The last couple of days at the 30th Conference of Parties (COP30) in Brazil witnessed intense battles—between the legitimate demand of the developing world to enhance financial support for the energy transition and adaptation, and the push on climate ambition as perceived by the developed world.
At every COP, the developed world seems a lot more concerned about its own industry, jobs, and the climate impact on its communities and ecosystems. It pushes the developing world to accelerate emission mitigation, even in the absence of adequate financial support. The same script repeated itself in the push for a ‘fossil fuel transition roadmap’, down to the last minute, at COP30.
COP is a platform where countries come together to give some and take some in the spirit of ‘global mutirão’, or community action, as framed by the Brazilian presidency. When so many countries come together to make difficult choices, there are two potential ways to ensure action. Either create a tight, legally-bound architecture where countries that don’t act on climate are penalised, or have a bottom-up voluntary architecture based on trust and accountability. The Copenhagen COP (COP15) showed the world that top-down would not work. The Paris Agreement was built on the latter, a voluntary framework, and has already bent the emissions curve.
By bringing real-world constraints, such as development barriers and lack of adequate finance, and workable pathways to the fore, the developing world helped chart a more honest course at COP30. It delivered meaningful wins—a long-awaited breakthrough on adaptation finance; real progress on just transition by recognising that countries will chart diverse, development-linked pathways; and, despite a difficult geopolitical year, a deal that kept the multilateral process intact.
Enhancing mitigation ambition means difficult choices. This is when the spirit of mutirão is tested. The big question is: would this bottom-up architecture, where countries undertake actions based on their national circumstances, work?
The text coming out of COP30 emphasises the criticality of multilateralism to give a message to the world: it is important to not be swayed by what is happening to the global order. Trust is the bedrock of multilateralism. It will only be created if there are spaces for honest conversations on issues close to parties’
national interests. The COP30 presidency took a significant step in this direction by allowing some core issues to be discussed, even if it was impossible to put these on the formal agenda. Parties were heard, a critical first step to rebuild trust.
However, continuous backsliding on the core principle of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, constant denial of the means of implementation, and implementation of unilateral trade measures don’t bode well for the future of the Paris Agreement.
As research by the Council on Energy, Environment, and Water has highlighted for years, the transition to a net-zero world is an economic transformation. Countries whose economies are critically dependent on fossil fuels either for economic or energy security and access are bound to resist hard in the absence of meaningful and mandatory financial support.
So the key question now is: which direction are we going post-COP30? The Global South is already acting on many fronts—simply because it cannot afford not to. CEEW research shows India’s current climate policies could cut about 4 billion tonnes of CO2 between 2020 and 2030—1.6 times the EU’s 2023 emissions.
The developing South will further accelerate transition if low-cost, predictable, and meaningful financial support is available—the required quantum of which is far beyond what developed countries have so far been willing to support. Most likely, the desired finance will never come. But the developed world, especially the EU, is deeply committed to the idea of global ambition.
There are potentially two directions from here. First, countries in the developed world will ramp up unilateral trade measures under the guise of environmental integrity. Second, the idea of ‘climate coalitions’, where a group of large countries can come together to act themselves, and incentivise or penalise others outside the club, will start gaining ground.
The former is already in motion, spurred by the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. Many other countries in the developed North are thinking about the same. The latter idea has been gaining traction, with the Brazilian presidency proposing a climate coalition based on carbon pricing, supported by many others including China. Countries will assess their incentives for joining a climate coalition, and take a call based on that.
To safeguard its development and climate goals, India, like many other countries, must now play smart across all arenas. It can continue enhancing its ambition through its domestic resources, something it has already been doing for long now; it may retaliate through its own version of CBAM or other trade measures; and it can assess the implications of being a part of climate coalitions.
India should realise that the game is no longer being played solely at the UNFCCC platform. It has to meaningfully assess and devise strategies to engage in the other two arenas as well, committing equal intellectual investment. It has to somehow balance between principles and realpolitik. The outcome of COP30 shows that the task has become more complicated, but so is India’s capacity to shape it with clarity, confidence, and real solutions.
Vaibhav Chaturvedi | Senior Fellow at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water who attended COP30
(Views are personal)