Rebecca Brown is president and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law. Lien Vandamme is its senior campaigner on human rights and climate change.
The world doesn’t just need stronger climate targets. It needs a fairer, faster and more accountable multilateral system to deliver climate action.
This November, with the world gathered in Belém, Brazil, for COP30, the negotiations unfold against a backdrop of a deepening climate crisis and rising frustration with the slow pace of progress.
These talks matter because the UN climate process is the world’s best platform for much-needed global action on the climate crisis. But after three decades, the process must evolve to meet the moment – which means changing the rules that too often delay action, dilute ambition and disconnect decisions from science, equity and the law.
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Powerful countries use procedural deadlock to block ambition. Polluting countries and corporations exert influence to protect their interests and weaken outcomes. And too often, the people most affected by the climate emergency are sidelined or excluded from the decisions that affect them the most.
Given its global nature, effective multilateralism is the only way out of the climate crisis. At COP30, leaders have a choice to continue with the status quo or revise the rules to deliver climate justice.
Reform of UN climate talks
The case for reform is undeniable.A systemic lack of compliance and accountability demands a serious, good-faith effort to reform the system.
For example, this year was supposed to mark a milestone, as all countries were expected to submit their new plans – known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) – to scale up their ambition, bringing us closer to truly limiting warming to 1.5°C. But around half of the plans have yet to arrive.
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Many of the plans that have been submitted largely missed the mark to keep warming below the legal limit of 1.5C. They avoid the one measure that science demands: an explicit fossil fuel phaseout. And the financing that developing countries need to raise ambition in their climate plans remains scarce.
Reforming the UN climate talks is therefore not procedural housekeeping; it is climate action. Without reform, the best science and strongest legal obligations will continue to collide with an outdated process. With reform, we can accelerate the phase-out of fossil fuels, deliver real finance at scale and protect human rights.
Principles for reform
Efforts are already underway. Calls for reform are coming from inside and outside the process: from civil society and experts to former negotiators and even the UNFCCC executive secretary and the COP30 presidency.
States are also testing the waters, with a recent call from Panama to allow for majority decision-making and Vanuatu naming the need for additional architecture to force states to comply with their obligations. The momentum is real.
But to succeed, this reform must be grounded in a few basic principles.
First, voting needs to be possible when consensus fails. When one or two holdouts block the ambition the world needs, the majority must be allowed to move without them.
Second, fossil fuel interests must not warp climate action priorities. Fossil fuel and other polluting industry lobbyists outnumbered national delegations of almost every country at recent talks. It is time to enforce robust conflict of interest rules to limit the influence of those whose business model depends on delay and denial.
This has been done before. The World Health Organization excluded Big Tobacco from public health conversations. Climate talks should do the same with Big Oil.
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Third, there must be meaningful accountability. Shiny declarations from states and private actors made at COPs need criteria, monitoring, and compliance. States must be held accountable for the commitments they make.
While the Paris Agreement’s compliance mechanisms may be toothless by design, the International Court of Justice recently affirmed that states are responsible for meeting their climate obligations and can be held liable if they don’t.
They have a choice to make: set up legitimate accountability mechanisms under the climate regime or face their responsibilities in courts around the world.
Human rights at its core
Finally, reform also needs to guarantee human rights protections and civic space at every COP, and make negotiations participatory, inclusive and transparent. Civil society and the public have the right to know what is being decided in their name, and to challenge decisions when they fall short.
At its core, this reform is about restoring faith in international cooperation to solve global crises. It is about making the process stronger, fairer and more capable of delivering what science and justice require.
Comment: It’s time for majority voting at UN climate summits
In Belém, governments have the opportunity to begin closing the gap between promises and action, not just through stronger targets and better policies, but by changing the rules of the game.
The science is clear. The law is clear. Now, the process must catch up.
If COP30 is to be remembered as a turning point, it won’t be because the system was perfect, but because governments decided to make it better.
The post Not another COP-out: We must rewrite the rules of the UN climate talks appeared first on Climate Home News.
Not another COP-out: We must rewrite the rules of the UN climate talks
Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD.
This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway point between the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the deadline for achieving its targets.
The CBD has found that countries are currently not on track to meet 22 out of the framework’s 23 targets.
During the fortnight, delegates will also be negotiating decisions relating to the two supplemental protocols to the CBD: the Cartagena Protocol, which covers biosafety; and the Nagoya Protocol, which covers access and benefit-sharing for the use of genetic resources.
