While government delegations and civil society representatives at the pre-COP in Brasilia this week had hoped for bigger advances on key topics, one stood out as winning broad backing for a leap forward at next month’s UN climate summit: adaptation.
Efforts to adapt to worsening extreme weather and rising seas have long trailed behind measures to cut planet-heating emissions in terms of political support and funding. But as storms, droughts, floods and extreme heat take an ever-higher toll across the world, that imbalance could shift significantly at COP30 this week’s discussions suggest.
COP30 president André Corrêa do Lago told Climate Home that he’s hoping for an adaptation package to be agreed in Belém, which would include a new goal to measure progress on adaptation and a new target to increase finance for climate resilience in developing countries.
“An adaptation package would be important. I said during a closed-door meeting that I would like for COP30 to be remembered as an adaptation COP,” Corrêa do Lago said in an interview on the sidelines of pre-COP30.
Natalie Unterstell, president of the Brazilian Talanoa Institute, told Climate Home conversations on adaptation showed clear progress. “Practically all delegations mentioned the need to elevate adaptation to a higher political level in Belém,” she said.
In Brasilia, which attracted delegations from nearly 70 countries, India said COP30 – the first UN climate summit to take place in the Amazon – needs to be a COP of adaptation. Island nation Barbados urged to increase ambition on adaptation, while Palau called for finance for adaptation to be scaled up.
The group of Least-Developed Countries (LDCs), meanwhile, reiterated a proposal to triple adaptation financing flows compared to 2022 – a year in which developed countries provided and mobilised $32.4 billion.
“For the first time at the pre-COP, we heard from more countries in favour of this proposal, but it still doesn’t have the support of everyone, especially not from developed countries,” said Unterstell, who has been following discussions on the topic.
An annual progress report shows that agriculture and wildfires continue to decimate forests despite a global promise to stop their loss this decade
The context for boosting adaptation finance – which covers only a small share of identified needs – is difficult, with the US slashing most of its aid under Donald Trump and other key donor countries paring back their development spending amid wars and fiscal pressures.
That would be far short of the estimated $40 billion needed to honour the promise developed countries made four years ago at COP26 in Glasgow to double their adaptation finance from 2019 levels by this year.
Concerned about this trend, and the huge gap between the funding on offer and their adaptation needs, poorer countries want Belém to be the moment to set a new and ambitious adaptation financing goal for the coming years.
Unterstell said this could be discussed under the Global Goal on Adaptation and, particularly, the Baku Adaptation Roadmap agreed during COP29 to advance progress on the adaptation provisions of the Paris Agreement. Another option could be its inclusion in a text prepared by the presidency called a cover decision, but it’s still unclear if COP30 will end with one, she said.
Ministerial consultations held on October 15, 2025, during pre-COP30 in Brasilia. (Photo: Rafa Neddermeyer/COP30 Brasil Amazônia/PR)
Decision due on adaptation indicators
In Brasilia, there was widespread recognition of the need to complete the Global Goal on Adaptation – agreed in the Paris accord 10 years ago – at COP30 by defining the indicators that will guide and monitor adaptation policies in areas such as food production, water and health.
After a process that began with nearly 10,000 indicators, countries are now discussing a far shorter potential list of 100 that should be decided upon at COP30.
At the closing of the pre-COP, Ana Paula Chantre Luna de Carvalho Pereira, environment minister of Angola and one of the coordinators for the adaptation talks, said there was still work to be done by the end of the month to finalise the indicators, so they “are applicable globally, flexible, and reflective of implementation and progress in all countries”.
At the meetings in Brasilia, some governments expressed the need to quickly finalise the definition of the indicators during the first week of COP30 and leave the second week for talks on more political aspects and implementation.
In response, the COP30 president said this could be possible. Civil society representatives were more sceptical, however, because of the differences among countries regarding the indicators, including the total number listed and which are most important. Finance is another likely sticking point.
Lucas Di Pietro, policy consultant and former adaptation director at Argentina’s Ministry of Environment, said the indicators are key to translate the political progress into “measurable and comparable results”.
