World strikes climate deal but fails to agree to a roadmap away from fossil fuels after contentious, chaotic summit

Talks stretched overtime as dozens of nations pushed back against an outcome that didn’t explicitly mention a transition away from oil, coal and gas — the drivers of the climate crisis.

(CNN) — The world struck a new climate deal at the COP30 summit in Brazil Saturday, which calls for a tripling of funding to help countries adapt to increasingly severe climate impacts. But countries failed to agree to a roadmap away from fossil fuels, after entrenched divisions threatened to collapse the talks.

The agreement came after more than two weeks of increasingly fraught negotiations between representatives of more than 190 countries in the port city of Belém, known as the gateway to the Amazon. Disagreements reached such fever pitch there were fears the summit would collapse with no deal. Talks stretched overtime as dozens of nations pushed back against an outcome that didn’t explicitly mention a transition away from oil, coal and gas — the drivers of the climate crisis.

But just after midday local time Saturday, the COP30 president André Corrêa do Lago gaveled through a deal.

The final text contained no mention of fossil fuels, signaling a retreat from consensus agreements only two years old. It included only a general agreement on deforestation, rather than more explicit commitments, which had been another key issue in the negotiations.

More than 80 countries, including Colombia, the UK and France, supported the concept of a “roadmap” to transition away from fossil fuels, building on a commitment made at COP28 in Dubai in 2023. However, intense opposition from petrostates — including Saudi Arabia and Russia — and other heavy fossil fuels users prevented consensus.

As part of reaching the deal, Corrêa do Lago instead said the COP presidency in Brazil would produce side texts detailing a global roadmap for moving away from fossil fuels and addressing deforestation that not all countries signed off on.

This unorthodox move was intended to demonstrate that all countries’ issues were heard at the summit, and allow COP to potentially build off the language in future negotiations.

After the agreement was gaveled through, multiple developing countries spoke out against it, including Colombia, which formally objected to the lack of inclusion of a reference to fossil fuels.

There was some progress at COP30. Wealthier countries agreed to work toward tripling the money available to help climate-vulnerable countries adapt to the ravages of global warming — a potential goal of $120 billion a year by 2035, to come out of the $300 billion pot of funding they agreed to at last year’s COP.

The summit deal also included an agreement to a plan for a “just transition” — the idea that as the world moves away from fossil fuels, workers in these industries must not be left behind but instead are helped into cleaner jobs. However, this included no specific funding.

There was also disappointment from some that more was not done to strengthen countries’ national climate plans, which set out how much climate pollution they’ll cut over the next decade.

An analysis of these plans by the UN found that collectively they would only achieve around a 12% reduction in planet-heating pollution, far below the 60% needed for any chance of keeping alive the internationally agreed target to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

This is “the first COP at which the prospect of surpassing 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming has now become acknowledged,” said Joeri Rogelj, director of research at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London.

The reaction from global climate experts to the final agreement was mixed.

This summit was in many ways seen as a test of multilateralism, especially as the US was absent from the process, with the Trump administration declining to send a delegation. For some experts, the fact an agreement was reached at all shows global climate diplomacy is still alive.

A decade after the landmark Paris agreement, the Brazil summit proved the process “is working,” said former German climate envoy Jennifer Morgan.

“While far from what’s needed, the outcome in Belém is meaningful progress,” Morgan said in a statement. “Despite the efforts of major oil producing states to slow down the green transition, multilateralism continues to support the interests of the whole world in tackling the climate crisis.”

Sierra Leone’s minister of environment and climate change Jiwoh Abdulai said this year’s summit had “moved the needle” in terms of richer, developed nations accepting more financial responsibility to help the rest of the world adapt to climate change.

But where some saw cautious forward progress, others identified a much darker trend. “Science has been deleted from COP30 because it offends the polluters,” said Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, Panama’s special representative for climate change. “A ‘Forest COP’ with no commitment on forests is a very bad joke. A climate decision that cannot even say ‘fossil fuels’ is not neutrality, it is complicity. And what is happening here transcends incompetence.”

Harjeet Singh, COP veteran and founding director of the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation, agreed. “The hypocrisy of the Global North has been laid bare,” he said. “They offer us endless new ‘dialogues’ that cannot pay for adaptation or rebuild homes destroyed by climate disasters.”

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