COP30 – Review of Outcomes and the Road to COP31

The 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) took place in Belém, Brazil, between 10 and 21 November 2025. Following Clyde & Co’s COP30 Briefing Paper, we provide a review of COP30’s main outcomes and its successes and failures before looking forward as we take the first steps on the road to COP31 in 2026.

The Main Outcomes of COP30

COP30 was billed as the “COP of implementation”, meaning there would be fewer negotiated decisions and a greater emphasis on driving action towards fulfilling existing commitments. Despite this, there were significant negotiated agreements reached at COP. Possibly the most significant of these are:

• Agreement on Adaptation Indicators
• Agreement on Adaptation Finance
• The “Global Mutirão” Decision

1. Agreement on Adaptation Indicators

COP30 saw the culmination of ten years of work on establishing common adaptation indicators. Within the UNFCCC process, adaptation describes the actions that States, private businesses and individuals take to respond to and alleviate the negative effects of climate change. Adaptation indicators in the context of the UNFCCC are the criteria by which all countries’ progress towards adapting to climate change will be assessed under the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA).

The GGA was established under Article 7 of the Paris Agreement and facilitates action to enhance adaptive capacity, strengthen resilience and reduce vulnerability to climate change. The purpose of agreeing a common list of adaptation indicators is to enable countries to capture and report on the unique specificities of their own circumstances, while also enabling data analysis and insight into adaptation action at national and global levels.

Over the last two years, intensive work by technical experts reduced an initial list of around 10,000 potential indicators to just 100. By the end of COP30, that had been reduced to 59 indicators known as the ‘Belém Adaptation Indicators’. Although there were controversies regarding the approach taken to select these last 59 (see below), this agreement on adaptation indicators is a major step forward towards facilitating a common approach to assessing adaptation projects. The Belém Adaptation Indicators should therefore enable and increase climate finance flows towards projects that can prove their efficacy and towards countries and regions that need greater assistance.

2. Agreement on Adaptation Finance

2025 was the deadline for a pre-existing commitment made at COP26 to double annual finance for adaptation projects from USD 20bn in 2019 to USD 40bn. Despite this, the UN Environment Programme reported immediately prior to COP30 that adaptation finance had fallen from USD 28bn to USD 26bn between 2022 and 2023. In this context, the Least Developed Countries negotiating bloc (for more information on negotiating blocs see our COP30 Briefing Paper) proposed that states triple adaptation finance from 2025 to USD 120bn by 2030.

This translated into a commitment in the final “Global Mutirão” decision to triple adaptation finance to 2035. Critics have noted that this commitment does not specify a baseline for this increase, the sources of the sums to be provided or a target figure. However, it has been assumed that the target will be USD 120bn, and that finance sources will be aligned with those set out in last year’s New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance (NCQG) (for more information on the NCQG see our COP29 Summary Paper), meaning a wide variety of public, private, bilateral and multilateral sources of finance as well as undefined “alternative sources”.

3. The “Global Mutirão” Decision

Most COPs begin with significant disagreement over what should be included in the conference agenda. Such “agenda fights” bring attention to aspects of global climate action that may have been previously overlooked in the COP process, but also reduce the amount of time allocated to substantive negotiations. At COP30, the Brazilian Presidency avoided an agenda fight by announcing that four controversial topics (climate-related trade measures, climate finance, the 1.5C warming goal and data transparency) would be discussed in “presidency consultations”.

