Progress Without Real Acceleration

Belém's outcomes reveal a world still negotiating at yesterday's pace despite today's accelerating climate risks, placing greater responsibility on vulnerable countries to act proactively

- PRAVEEN GARG & SUDHEER KUMAR SHUKLA

Incremental progress at COP30 contrasts sharply with the accelerating pace of climate impacts, particularly for vulnerable nations like India

When the gavel finally came down at COP30 in Belém, Brazil, the symbolism was unmistakable.

Negotiators met in the heart of the Amazon — a landscape that embodies both the planet's resilience and its fragility — at a moment when global emissions, temperatures and extreme weather events are reaching record highs. Expectations were correspondingly high: a decisive fossil-fuel phaseout timetable, a credible deforestation roadmap, and substantial climate finance for developing countries. What emerged instead was a package of important but partial gains overshadowed by a lack of binding commitments on the core drivers of global warming.

The Belém Package, as the final outcome is called, offers incremental progress: expanded adaptation finance, a sharpened focus on climate justice, and greater engagement of sub-national actors. Yet it also reveals the widening gap between what climate science urges and what geopolitics permits. For India — a nation both vulnerable to climate impacts and central to the global energy transition — the outcomes of COP30 present a renewed challenge: to push harder on diplomacy abroad, and to accelerate climate action at home.