Businesses mustn't wait for a global climate consensus

This year’s United Nations climate summit in Belém, Brazil, ended last week. Countries made promises on paper and avoided hard decisions. Having gathered nearly 200 nations to chart out climate action, CoP-30 produced a ‘Belém Political Package’ that deferred questions rather than answer them. We should not pretend that this is progress.

- SOUMYA SARKAR

The core issue is simple. Countries could not agree on how or when to phase out fossil fuels that are primarily responsible for the climate crisis. They pledged to triple adaptation finance to $120 billion each year by 2035, but offered no timeline for delivery and no one to hold accountable for it. On trade and finance, the mechanisms that actually move capital, the summit produced nothing. Negotiators at the 2025 Conference of the Parties (CoP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) moved these conversations into so-called ‘presidency consultations,’ which is diplomatic code for ‘later.’

This pattern has worn thin. The 2009 commitment of $100 billion in annual climate finance was never fully delivered. Now we are told to trust pledges of about $300 billion annually and a Baku-to-Belém Road-map to mobilize $1.3 trillion. Without enforcement, these are merely hopes and not plans. And hope does not move capital, plans do.

Business leaders watching from boardrooms have grown tired of this cycle. They have been promised clarity on fossil fuel timelines. But all they got was ambiguity. They have been promised frameworks to manage carbon tariffs and trade. What they got was silence. They have been promised accountability on financial commitments. Instead, they got vague targets and no one to hold responsible.

Climate science tells a story that demands urgency. The World Resources Institute’s