Every year when the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP) draws to a close, a familiar debate reignites: Is the Paris Agreement still fit for purpose and is the system of international cooperation designed to confront climate change working?
After the most recent conference, held in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 2024, that debate has become even more intense for several reasons. Greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise despite promises and ambitious plans to reduce them and transition to clean energy. The year 2024 was the hottest ever recorded, and the destructive consequences of climate change are becoming more frequent, more prolonged, and increasingly visible. At the same time, heightened geopolitical rivalries are creating unprecedented challenges for multilateral cooperation.
In reality, the Paris Agreement has had a positive influence. Since 2015, the year it was signed (it entered into force in 2016), many countries, as well as companies, regions, and municipal authorities, have begun taking climate change more seriously. They have been developing plans for transitioning to cleaner forms of energy and for adapting to climate impacts.
Several states have adopted national climate laws defining specific measures for their most energy-intensive sectors, along with implementation timelines and monitoring mechanisms. The agreement has also proven resilient, surviving even the first U.S. withdrawal in 2016, and it continues to guide institutional cooperation on climate policy. Today, there is a far better understanding of both the causes and consequences of climate change, as well as of the kinds of policies that must be designed and implemented to manage it.
There have, of course, been major delays in implementing the necessary actions. Yet the existing international cooperation framework is not solely to blame. A common misunderstanding persists about how the Paris Agreement was designed to function. The agreement commits its signatories to submit national action plans for reducing emissions and adapting to climate change, to revise them every five years, to attempt their implementation, and to submit periodic reports to the United Nations on their progress. However, these plans are not negotiated internationally; each country decides its own measures. Nor are there sanctions if states fail to meet their commitments. The idea was that such a flexible system would ensure universal participation, an indispensable factor in managing a global problem like climate change, while regular international review would apply political pressure to achieve national targets.
In any case, one must remember that if, in 2015, the world had faced the geopolitical and economic context of today, the Paris Agreement might never have been adopted. The very existence of an active institutional framework that binds both developed and developing countries to follow a common path is itself a significant achievement of multilateral diplomacy.
As the 30th Climate Change Conference (COP30) begins in Belém, a coastal city at the mouth of the Amazon River, governments are expected to present revised and more ambitious national plans for reducing harmful emissions and to negotiate a new framework for financing and a just transition. These national plans were due by February 2025, yet only a few countries met the deadline. More plans were submitted during the summer, while some major emitters, such as the European Union (which submits a single collective plan rather than individual ones for its member states), have still not responded.
A major question is whether these new plans will align with the global goal of preventing further planetary warming and whether they will cover all energy-intensive sectors and greenhouse gases. Another important issue is whether this third round of national climate plans will be consistent with the decision taken at COP28 in Dubai in 2023: to move away from fossil fuels and increase renewable energy sources. The validity and binding nature of that decision were reaffirmed by the International Court of Justice in a landmark advisory opinion issued in July 2024, clarifying states’ obligations in addressing climate change.
One of Brazil’s initiatives for COP30 is the creation of a fund to protect tropical forests, aiming to raise $125 billion. The choice of Belém -a port city located at the mouth of the Amazon- is not accidental. It highlights both the rainforest’s crucial role in stabilizing the global climate and the decisive contribution of Indigenous peoples in preserving biodiversity. The issue of deforestation, particularly in the Amazon, is of special significance for Brazil, which is hosting the conference. Yet it also has contradictory dimensions. A large part of deforestation is driven by extensive industrial agriculture that supplies markets in developed countries, as well as by fossil fuel extraction that continues despite commitments to phase it out. This contradiction — between the need to protect nature and the profits derived from exploiting it — lies at the heart of Brazil’s climate dilemma. It exposes the uneasy balance between economic growth and the environmental and social costs it imposes.
Another major topic in Belém will be adaptation to climate change. Specifically, the indicators used to monitor progress toward the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA). This goal, mentioned in the Paris Agreement but never precisely defined, refers to improving adaptive capacity, strengthening resilience, and reducing vulnerability to climate impacts. So far, eleven thematic targets have been identified, covering specific areas such as water and health, as well as the overall cycle of planning and implementing adaptation measures. Negotiators are now proposing one hundred indicators to monitor progress. This may be one of the key issues where concrete advancement occurs in Belém, though progress will depend on agreement over indicators related to means of implementation, including financing and technology transfer.
Global inequality, however, continues to hinder cooperation on climate change from the outset. The divide between the Global North and South is often seen as a clash over money and technology, but beneath the surface lies a far more layered reality. The countries of the Global South seek recognition from the North of the injustice embedded in an unequal global system. At its core, the real tension may stem from their fundamentally different understandings of what true progress entails.
It is clear that the annual climate conference cannot by itself produce all the solutions needed to address global warming — especially when the major polluters lack the will to limit themselves. Meaningful agreements are hard, if not impossible, to achieve when nearly 200 countries with different levels of development, priorities, interests, and emission profiles sit at the same negotiating table. Still, these conferences serve a vital purpose. They indicate what the international community is collectively willing to do to prevent further warming — and they point toward what must happen next to make that goal a reality.