These culminated in COP30’s “Global Mutirão” decision, Mutirão being a Portuguese word originating in the Indigenous Tupi-Guarani language, referring to collective community-based work for the common good. Despite controversy over the absence of wording on deforestation and fossil fuels (see below), the Global Mutirão decision was agreed in the final plenary session and included decisions to:

• Triple adaptation finance (see above)
• Launch the “Global Implementation Accelerator and Belém Mission to 1.5” to enable and accelerate parties’ ambition and action regarding their emission reduction and adaptation plans
• Establish a two-year work programme on climate finance
• Begin a COP-driven process to consider opportunities, challenges, and barriers in relation to enhancing international cooperation related to the role of trade

COP30’s Successes and Failures

Clyde & Co’s COP30 Briefing Paper set out five key areas in which a successful COP would see meaningful achievements:

• Logistics
• Agreement on Adaptation
• Consensus on Ambitious NDCs
• Concrete Proposals on Climate Finance
• Recommitment to Multilateralism

While a climate COP’s success or failure can be assessed differently depending on a party’s goals and outlook on the negotiations, this section sets out what progress was made on each of these five areas as well as highlighting one further area of interest.

1. Logistics

After extensive criticism was levelled at Brazil for its decision to host COP30 in the Amazon rainforest, the hosts hoped that well-publicised logistical difficulties would be forgotten once the conference began.

However, accommodation difficulties persisted throughout COP. Security at the conference site was also breached on the third day as Indigenous protestors were able to force entry into the UN controlled Blue Zone. Further safety issues, including the threat posed by excessive heat and heavy rain to electrical fixtures and fittings, were raised by UNFCCC Executive Secretary, Simon Stiell in a letter to Brazil’s COP30 President. In the event, a fire did break out in the Blue Zone during the final hours of negotiations, and although no one was seriously injured the subsequent evacuation disrupted key negotiations.

While it had been hoped that the intangible effect of hosting the conference in the world’s largest rainforest would inspire delegates, the UN was forced to publicly criticize the hosts for security lapses, soaring temperatures and flooding amongst other problems affecting negotiations.

2. Agreement on Adaptation

As set out above, agreements on adaptation indicators and adaptation funding were key achievements of COP30. Controversy around adaptation funding commitments was perhaps expected given sensitivities around climate finance. However, while it was anticipated that COP30 would bring the negotiations around adaptation indicators out of the technical realm and into the political spotlight, few would have anticipated that negotiations would be so difficult.

On the first day, the African Group of Nations proposed that adoption of the indicators be delayed for two years in order to allow for “political refinement”. While this effort was unsuccessful, many countries rejected the inclusion of so-called “intrusive” indicators related to countries’ laws, allocation of domestic resources and climate strategies. Countries also called for greater emphasis on the means of implementation (i.e. finance and capacity building). In the final plenary, the Presidency presented a final list of 59 indicators that was perhaps more reflective of the need to break this political deadlock than of the scientific and technical process that had guided the indicator selection process prior to COP30. This compromise was acceptable to some, and the final decision was gaveled through and agreed despite attempts by the AILAC bloc, the EU, Switzerland and Canada, amongst others, to voice their opposition. After the EU described the indicators as “not in line with the Paris Agreement”, the COP President requested  further work on the indicators to continue at the Bonn climate conference in June 2026.

3. Consensus on Ambitious NDCs

A significant feature of the build up to COP30 was the failure of many Parties to the Paris Agreement to publish their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) by the February 2025 deadline. NDCs contain States’ commitments to reduce their emissions and are submitted every five years to the UNFCCC Secretariat. This year, the International Court of Justice in its landmark Advisory Opinion confirmed that countries were legally required to adequately contribute to climate change mitigation efforts through their NDCs.

However, as of 6 November 2025, only 71 out of 197 States had submitted an NDC for review. While 122 countries have now submitted an NDC, as of the date of publication, major oil producers Iran and Saudi Arabia have failed to submit an NDC and India (the world’s third largest emitter) has only committed to publishing their NDC “by December”, and has not done so by the date of this publication.

Even if existing NDCs are fully implemented, the world remains on track for 2.3-2.5C of warming by 2100, meaning ambition remains well below the level required to achieve the 1.5C-2C target established in the Paris Agreement and thereby avoid the scientifically established consequences.

4. Climate Finance

Expectations were high prior to COP30 regarding the planned unveiling of the Brazilian Presidency’s “Baku to Belém Roadmap to 1.3T”. This “roadmap” was a key outcome of the previous COP29 and was aimed at scaling up climate finance flows to developing countries to facilitate mitigation and adaptation measures with a focus on non-debt based financial instruments.