(The Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, which are each governed by a “meeting of the parties”, or “MOP”, have fewer parties than the CBD as a whole, with 173 and 141, respectively.)
Carbon Brief is tracking the progress of countries towards consensus on dozens of negotiating texts using the interactive table below.
The tracker includes texts from the COP, as well as the MOPs for the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols. It also includes draft decisions from the most recent subsidiary body meetings, as these form the starting point for the negotiations in Yerevan.
The CBD has three subsidiary bodies: the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA), the subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) and the subsidiary body on article 8(j) and other provisions (SB8J).
SB8J focuses on issues related to the Indigenous peoples and local communities. It was established at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024.
The first two columns of the interactive tracker list the topic of each agenda item and the relevant body, with subsequent columns including dates, page counts and links to the original documents.
The table is searchable and can be sorted using the arrows in the header.
Areas of disagreement in UN draft texts are denoted by square brackets. Counting the brackets in a particular iteration of a text therefore gives a sense of how far parties are from reaching consensus.
The bracket column is colour-coded, with dark green indicating a low number of brackets and red indicating a high number of brackets remaining.
Texts can also present parties with choices using “options” or alternatives (“alt”), which are counted together in the sixth column of the table.
The key discussions in Yerevan will centre around two agenda items in particular. The first is the global review, which will assess progress towards the GBF and make recommendations for accelerating action.
The second is finance, which can be separated into two parts: resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism. On resource mobilisation, biodiverse global south countries are likely to push for an increased amount of international finance for conservation.
Disagreement over the creation of the financial mechanism led to the suspension of COP16 in Cali in October 2024, as parties failed to find agreement on the mobilisation of finance before the end of the summit.
Global south countries want the establishment of a separate financial mechanism under the control of the CBD; global north countries largely prefer to maintain the existing mechanism, which sits under the Global Environment Facility.
At the resumed session of COP16 in Rome in early 2025, countries agreed on a roadmap that would lead to the establishment of a permanent mechanism.
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The post Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit
A beacon of love
On an outer island of Fiji, two thousand nautical miles from Sydney, is a shining light of hope and resilience for our troubled world.
The island of Kioa is home to a Tuvaluan community who migrated from their atoll of Vaitupu in the late 1940s. It is a land of warm hearts, big smiles, and deep cultural roots; a place where the sound of a conch still summons the island together, where islanders paddle out to fish in carved outrigger canoes, and healthy happy children walk barefoot to school.
Here, culture is life. Kioans live sustainably through their traditional knowledge and practices. The island is alive with song, dance and the rhythms of a life tied to the tides, the winds, and the seasons.
Facing the future
Greenpeace has been lucky to have a relationship with Kioa for a number of years now, and we are continually learning from this remarkable community.
Last week, as part of our Voyaging Oceania project, we returned to the island. Our purpose was twofold —- to carry messages from the island to leaders gathering in Nadi this week for the Pacific Pre-COP, and to support the Kioa community in their efforts to improve water security for the island.
Unlike Tuvalu itself, with its eight atolls, Kioa is a mountainous, forested and richly fertile island. It will remain habitable far into the future. Kioans did not initially migrate from Vaitupu due to climate change, but the move was prophetic. They now have a lifeboat.
However, even Kioa faces challenges on our rapidly warming planet, in particular when it comes to water. Climate change is shifting once reliable rainfall patterns. On top of this, the island is already feeling the effect of this year’s intensifying El Niño event, which for Fiji means reduced rainfall and prolonged dry spells.
Right now, fresh water has to be carefully rationed, and is only available for a few hours a day. During last week’s visit aboard our campaigning ship Oceania, Greenpeace was privileged to work with the Kioa community on a new solar-powered water distribution project for the island.
Designed and led by the island, the project involves using a solar pump to move water from a reliable source to a storage tank and then using gravity to distribute the water around the village.
It was a lesson in how local knowledge and ingenuity can be the backbone of today’s climate solutions. To build a dam around the source, the local community knew the exact spot where they could gather gravel at low tide to mix with the cement. They took only what was needed, knowing that all resources must be carefully conserved. Kioa has no roads and no machinery, and it was an all-of-island effort to carry the materials up to the project site, including many heavy bags of sand and rock.
Such projects truly bring to life the vision of a resilient, locally-led, fossil fuel free Pacific.