“Their development must reflect the diversity of contexts and capabilities, allowing each country to adopt those most relevant to its national reality,” said Di Pietro. “Rather than rushing to approve them, it is important that the final result is balanced and linked to the effective provision of means of implementation, such as finance, technology and capacity-building.”
Many countries – especially some developing ones – consider it essential to include indicators related to the financing provided by developed countries to developing ones, while others argue that all types of financing should be monitored — including private sector investments.
The expansion could add millions of tons of carbon pollution annually while polluting the air near vulnerable communities and ecosystems.
By Ryan Krugman
Georgia regulators have approved a massive expansion of natural gas power plants that could dramatically increase the state’s climate pollution, largely to support the rapid growth of data centers.
The real action is happening locally anyway, says Monique Harden, an environmental justice lawyer and advocate living in Cancer Alley.
Interview by Paloma Beltran, Living on Earth
From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Paloma Beltran with Monique Harden, an environmental justice lawyer and advocate in New Orleans.
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed. An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Secrets and layoffs
UNLAWFUL PANEL: A federal judge ruled that the US energy department “violated the law when secretary Chris Wright handpicked five researchers who rejected the scientific consensus on climate change to work in secret on a sweeping government report on global warming”, reported the New York Times. The newspaper explained that a 1972 law “does not allow agencies to recruit or rely on secret groups for the purposes of policymaking”. A Carbon Brief factcheck found more than 100 false or misleading claims in the report.
DARKNESS DESCENDS: The Washington Post reportedly sent layoff notices to “at least 14” of its climate journalists, as part of a wider move from the newspaper’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, to eliminate 300 jobs at the publication, claimed Climate Colored Goggles. After the layoffs, the newspaper will have five journalists left on its award-winning climate desk, according to the substack run by a former climate reporter at the Los Angeles Times. It comes after CBS News laid off most of its climate team in October, it added.
WIND UNBLOCKED: Elsewhere, a separate federal ruling said that a wind project off the coast of New York state can continue, which now means that “all five offshore wind projects halted by the Trump administration in December can resume construction”, said Reuters. Bloomberg added that “Ørsted said it has spent $7bn on the development, which is 45% complete”.
Around the world
CHANGING TIDES: The EU is “mulling a new strategy” in climate diplomacy after struggling to gather support for “faster, more ambitious action to cut planet-heating emissions” at last year’s UN climate summit COP30, reported Reuters.
FINANCE ‘CUT’: The UK government is planning to cut climate finance by more than a fifth, from £11.6bn over the past five years to £9bn in the next five, according to the Guardian.
BIG PLANS: India’s 2026 budget included a new $2.2bn funding push for carbon capture technologies, reported Carbon Brief. The budget also outlined support for renewables and the mining and processing of critical minerals.
MOROCCO FLOODS: More than 140,000 people have been evacuated in Morocco as “heavy rainfall and water releases from overfilled dams led to flooding”, reported the Associated Press.
CASHFLOW: “Flawed” economic models used by governments and financial bodies “ignor[e] shocks from extreme weather and climate tipping points”, posing the risk of a “global financial crash”, according to a Carbon Tracker report covered by the Guardian.
HEATING UP: The International Olympic Committee is discussing options to hold future winter games earlier in the year “because of the effects of warmer temperatures”, said the Associated Press.
54%
The increase in new solar capacity installed in Africa over 2024-25 – the continent’s fastest growth on record, according to a Global Solar Council report covered by Bloomberg.
Latest climate research
Arctic warming significantly postpones the retreat of the Afro-Asian summer monsoon, worsening autumn rainfall | Environmental Research Letters
“Positive” images of heatwaves reduce the impact of messages about extreme heat, according to a survey of 4,000 US adults | Environmental Communication
Greenland’s “peripheral” glaciers are projected to lose nearly one-fifth of their total area and almost one-third of their total volume by 2100 under a low-emissions scenario | The Cryosphere
Solar power, electric vehicles and other clean-energy technologies drove more than a third of the growth in China’s economy in 2025 – and more than 90% of the rise in investment, according to new analysis for Carbon Brief (shown in blue above). Clean-energy sectors contributed a record 15.4tn yuan ($2.1tn) in 2025, some 11.4% of China’s gross domestic product (GDP) – comparable to the economies of Brazil or Canada, the analysis said.
