Why Cop30 remains key to fighting the climate crisis

Experts tell Nick Ferris that the summit in Brazil can drive forward the Green agenda - even without the US present

- 

It’s the month of November, which means that the eyes of everyone working in climate will be turning to whichever city is hosting the annual UN Conference of Parties, or Cop. This year, it’s being hosted in the northern Brazilian city of Belem, with Brazil’s President Lula hoping that its location close to the

Amazon will help place the world’s largest rainforest at the heart of the discussions.

It can be easy to have a sense of deja vu about it all: talk is once again of how to “turn words into action”; Donald Trump is for the second time pulling the US out of the key international climate treaty, the Paris Agreement; and emissions are continuing to rise year on year, despite this being the 30th time that countries have met with the intention of turning the tide on just that.

With the technical rulebook for the 2015 Paris Agreement now more or less complete following Cop29 in Baku, it could be argued - given that we now have the structure through which countries are supposed to decarbonise - that Cop no longer serves a real function. Moreover, after deals agreed in recent years to reverse deforestation and reduce methane emissions at Cop26 in Glasgow, and to triple renewables deployment and “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems” at Cop28 in Dubai (the first time, amazingly, that countries agreed to mention the main cause of climate change) - there is a sense that the ability of the conference to drive things forward may have stalled.