8 Key Takeaways from the First Week of COP30
With all eyes on Belém, Week 2 of COP30 kicks off today. We have pulled together headlines, hard truths and hope from Week 1 as we look ahead to intensifying negotiations against a backdrop of increasing crisis. In addition to a wide range of sessions, our colleagues are tracking several policy processes such as the negotiations on the final list of Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) indicators and the Just Transition Work Programme, which has been stalled since last year’s COP29.
To encourage collaboration and accelerate progress the presidency has appointed ministerial pairs to lead on important issues like Finance (Kenya-UK), Mitigation (Egypt-Spain), and Just Transition (Mexico-Poland).
“Adaptation cannot continue to be a silent partner of mitigation. The two are inseparable. They are two pillars of climate justice. At COP30, our collective task is to elevate adaptation to the same level of political and financial ambition as mitigation.”
The AGWA delegation outside COP30 venue - Belém., Brazil
Sobering Shift in Climate Rhetoric
The international climate conversation has reached a painful turning point. UN Secretary-General António Guterres delivered the stark admission that "the hard truth is we have failed to ensure we remain below 1.5 degrees," marking a shift from the rallying cry to "keep 1.5 alive" to the more sobering question of how we bring temperatures back down by the end of the century. With global temperatures already up 1.2°C and current trajectories suggesting we'll breach 1.5°C within the next decade, negotiators are now grappling with overshoot scenarios and the prospect of relying on largely unproven carbon removal technologies at scale.
Notable Absences
The absence of Presidents from the USA, China, and India – the world's three largest emitters – sent an unmistakable signal about dwindling commitment or attention focused elsewhere on competing domestic priorities. The EU has attempted to fill this leadership gap during the first week, with European leaders reaffirming their commitment to ambitious targets, but without engagement from the world's largest economies, questions remain about whether agreements reached in Belém will have the teeth needed to drive meaningful global change. However, according to Reuters: China is pivoting from high level leadership towards a larger delegation and their biggest country pavilion to date.
Forest Finance Falls Short
Last week saw $5.5 billion in pledges for the Tropical Forest Forever Facility: significant yet dramatically short of the initiative's $25 billion goal. The facility aims to provide sustainable, long-term financing for countries that protect their tropical forests, creating positive incentives that recognize the global value of standing forests. Forests, water, and land use are inextricably-linked: healthy forests regulate water cycles, prevent soil erosion, recharge groundwater, and maintain watershed integrity. This means water action has a key role to play in forest protection, but also that protecting forests is in turn a valuable water security strategy that affects downstream communities and agricultural productivity. While the pledges represent progress, the funding gap reveals a persistent pattern in climate finance: bold commitments that don't match the scale of the challenge facing critical carbon sinks, biodiversity havens, and Indigenous homelands.
Stronger Subnational Climate Action
Where national parties are faltering, cities, states, and regions are increasingly leading on climate action. These efforts matter not only for direct emissions reductions but also for showing that ambitious climate policy can coexist with economic prosperity and creating political pressure upward as citizens demand similar ambition from national governments. The Water Resilience Tracker (WRT) is also experiencing positive traction from the bottom up. Brazil, for example, is currently applying the WRT approach and related capacity building activities with sub-national governments and partners in six different basins. Recognizing the importance of local contexts to building water and climate resilience, Malawi and Nepal’s WRT programmes are doing the same.
COP32 has a host: Ethiopia
Despite an ongoing deadlock over the COP31 host, Ethiopia has been confirmed as the host of COP32, providing forward planning certainty. As an African nation on the frontlines of climate impacts – facing recurring droughts and food insecurity – Ethiopia brings lived experience of climate vulnerability while also demonstrating ambition through massive tree-planting campaigns and renewable energy investments. The selection reflects Africa's growing voice in negotiations and recognition that countries experiencing the worst climate impacts despite contributing the least deserve a central role in shaping the global response. COP32 has the potential to serve as a backdrop for either increased conflict – or new cooperation – on renewable energy related to the already contentious Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam: Africa’s largest hydroelectric dam.
Photo:© UN Climate Change - Diego Herculano
Brazil’s Climate Contradiction
A troubling gap is widening between Brazil's high-profile international climate commitments and how it is – or is not – considering local and Indigenous communities domestically. While President Lula has reduced Amazon deforestation and championed forest protection at COP30, Indigenous leaders raise long running and historically rooted concerns about being excluded from decision-making on projects affecting their lands, often without prior and informed consent. This contradiction undermines climate justice: the people who have protected forests for generations and possess invaluable traditional knowledge are sidelined in favor of top-down approaches, risking Brazil's climate credibility.
First Ever Climate Health Action Plan
A landmark moment: the first-ever climate health action plan was launched to help countries strengthen health systems against mounting climate threats, with a $300 million commitment through the Climate and Health Funder Coalition. The plan recognizes that climate change is fundamentally a health crisis: increasing heat-related mortality, expanding vector-borne disease ranges, disrupting health infrastructure through extreme weather, and threatening nutrition through food insecurity. Water security sits at the heart of many of these health challenges: contaminated water sources during floods spread waterborne diseases, droughts reduce access to safe drinking water and sanitation, and changing precipitation patterns affect hygiene practices - all of which disproportionately impact vulnerable populations. While modest compared to the scale of need, the initiative shifts the narrative by positioning climate action not just as an environmental imperative but as a public health necessity.
Handling Hunger
The Belem Declaration on Hunger, Poverty, and Human-Centered Climate Action, signed by 43 countries and the EU, commits signatories to supporting small-scale farmers, enabling just transitions for forest communities, and prioritizing social protection within climate planning. This human-centered approach represents a development in climate discourse, acknowledging that climate policy intersects with every dimension of human wellbeing and reframing climate action not as a burden but as an opportunity to address interconnected crises of hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation simultaneously. The availability of water is a critical link between climate and food security: erratic rainfall, prolonged droughts, and depleted aquifers directly threaten agricultural production and livestock, while extreme flooding destroys crops and contaminates irrigation systems, making water management central to any meaningful effort to address climate-driven hunger.
As Week 2 begins, negotiators face the difficult work of turning commitments into concrete action, bridging divides, and maintaining ambition in the face of geopolitical headwinds. The week is off to a tough start: What should have been a straightforward victory - finalizing the Global Goal on Adaptation indicators - has instead seen a push for a two-year delay to embed financial commitments directly into the framework. This has sparked fierce debate over whether finance discussions belong within adaptation goals or should remain separate. This impasse exemplifies the broader tensions that will define the coming days: between immediate action and comprehensive frameworks, between developed and developing nations, and between technical targets and the resources needed to achieve them.