Spotlight
Can humans reverse nature decline?
This week, Carbon Brief travelled to a UN event in Manchester, UK to speak to biodiversity scientists about the chances of reversing nature loss.
Officials from more than 150 countries arrived in Manchester this week to approve a new UN report on how nature underpins economic prosperity.
The meeting comes just four years before nations are due to meet a global target to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, agreed in 2022 under the landmark “Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework” (GBF).
At the sidelines of the meeting, Carbon Brief spoke to a range of scientists about humanity’s chances of meeting the 2030 goal. Their answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Dr David Obura, ecologist and chair of Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)
We can’t halt and reverse the decline of every ecosystem. But we can try to “bend the curve” or halt and reverse the drivers of decline. That’s the economic drivers, the indirect drivers and the values shifts we need to have. What the GBF aspires to do, in terms of halting and reversing biodiversity loss, we can put in place the enabling drivers for that by 2030, but we won’t be able to do it fast enough at this point to halt [the loss] of all ecosystems.
Countries are due to report on progress by the end of February this year on their national strategies to the Convention on Biological Diversity [CBD]. Once we get that, coupled with a process that is ongoing within the CBD, which is called the global stocktake, I think that’s going to give insights on progress as to whether this is possible to achieve by 2030…Are we on the right trajectory? I think we are and hopefully we will continue to move towards the final destination of having halted biodiversity loss, but also of living in harmony with nature.
Prof Laura Pereira, scientist at the Global Change Institute at Wits University, South Africa
At the global level, I think it’s very unlikely that we’re going to achieve the overall goal of halting biodiversity loss by 2030. That being said, I think we will make substantial inroads towards achieving our longer term targets. There is a lot of hope, but we’ve also got to be very aware that we have not necessarily seen the transformative changes that are going to be needed to really reverse the impacts on biodiversity.
Dr David Cooper, chair of the UK’s Joint Nature Conservation Committee and former executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity
It’s important to look at the GBF as a whole…I think it is possible to achieve those targets, or at least most of them, and to make substantial progress towards them. It is possible, still, to take action to put nature on a path to recovery. We’ll have to increasingly look at the drivers.
Prof Andrew Gonzalez, McGill University professor and co-chair of an IPBES biodiversity monitoring assessment
I think for many of the 23 targets across the GBF, it’s going to be challenging to hit those by 2030. I think we’re looking at a process that’s starting now in earnest as countries [implement steps and measure progress]…You have to align efforts for conserving nature, the economics of protecting nature [and] the social dimensions of that, and who benefits, whose rights are preserved and protected.
Neville Ash, director of the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre
The ambitions in the 2030 targets are very high, so it’s going to be a stretch for many governments to make the actions necessary to achieve those targets, but even if we make all the actions in the next four years, it doesn’t mean we halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. It means we put the action in place to enable that to happen in the future…The important thing at this stage is the urgent action to address the loss of biodiversity, with the result of that finding its way through by the ambition of 2050 of living in harmony with nature.
If you look at all of the available evidence, it’s pretty clear that we’re going to keep experiencing biodiversity decline. I mean, it’s fairly similar to the 1.5C climate target. We are not going to meet that either. But that doesn’t mean that you slow down the ambition…even though you recognise that we probably won’t meet that specific timebound target, that’s all the more reason to continue to do what we’re doing and, in fact, accelerate action.
Watch, read, listen
OIL IMPACTS: Gas flaring has risen in the Niger Delta since oil and gas major Shell sold its assets in the Nigerian “oil hub”, a Climate Home News investigation found.
LOW SNOW: The Washington Post explored how “climate change is making the Winter Olympics harder to host”.
CULTURE WARS: A Media Confidential podcast examined when climate coverage in the UK became “part of the culture wars”.
Greenhouse Gases2 years ago
Climate Change2 years ago