey necessary to overcome our differences and contradictions in urgently confronting climate change.”

Juan Carlos Monterrey-Gomez, Special Representative for Climate Change & National Climate Change Director of the Ministry of Environment of Panama:

“Ten years after the adoption of the Paris Agreement, the negotiators that your governments sent to COP30 are not defending your future. They are defending the very industries that created this crisis: the fossil fuel industry and the forces driving global deforestation…

“A Forest COP with no commitment on forests is a very bad joke. A climate decision that cannot even say “fossil fuels” is not neutrality, it is complicity. And what is happening here transcends incompetence.”

António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations:

“COPs are consensus-based – and in a period of geopolitical divides, consensus is ever harder to reach. I cannot pretend that COP30 has delivered everything that is needed.

“COP30 is over, but our work is not. I will continue pushing for higher ambition and greater solidarity. To all those who marched, negotiated, advised, reported and mobilised: do not give up. History is on your side – and so is the United Nations.”

Al Gore, former US Vice President:

“Despite petrostates’ attempt to veto the development of a roadmap away from fossil fuels, the Brazilian COP30 Presidency will lead an effort to develop this roadmap, bolstered by the more than 80 countries that already support the effort. Ultimately, petrostates, the fossil fuel industry, and their allies are losing power…

“The rest of the world is fed up with delay and denial. Now is the time to forge global partnerships among all levels of government, the private sector, finance, and civil society to cultivate and achieve the level of action necessary to fulfill the promise the world made to future generations under the Paris Agreement.”

Inger Andersen, United Nations Environment Programme Executive Director:

“COP30… reinforced the growing global momentum, both in and outside of the negotiating halls, to transition away from fossil fuels as agreed in Dubai at COP28, halt deforestation – including the launch of the Tropical Forest Forever Facility that now stands at US$6.7 billion – and pursue rapid, high-impact measures such as cutting methane emissions.

“The Action Agenda, the foundation to such an inclusive COP from the Brazil Presidency that saw unprecedented Indigenous Peoples leadership from the Amazon and across the world, reinforced momentum is coming from all sources, including businesses, cities and regions, local communities, civil society, women, people of African descent, youth, and many more.”

Toya Manchineri, Manchineri Peoples, Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB):

“Indigenous Peoples will remain vigilant, mobilised, and present beyond COP30 to ensure that our voices are respected and that global decisions reflect the urgency we experience in our territories. For some, COP ends today, for us territorial defense in the heart of the Amazon is every day.”

Kaysie Brown, Associate Director, Climate Diplomacy & Geopolitics, E3G:

“In an increasingly turbulent and multi-polar world, COP30 was a litmus test of whether political will and commitment to multilateralism could keep pace with the momentum already evident in the real economy.  

“A deal was always going to be hard-fought, and the outcome on the table shows that Parties were not consistently resolute in pursuing the level of collective ambition required. Even so, there are important foundations to build on – elements that can be translated into tangible acceleration of real-world progress.”

Li Shuo, Director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute:

“COP30 marks a new inflection point in global climate politics. As national climate ambition slows, international negotiations are now constrained by diminishing political will. When the United States steps back, others are left cautious and indecisive.

“Belém has laid bare an urgent truth: in the absence of strong political momentum for greater ambition, the climate agenda will be driven less by the COP process and more by the economic forces unfolding in the real world.”

Mohamed Adow, Director, Power Shift Africa:

“With an increasingly fractured geopolitical backdrop, COP30 gave us some baby steps in the right direction, but considering the scale of the climate crisis, it has failed to rise to the occasion. 

“Among the green shoots to emerge was the creation of a Just Transition Action Mechanism – a recognition that the global move away from fossil fuels will not abandon workers and frontline communities.

“COP30 kept the process alive — but process alone will not cool the planet. Roadmaps and workplans will mean nothing unless they now translate into real finance and real action for the countries bearing the brunt of the crisis.”

Tasneem Essop, Executive Director, Climate Action Network International:

“We came here to get the Belém Action Mechanism – for families, for workers, for communities. The adoption of a Just Transition mechanism was a win shaped by years of pressure from civil society.

“This outcome didn’t fall from the sky; it was carved out through struggle, persistence, and the moral clarity of those living on the frontlines of climate breakdown. Governments must now honour this Just Transition mechanism with real action. Anything less is a betrayal of people – and of the Paris promise.”

Ani Dasgupta, President & CEO, World Resources Institute:

“COP30 delivered breakthroughs to triple adaptation finance, protect the world’s forests and elevate the voices of Indigenous people like never before. This shows that even against a challenging geopolitical backdrop, international climate cooperation can still deliver results…

“COP30 succeeded in putting people at the center of climate action. Indigenous Peoples participated in record numbers and made their voices heard. The Global Ethical Stocktake affirmed that fairness, inclusion, and responsibility must guide every decision. New commitments for Indigenous Peoples’ and communities’ land rights and finance offer a strong step forward, though far more is needed.”

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“We are still here” – COP30 shows resolve to keep fighting climate crisis