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Climate Conferences Are Dying How To Save The World Now

Leo Migdal
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climate conferences are dying how to save the world now

This year’s U.N. climate change summit wore its contradictions and failings on its sleeve, prompting existential anxiety. Photo-illustration by Dato Parulava/POLITICO (source images via Unsplash) BAKU, Azerbaijan — As the red-eye flight from London made its final descent into Baku, the sunrise lit up the eastern sky, turning the Caspian Sea into a blaze of orange. Most of the passengers were heading to COP29, a two-week climate conference featuring almost 200 nations held in oil-rich Azerbaijan. The mood on the plane was grim, and more than one of those on board must have been wondering: Are these United Nations climate summits doomed?

Donald Trump had won the U.S. presidency just a few days before, bringing a wave of promises to eviscerate America’s climate efforts and yank the country from these very talks. As the red-eye flight from London made its final descent into Baku, the sunrise lit up the eastern sky, turning the Caspian Sea into a blaze of orange. Most of the passengers were heading to COP29, a two-week climate conference featuring almost 200 nations held in oil-rich Azerbaijan. The mood on the plane was grim, and more than one of those on board must have been wondering: Are these United Nations climate summits doomed? Donald Trump had won the U.S.

presidency just a few days before, bringing a wave of promises to eviscerate America’s climate efforts and yank the country from these very talks. Looking at the sunrise, one passenger murmured: “Maybe there is hope after all.” The light twinkled off Baku’s skyscrapers — and the oil wells and giant refinery towers that had helped pay for them. Optimism in the face of overwhelming evidence is one of the things that keeps delegates returning to these conferences, year after year. That, and the lack of any real alternative. For the past three decades, these annual meetings have been humanity’s main tool to avoid the nightmare of a planet heated by 2 degrees Celsius or more. Research fellow, The University of Melbourne

Arthur Wyns has received funding from the University of Melbourne, the World Health Organization, and the World Bank. University of Melbourne provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU. The United Nations’ global climate summit has finished for another year. Some progress was made in Brazil on climate finance and adaptation. But efforts to end reliance on fossil fuels were stymied by – you guessed it – fossil fuel powers. It left many observers with a question: is this really the best we can do?

Nearly every country (except the United States) joined the COP30 summit in the Brazilian city of Belém. The meeting showed the best and the worst of multilateralism – when countries try to address global problems beyond the capacity of an individual nation. In the past few months United Nations-sponsored negotiations to tackle climate change and environmental issues have either failed or come out with limited outcomes, leading to questions about the process. People arrive for the day at the COP29 U.N. Climate Summit, Nov. 19, 2024, in Baku, Azerbaijan.

(AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel, File) Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, from front left, United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Simon Stiell, United Nations climate chief, Antonio Guterres, United Nations secretary-general, Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan president, Turkey President Recep Tayyip and... Climate Summit, Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2024, in Baku, Azerbaijan. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)

Activists participate in a demonstration for climate finance at the COP29 U.N. Climate Summit, Nov. 21, 2024, in Baku, Azerbaijan. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits, File) Ann Carlotta Oltmanns pretends to resuscitate the Earth during a demonstration at the COP29 U.N. Climate Summit, Nov.

18, 2024, in Baku, Azerbaijan. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong, File) Cleaning the environment and reducing heat-trapping emissions are nearly universally recognized as necessary. The primary mechanism to achieve that mission is the Conference of the Parties (COP), which has gathered almost every year since 1995. The concern is how to reduce emissions and tamp down on temperature rises. Everyone involved wants to know if these discussions are actually making a difference or just a show.

The talks are complicated, with many groups representing governments, energy companies, and large businesses. However, the agreements are primarily based on an honor code, and priorities often shift, especially when new leadership comes to power. It would be unreasonable to think that the COPs have failed, although they are not ideal. Importantly, they’re still essential in helping countries craft policies, engaging people in the cause, and ensuring businesses walk the walk. “Undoubtedly, we’ve fallen short,” says Juan Carlos Navarro, Panama’s Minister of the Environment, in a virtual conversation with me. “The world has a clear agenda about what must be done.

