As leaders gather for COP30 in Brazil this month — three decades after the world’s first annual climate conference — data showing progress in the fight against global warming tells a sobering story.
Despite years of negotiations, promises and summits, greenhouse gas emissions have increased by a third since that first meeting; fossil fuel consumption continues to grow; and those that, according to scientists, will cause catastrophic damage to the planet.
“Yes, some good things have come out of these conventions, but not enough to guarantee the promise of life on Earth,” said Juan Carlos Monterrey, Panama’s special representative for climate change, who is leading an initiative to simplify key environmental agreements.
The practical effect of domes
This grim assessment raises a fundamental question before: Is global climate diplomacy failing? Or were encounters successful in ways that raw data cannot capture?
Simon Stiell, head of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), says the annual meetings are helping. “But it is clear that much more is needed, and much faster, as climate disasters strike every country.”
Global greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 34% since 1995. Although this rate is slower than the 64% increase in the previous three decades, it still represents a trajectory incompatible with climate stability, scientists explain.
“We still have time to solve this problem. We can still win this fight if we do what we promise. We just need to give a little push and start taking action,” said John Kerry, the United States’ special envoy for climate under Democratic President Joe Biden.
WRI (World Resources Institute), a climate research and advocacy group, said in an October report that government targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions for 2035 remain insufficient to prevent t — the limit set by the world’s governments in the historic 2015 Paris Agreement.
Global temperatures have surpassed the 1.5°C mark in some years, with 2023 and 2024 being among the hottest on record, although the 30-year moving average — the benchmark used by — is still below that level.
“There will be an excessive increase, which is very regrettable,” said James Fletcher, special envoy for climate for CARICOM (Caribbean Community) and former energy minister of Saint Lucia, in an interview.
“Any increase above 1.5 degrees Celsius will be catastrophic for small island developing states,” he said.
Stiell told Reuters that without it, global temperatures would be heading towards a catastrophic warming of 5°C, rather than the less than 3°C rise currently projected.
Meanwhile, consumption of fossil fuels—the main source of planet-warming emissions—remains stubbornly high, driven by economic growth and, more recently, the energy demands of the data centers that power artificial intelligence.
The IEA () predicts that demand for coal — one of the most polluting fossil fuels when burned — will remain at record levels until 2027, as rising demand in China, India and other developing countries offsets declines in other regions.
On the other hand, the adoption of solar and wind energy has accelerated, sales of electric vehicles have soared globally and energy efficiency in general has improved, according to IEA data.
Global investment in clean energy reached US$2.2 trillion last year, surpassing the US$1 trillion invested in fossil fuels, according to IEA data.
“Ten years ago, we could never have imagined that these technological advances and falling prices for electric vehicles and renewable energy would occur,” said Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s former special envoy for climate and veteran of every COP summit.
Still, the growth of renewable energy and electric vehicles has largely offset the growing demand for energy, rather than replacing fossil fuels.
And in the United States, President Donald Trump — who has called climate change the world’s biggest “hoax” — has cut subsidies for wind and solar power and electric vehicles, created bureaucratic hurdles for renewable energy projects and opened more areas to drilling and mining.
“President Trump will not put our country’s economic and national security at risk to pursue vague climate goals that are destroying other countries,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers told Reuters news agency.
Achievements and returns from the summit
Despite these setbacks in the United States, the Paris Climate Agreement — perhaps the greatest achievement of the COP process — endured, even after the country’s withdrawal during Donald Trump’s two terms.
This means that, theoretically, countries remain committed to avoiding the worst of climate change.
However, the consensual nature of the COP negotiations, which require unanimous decisions from almost 200 nations, has been criticized.
“We are drowning in paperwork, drowning in reports, drowning in mandates that are evaluated only based on the number of pages in the document instead of how many lives we are saving,” highlighted Monterrey, Panama’s climate envoy. “We need systemic reform.”
Christiana Figueres, who was the UN’s lead climate representative during the Paris negotiations, said the COPs could consider adopting a voting system, similar to that of the International Monetary Fund.
But Figueres also said political negotiations are becoming less important as world economies adopt clean energy technologies.
“Today, the driving force for the transition no longer comes from governments. It is in the private sector, in industry, in technological development”, she explained.
The representative cited China, which alone accounts for a third of global investment in clean energy, including solar, wind, batteries and the electric vehicle industry, according to the IEA (International Energy Agency).
Participation from all countries
Some COP veterans argue that the current process is the best option to ensure that all countries have a voice in discussing a global problem.
“I don’t believe there are alternatives to the multilateral process,” said Manuel Pulgar Vidal, who chaired COP20 in Peru and is currently climate director at the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).
Former US climate envoy Kerry acknowledged the flaws in these annual meetings but said they remained vital.
“We know they are not enough, but persisting and keeping the process going is better than absolute and abject nihilism.”