In the end, while both Kenya and the AILAC bloc pushed for the Roadmap to be included in the final Mutirão text, the lack of concrete proposals and agreements to provide finance in the Roadmap itself, as well as the assessment that it would be mostly made up of private rather than public finance, dampened enthusiasm for the Roadmap amongst developing countries.

In the end, the Mutirão decision only “takes note” of the Roadmap. More significantly,  there were significant calls amongst developing countries, especially the LMDC and Arab Group blocs, for emphasis to be given to Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement, which states that developed countries “shall provide” climate finance to developing countries. The LMDC bloc (which includes China, India and Saudi Arabia) consider this commitment to exist independently and in addition to the existing commitment by developed countries to provide USD 300bn of annual climate finance by 2035.

While the LMDC and Arab Group blocs had pushed for a three year work programme on the implementation of Article 9.1, in what is considered a win for the EU and other developed countries, the final Mutirão decision only provided for a two year work programme on climate finance that would not be dedicated exclusively  to Article 9.1.  

5. Recommitment to Multilateralism

In his statement on the agreement at COP30, UN Secretary General António Guterres declared that “multilateralism is alive”. This somewhat muted endorsement was considered by some to be a pointed response to the widely voiced opinion that the multilateral COP system is failing to achieve its stated goals.

From the beginning of the conference, Saudi Arabia and China, amongst other members of the LMDC bloc and the African Group, repeatedly criticised unilateral trade measures (most notably the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism or CBAM) as undermining the spirit of multilateralism. These states see such measures as imposing financial penalties on their industrial economies in the name of climate action.

Further, agreed texts failed to make the traditional endorsement of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as representing the best available science. The IPCC is the UN body established to collate and assess global science related to climate change and has historically been at the core of the UNFCCC process. The LMDC bloc, and especially Saudi Arabia and India, were the main opponents to referencing the IPCC as a source of science in draft texts, while Saudi Arabia was also responsible for the deletion of references to countering climate science misinformation.

The process of adopting the decision on adaptation indicators also drew significant criticism as it seemed to directly contravene COP’s principle of consensus-based decision-making.

6. The Decision That Wasn’t

As explained above, in a successful attempt to avoid an agenda fight, the Brazilian Presidency diverted discussions on areas of significant disagreement into presidency consultations dedicated to trade measures, climate finance, the 1.5C warming goal and data transparency. The Brazilian President had also expressed in his opening speech his desire that parties agree to roadmaps to “reverse deforestation” and “overcome dependence on fossil fuels”.

The first draft of the Mutirão decision suggested that agreement on all these issues could be possible, with the text including two possible approaches for a roadmap away from fossil fuels. While roughly 80 nations publicly backed the inclusion of a fossil fuel roadmap, the Brazilian Presidency claimed that a roughly equal number saw its inclusion as a red line. Negotiations on the Mutirão decision were described as subsequently descending into turmoil. Ultimately, the decision did not reference either fossil fuels or deforestation.

While the Presidency subsequently announced its intention to create its own fossil fuel and deforestation roadmaps, unlike the “Baku to Belém Roadmap to 1.3T” these roadmaps are not founded within a negotiated text and consequently have no mandate under either the UNFCCC or the Paris Agreement and do not formally sit within the COP process. This failure was attributed by the executive director of Greenpeace Brazil to the “divided multilateral landscape”.

On the final day of negotiations, the Alliance of Small Island States urged that COP30 must not be the COP that “gives up on the goal of keeping 1.5°C within reach.” However, with the Global Carbon Project warning that at current emission levels the remaining carbon budget for limiting warming to 1.5C will be consumed within four years, the failure at COP30 to find common ground on the energy transition may mean 1.5C has now slipped permanently out of reach.

