Cop30 live: Brazil aims for early agreement on ‘big four’ issues | Cop30

Fiona Harvey

Brazil’s running of Cop30 has been unorthodox from the start, with an insistence that effectively there was little to negotiate at this “conference of the parties” and that some of the biggest items – the roadmap to climate finance, the transition away from fossil fuels, and above all a response to the national climate plans that were supposed to be submitted ahead of this Cop – were not even to be on the agenda.

The hosts have continued with their unusual approach: the Cop president has let it be known he wants to wrap up the most difficult issues at a ministerial meeting on Wednesday, gavel through the deal, and then allow the less contentious issues to be processed on Thursday and Friday.

This would be the opposite of the usual Cop format, in which routine issues are dispensed with first and the final hours are an almost fisticuffs affair when ministers wrangle over their intractable differences – usually over money and responsibility for emissions cuts – late into the night.

Gavelling through a “Belem political package” on Wednesday may be the aim – in practice, nations are still so wide apart on the key issues that it is vanishingly unlikely. The “big four” issues have been known since the start of this Cop, when they were decanted out of the agenda and into special “presidency consultations” on the first official day.

They are: finance, transparency, trade and a response to the inadequacy of the national climate plans.

Finance is a perennial issue at Cops and last year developing countries were frustrated when their developed counterparts agreed only $300bn of the promised $1.3 trillion in climate finance annually by 2035 would come directly from rich country coffers. So some developing country groupings have proposed discussions on Article 9.1 of the Paris agreement, which requires developed countries to provide finance to the poor world. Rich countries see this as an attempted bear trap, to wrap them into a model of climate finance based on the 1992 division of countries (under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, parent treaty to the 2015 Paris agreement) into developed and developing, which they argue no longer applies as countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and United Arab Emirates have grown rich on their oil wealth, and high-performing economies such as South Korea and Singapore have GDP per capita higher than EU member states.

Trade is likewise contentious as China and many developing countries have been angered by the EU’s green tariff. The carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) places a charge on imports of high-carbon goods such as steel, when they come from jurisdictions with weak controls on carbon. China argues that the EU’s carbon price is too high, and poorer countries are worried that they are being unfairly caught up in the row and will be penalised. Though the EU’s CBAM has been the lightning rod for discontent, there are many trade disparities in the developing world: some poor countries levy tariffs on imports of green goods, such as renewable energy components. The EU argues that the UNFCCC is not the arena in which to raise or settle trade issues.

Transparency refers to the question of the biennial transparency reports that countries must submit to the UN under the Paris agreement, showing how they are cutting or curbing their greenhouse gas emissions, and how they are providing or using climate finance. Many countries dislike having to disclose detailed information, regarding the “measurement, reporting and verification” as a potential infringement of national sovereignty, but without such data it is impossible to judge how the world is progressing on the Paris targets.

The most important of the “big four” issues is the response to the NDCs. Under the Paris agreement, parties must produce NDCs – national plans on greenhouse gas emissions, also showing measures to meet them and finance needs – on a five-year cycle. This year was delivery year for the third round of NDCs: the first, presented at Paris, would have led to warming of about 3.6C; the second, at Glasgow in 2021 to about 2.8C; and the current round, still being submitted by some countries at Cop30, would cook the planet to about 2.5C.

The question of how these inadequate proposals can be reconciled with the Paris agreement goal of limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – which has already been breached for two years, but could still be held to in the longer term according to optimistic estimates – is now one of the defining issues for Cop30. So far, the text suggests more negotiations, coming back next year, or encouraging countries to do better. All of these are weak.

Finally, Brazil has had to bow to pressure from the more than 80 countries that want to see a “transition away from fossil fuels” to be on the agenda for Cop30. A draft “mutirao decision” including some potential wording on the issue was released on Tuesday, containing several potential options for such wording. The countries that refuse to accept any mention of the phaseout – which was committed to at Cop28 in 2023 but has been under attack since – are likely to make their views known on Wednesday. Fresh drafts will be prepared, and Brazil’s stated intention of moving to a final draft that has whittled down the options to a single pathway by the end of Wednesday are certainly optimistic.

Correa do Lago is hosting heads of delegation, and facilitating shuttle diplomacy among the competing nations and regional and special interest groupings in Belem. President Lula’s arrival in Belem is supposed to galvanise the talks – he and the UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres, who is also in town, will use their charm and influence to try to bridge disagreements and broke deals among the conflicting parties.

Brazil’s changes to the Cop format may help to produce movement, but at the end this process always comes down to the same basic formula: countries meeting in windowless rooms hashing out the details of potential compromises, and – when it goes right – surrendering some of their perceived short term national interest to the common good.