Dr Devashis Bose
The Conference of Parties (COP)-30, held in Belem (Brazil), the annual meeting of nations (now almost 200) under the aegis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), ended late into Saturday, the 22nd of November, 2025, amidst hopes and despair for the global climate change crisis. The chair held by the Brazilian President, Andrei Lago, gave a personal commitment to make the nations deliberate and traverse on two paths of ending deforestation and ending fossil fuel use by the countries. Exactly 10 years ago, the first COP of the UNFCCC was held in Paris in 2015, which was marked by tremendous hope for solving the climate crisis, and it was in this conference in which 196 countries agreed to cut down carbon emissions and keep the global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level of 1890. All through COPs held in Dubai (UAE), Baku (Azerbaijan) and now in Belem, the focus has partially shifted on two aspects of climate change. Around 80 developed countries vouch for a specific road map for phasing out and ending the use of fossil fuels, which has been resisted by the developing countries, while the latter wants full commitment on the monetary part and demands at least 2 to 3 trillion dollars annually for financing climate change adaptability and transfer of green technology. Sadly, the global south does not want to commit to phasing out and ending the use of fossil fuels for obvious developmental reasons, and for the finance part, the developed countries have come up with a paltry sum of 300 billion dollars annually, which is grossly insufficient for meeting the climate finance needs. This is contrary to Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement (2015), which specifically mentions that “developed country parties will provide financial resources to assist developing country parties with respect to both mitigation and adaptation.” The climate crisis is for real; globally, 2024 was the hottest year on record since 1890, surpassing 2023. This makes 2024 the first calendar year to be over 1.5°C warmer than the pre-industrial era, which will spell disaster not only for the global south but also for the rich coastal nations where sea levels are expected to rise abnormally. The world has temporarily exceeded the 1.5°C target, with the 12-month period of February 2023–January 2024 being the first time the global average temperature has stayed above this threshold, at 1.52°C above pre-industrial levels. For countries like India, extreme climate events have become too frequent and are responsible for en masse crop failure, water crises, unprecedented floods and rainfall or drought, health crises, and ever-growing pollution, with the Air Quality Index (AQI) becoming precarious in many cities and regions across the length and breadth of the country.
However, the greatest success of the Belém conference is the institution of the ‘Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF)’ Fund, which plans to reward the indigenous communities $4 per hectare of protected tropical forest, as these forests are natural carbon sinks, which gush in carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas responsible for rising temperatures. Though only a sum of $5.5 billion has been secured by the TFFF, the immediate target is to raise $125 billion soon. This initiative is special given the proximity of Brazil to the great Amazonian tropical rain forests, which are a huge carbon sink of the world, storing an estimated 150 to 200 billion tonnes of CO? in their biomass.
The COP 30 has ended, and after Australia dropped its bid, Turkey has emerged as the next destination for the COP 31 to be held in 2026. Then, what was the outcome of COP 30, especially in the backdrop of the USA pulling out of the climate negotiations despite the fact that it is the second biggest contributor of total carbon dioxide emissions after China, with a share of 12% of the total emissions? According to the think tank “Carbon Brief”, the Brazilian presidency released a final package termed the “global mutirão” – a name meaning “collective efforts”. An attempt was made to draw together controversial issues that had divided the COP 30 talks, including finance, trade policies and meeting the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C temperature goal. A “mechanism” to help ensure a “just transition” globally and a set of measures to track climate-adaptation efforts were also among COP30’s notable outcomes. Many of the nations that had backed plans to “transition away” from fossil fuels and “reverse deforestation” instead accepted COP30 President Andre Lago’s compromise proposal of “road maps” outside the formal UN regime. Billed as a COP of “truth” and “implementation”, the event – which took place 10 years on from the Paris Agreement – was seen as a moment to showcase international cooperation.
It is high time that the world comes together, as it had once in 1987 to ink the “Montreal Protocol” in Canada, to pledge to phase out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) for tackling the problem of ozone layer depletion. In 1984, it was detected by a team of scientists, Farman, Gardiner and Shanklin, that the earth’s ozone cover, which protects us from the harmful ultraviolet rays emitted by the sun and also keeps our planet cooler, was fast depleting (actually thinning) due to its reaction with the anthropogenic CFCs. During the signing of this protocol, the world was producing 80 thousand lakh metric tonnes of CFCs, which in 2015 stood at a mere 152 metric tonnes, and probably we are done with more than 99% of this compound.
It is amusing to note that when the shopping malls where we love to spend money and time hand us paper bags with the slogan “There is no planet B” imprinted on them, does it really mean anything at all? Barack Obama, the former President of the United States, was quoted as having said that “We are the first generation to feel the full effects of climate change, and the last generation that can do something about it.”
(The author is Associate Professor, Department of Economics, DDR College, Chabua, Assam)