After the eventful final phase of the Belém climate summit, marked by a fire that broke out inside the COP30 facilities which paralyzed the talks for around seven hours, the presidency published a draft agreement on Friday morning. And the main issue that was emphasized in this quote does not appear. There is no mention of the push for a roadmap to abandon fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels are primarily responsible for climate change. But at climate summits, pressure from many petrostates and a lack of momentum from other nations heavily dependent on their consumption mean they are repeatedly excluded from agreements, which focus on greenhouse gas emissions but not their root causes. At this meeting in Belém, the government of Brazil, which is chairing the negotiations as the host country, had advocated including in the final text a push to establish a roadmap to abandon these fuels. And it appeared in the first draft of the political declaration with which the summit should close.
Several dozen countries – around 80, although an official list has not been published – publicly supported this roadmap during the summit. But many others, out of the spotlight and in meetings with the COP30 presidency, flatly refused to make these direct references to fuels. In the draft distributed this Friday morning, the theoretical last day of the summit, there is no reference to either the roadmap or fuel.
It calls for the need to triple funding for adaptation by 2030 compared to 2025 levels, one of the requests of developing countries. In any case, this text is a draft still under negotiation. A plenary session is scheduled for Friday morning in which the presidency is expected to hear reactions to its draft proposal.
At the moment, a group of 29 countries, according to the count carried out by Caretakersent a letter to the Presidency rejecting the latter text in which it requests that the agreement contain a reference to the fossil fuel roadmap. Signatories include Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Colombia, Mexico and Sweden.
The system under which every text, every word of every decision must be agreed upon, is based on consensus, which means that any of the nearly 200 participating countries can raise its hand and stop everything. This system, during more than three decades of talks on climate change at the United Nations, has meant that the agreements always appear downsized and watered down.