Looking Ahead to COP31

There are several important issues that will continue to develop between now and COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye, in November 2026. Here we set out some key issues to watch out for in the year ahead:

1. Implementation of the Fossil Fuel and Deforestation Roadmaps

The nature and status of the fossil fuel and deforestation “roadmaps” announced by the Brazilian Presidency remain unclear. As the roadmaps have no basis in a negotiated document or foundation in the legal treaties underpinning the COP process, it is not certain whether all or which countries will contribute to their development, nor what their outcomes will be. The outcome of the “Baku to Belém Roadmap to 1.3T” may, although it was established in a negotiated text, be a guide. More may become clear in April 2026, when Colombia and the Netherlands will jointly hold a world-first conference on the phasing out of fossil fuels.

2. A Novel COP Structure

For the first time in the history of the UNFCCC process, COP31 will see the responsibilities of the Presidency split between hosting and negotiating functions: Türkiye will serve as the official host and COP President, whilst Australia will preside over the negotiations.

It remains to be seen what effect this dual structure will have on negotiations, especially given that Australia was in favour of a fossil fuel phase out roadmap at COP30, while Türkiye was recorded by the Presidency as being in opposition (although Türkiye has since denied this). As President and host, Türkiye will likely play the more important role. It remains to be seen to what extent Australia (and the climate vulnerable Pacific Island states its proposed presidency was supposed to represent) will drive the most difficult negotiations or whether Türkiye will have the final word in Presidency decision making.

3. Influence of the International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion

Prior to COP30, there was some expectation that the the International Court of Justice’s Advisory Opinion on climate change would have an impact on negotiations. This Advisory Opinion confirmed that States have a legal duty to cooperate to mitigate climate change and adapt to its effects, that the definitions of developed and developing countries are not immutable, and that States can be held legally accountable for emissions and that climate victims may be entitled to “reparations”.

While the Monaco, Mexico, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), AILAC and the Least Developed Country (LDC) blocs called for acknowledgment of the ICJ’s opinion, including in relation to discussions on Loss and Damage, the Arab Group responded that it was not appropriate to include it and that even its discussion would be a “deep, deep, deep red line”.

While no mention of the Advisory Opinion was made in a negotiated text, the Netherlands has announced that its/Colombia’s proposed conference on the phasing out of fossil fuels will be Advisory Opinion-aligned. Separately, Vanuatu’s Minster of Climate Change announced in September that it will pursue a UN General Assembly resolution to endorse and operationalise the Advisory Opinion. This means that while COP30 was perhaps too soon for states to commit to its inclusion, the Advisory Opinion’s influence on international negotiations may develop and grow over time.

4. Continuing Questions Over COP’s Relevance

COP30 was billed as the “COP of implementation”, and therefore was never intended to produce a large number of negotiated decisions. However, the failure of a COP based in the Amazon rainforest to produce a decision on deforestation and the continuing inability of the COP process to find common ground on even mentioning fossil fuels in its negotiated decisions, has left many considering whether a new way forward is required.

Yvo de Boer, a former Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, commented that: “My overall sense is that the wheels came off in Belém. My conviction is that this is not a bad thing.” His desire for “coalitions of the willing” to take the initiative on discrete issues is a view shared by many. In the upcoming year to COP31 in 2026, we can expect many to raise similar views, including the opinion that it is economics rather than politics that will drive the energy transition.

Notwithstanding such arguments, the COP process remains the only significant international legal mechanism by which countries have agreed to reduce their emissions and transition away from fossil fuels. While the economic advantage of cheap renewable power is growing, growth in renewable energy production is only adding to, not replacing, fossil fuel power generation that itself continues to grow in response to the economic incentive of increasing global demand for energy. Other non-COP initiatives, such as the G7’s Just Energy Transition Partnerships, seem to have also gone into reverse without significant fanfare. COPs consequently remain the only forum where the weight of consensus-based decision-making and the legal basis of the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement lends both credence and viability to states’ commitments.

Key contacts: Wynne Lawrence, Lucia Williams, Catríona Campbell