Salvaged from the brink of disaster

It took some oblique wording, but Saudi Arabia made a last-minute decision to sign the deal that averted the collapse of the Cop30 climate talks

- Fiona Harvey

DAWN WAS BREAKING Over the Amazonian city of Belém, but in the windowless conference room last Saturday it could have been day or night. They had been stuck here for more than 12 hours; dozens of ministers representing 17 groups of countries, from the poorest on the planet to the richest, urged by the Brazilian hosts to accept a settlement cooked up the day before.

Tempers were short, the air thick, as the sweaty and exhausted delegates faced up to reality: there would not be a deal here in Brazil. The 30th UN climate conference would end in abject failure.

The sticking point was fossil fuels.

As science has told us for well over a century, the carbon dioxide their burning produces is heating the planet, now to dangerous levels. But in more than 30 years of annual climate meetings, the need for that process to halt has been mentioned only once - in a resolution made two years ago, at Cop28 in Dubai, to "transition away from fossil fuels". Delegates from the Arab group of 22 nations, Russia, and a sprinkling of others, were determined it would not happen again but a growing number of countries were equally determined that progress was urgently necessary. Meanwhile, developing countries desperately wanted to move forward on securing the money to help them cope with the already disastrous impacts of extreme weather.