But since it is everyone’s responsibility, it is no one’s responsibility. It’s all talk and no action.” Minister Navarro and I have been chatting since he took over Panama’s top environmental job in 2024. He’s a true believer—super passionate about the climate cause and working nonstop to make a difference. He called me on his cell phone at 10:30 p.m. to share ideas.

For starters, Panama is hosting a climate convention with 100 governments and a nature summit with the private sector this week to push for change and set precise dates and deadlines. The approach will focus on forests and oceans, making their preservation an international priority. According to the Global Carbon Project, fossil fuels and industrial processes emit 36 to 40 gigatons of CO2 annually. The Amazon, Congo Basin, and Southeast Asian rainforests are the Earth’s lungs, capturing CO2 in biomass and soil. Collectively, forests of all types store about 10 gigatons of CO2, while oceans absorb roughly the same amount. Consequently, about half of our CO2 remains in the atmosphere, while oceans and land temporarily sequester the rest.

An iceberg in Ilulissat, Greenland. Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting rapidly, and that melt will accelerate as the Earth heats up. Ryan Kellman/NPR hide caption World leaders are heading into the final days of COP30, the United Nations climate meeting in Brazil. They are trying to agree on how to curb global warming and pay for the costs of an increasingly hotter planet. For the past eight years, one of the primary objectives of the annual negotiations has been to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to the temperatures in the late 1800s.

That temperature goal was established after a landmark international scientific report laid out the catastrophic effects of exceeding that amount of warming. But that goal is no longer plausible, scientists say. Humanity has not cut planet-warming pollution quickly enough, and the planet will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, likely in the next decade, according to a recent United Nations report. However, all is not lost. If countries can cut overall greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2035, scientists say the planet would quickly return to lower levels of warming. BAKU, Azerbaijan — As the red-eye flight from London made its final descent into Baku, the sunrise lit up the eastern sky, turning the Caspian Sea into a blaze of orange.

Most of the passengers were heading to COP29, a two-week climate conference featuring almost 200 nations held in oil-rich Azerbaijan. The mood on the plane was grim, and more than one of those on board must have been wondering: Are these United Nations climate summits doomed? Donald Trump had won the U.S. presidency just a few days before, bringing a wave of promises to eviscerate America’s climate efforts and yank the country from these very talks. Looking at the sunrise, one passenger murmured: “Maybe there is hope after all.” The light twinkled off Baku’s skyscrapers — and the oil wells and giant refinery towers that had helped pay for them. The United Nations' 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) to the U.N.

Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) stuttered to its end in Belem, Brazil, over the weekend. From the point of view of climate activists and poor countries demanding that rich countries supply them with hundreds of billions of dollars in climate change handouts, COP30 was largely a bust. In addition, the chief activist goal for a commitment to a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels by a date certain was nowhere to be seen in the conference's final Global Mutirão decision. COP30 convened 10 years after the adoption of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, in which signatory countries committed to "holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial... The Global Mutirão notes that achieving the Paris Agreement's limit of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels requires deep, rapid, and sustained reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions of 43 percent by 2030 and 60 percent... That's not going to happen.

The U.N. Environment Programme calculates that if countries actually kept their NDC promises, global emissions would only fall by between 12 and 15 percent by 2035 relative to their 2019 levels, and that those reductions would... And it shouldn't be counted since President Donald Trump issued an executive order on his first day in office to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. Also, the U.S. sent no official representatives to COP30.

The Global Mutirão "urgently advances" efforts to scale up climate action funding from rich countries to poor ones to $1.3 trillion per year by 2035. But total international aid from official donors fell by 7.1 percent to just over $212 billion last year. Even taking into account contributions from multilateral financial institutions and making generous assumptions that include "mobilizing" private investments, climate finance for developing countries was around $116 billion in 2022.

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