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.
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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.
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.