Following the end of COP30, Carbon Brief’s journalist answered a range of questions exclusively asked by its Insider Pass holders.

COP30 officially closed at 8:44pm on Saturday evening, with the final gavel coming down and more than 150 pages of decision text adopted at the summit in Belém, Brazil.

Less than 24 hours later, Carbon Brief published its 20,000-word summary of all the key outcomes from COP30.

It details the voluntary plan to curb fossil fuels, a goal to triple adaptation finance and new efforts to “strengthen” climate targets, among a range of other topics.

Building on this, Carbon Brief journalists answered questions on climate finance, deforestation, agriculture, trade measures and much more within the webinar.

The webinar was moderated by Carbon Brief’s editor, Leo Hickman, and featured the following Carbon Brief journalists:

• Dr Simon Evans, senior policy editor and deputy editor
• Daisy Dunne, associate editor
• Josh Gabbatiss, policy correspondent
• Molly Lempriere, section editor for policy
• Aruna Chandrasekhar, land, food systems and nature reporter
• Anika Patel, China analyst
• Giuliana Viglione, section editor for food, land and nature

A recording of the webinar (below) is now available to watch on YouTube.

COP30: Key outcomes agreed at the UN climate talks in Belém

COP30 Belém

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23.11.25

COP30 DeBriefed 21 November 2025: ‘Mutirão’ text latest; ‘Roadmaps’ explained; COP finish times plotted

COP30 Belém

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21.11.25

Webinar: Carbon Brief’s second ‘ask us anything’ at COP30 

COP30 Belém

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17.11.25

COP30 DeBriefed 14 November 2025: Finance and 1.5C loom large at talks; China’s emissions dip; Negotiations explained

COP30 Belém

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14.11.25

The post Webinar: Carbon Brief’s third ‘ask us anything’ at COP30 appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Webinar: Carbon Brief’s third ‘ask us anything’ at COP30

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.

The post The COP30 Mutirão agreement was just talk without truth appeared first on Climate Home News.

The COP30 Mutirão agreement was just talk without truth