The world expects too much from the annual COP climate summits, said the CEO of COP30 to be held in Brazil this November, stressing the importance of implementing climate action all year round and outside of the UN climate talks.

Brazil’s National Secretary for Climate Change Ana Toni told a conference at Chatham House in London on Tuesday that “COPs are not silver bullets – people are expecting COPs to deliver things that COPs cannot deliver, because change happens every day.”

“We don’t need to wait for COP to start implementing,” she added, emphasising the crucial roles of the private sector and sub-national governments like provinces and cities. She also recommended celebrating green measures as a way of inspiring more such action.

One limitation of COPs, she said, is that country delegations are usually led by their climate or environment ministers whereas a lot of key climate decisions are made by ministers of finance, transport, agriculture and energy who “are not there”. “We have to go beyond the walls of the Paris Agreement,” she urged.

Brazil decides leaders will speak before COP30, easing logistics crunch

At COP29, where governments agreed a collective annual finance target of $300bn by 2035, the UK’s delegation was led by climate minister Ed Miliband. Three months after that COP last November, the UK cut the aid budget, which is its main source of climate finance, despite Miliband’s reported unease.

Emissions still rising

COP30 CEO Toni’s words this week contrast with the grandiose rhetoric of some previous COP leaders. At the opening of COP26 in Scotland in 2021, then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the Glasgow summit “must mark the beginning of the end” of climate change, and in his closing speech in Dubai, COP28 President Sultan Al-Jaber proclaimed that the summit “set the world in the right direction”.

But global greenhouse gas emissions have yet to peak and temperatures look set to breach the lowest 1.5C warming limit in the Paris pact, leading many campaigners and climate-change sceptics to question the value of UN climate negotiations and their flagship annual conferences. COPs attract tens of thousands of government officials, business executives, activists and journalists each year.

Rich nations ignore polluting past to claim climate plans are 1.5C-compatible

Sitting beside Toni in London, the UK’s climate envoy Rachel Kyte said that, in hindsight, governments had been too slow to act on the 2015 Paris Agreement. “A lot of countries went OK, we’ve done Paris” – and have put little effort into aspects of the agreement like Article 2.1c, which says finance flows should be “consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development”.

Two key tasks for Brazil’s COP30 presidency team will be to encourage governments to publish more ambitious climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), and to oversee the development of the “Baku to Belem Roadmap” which aims to mobilise $1.3 trillion a year from all sources, including the private sector, for climate action in developing countries by 2035.

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“Not silver bullets”: COP30 CEO downplays impact of yearly climate summits