By Laura Paddison, CNN
(CNN) — The planet’s biggest climate conference, COP30, has kicked off with representatives from more than 190 countries descending on the Brazilian city of Belém. They will spend two weeks deep in negotiations — likely contentious — on how to rein in dangerous global warming.
COP30 is supposed to be the summit where countries really get down to the details of how they plan to halt catastrophic climate change. There’s a huge amount at stake. Last year was the hottest on record, capping a decade of unprecedented heat, and the impacts are already roiling the planet — from hurricanes and floods to fires and extreme heat.
Here’s what to expect over the next two weeks.
What are COPs?
In 1992, more than 150 countries signed a UN treaty to limit the alarming rise of planet-heating pollution. The first COP — which stands for “conference of the parties” that signed this agreement — took place in Berlin in 1995. Member states have been convening almost every year since.
A breakthrough moment came in 2015. At COP21 in Paris, more than 190 countries approved the Paris climate agreement, pledging limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and preferably to 1.5 degrees.
The agreement set out a vision but not a detailed roadmap. To flesh out how the warming limit would be achieved, countries committed to submit national climate plans every five years for keeping the 1.5-degree ambition alive.
COP30 marks the latest cycle of these. Countries were supposed to submit their plans for cutting climate pollution up to 2035 by a February deadline. More than 90% of governments missed it. Most countries have now submitted their plans, but some, including big polluters like India, have not.
Why has COP30 been controversial?
The pathway to the summit has been chaotic.
Brazil’s choice of Belém as the COP30 location was symbolic. The city is known as the “gateway to the Amazon,” and the aim was to focus minds on the existential danger the vast rainforest faces.
But Belém was not set up for the influx that accompanies COP. The city typically has around 18,000 hotel rooms and is expecting roughly 50,000 people. A dearth of lodgings meant rates spiked, and some countries said they were being priced out of the conference and out of the rooms where decisions were being made about their survival.
Brazil also faced criticism for its decision last month to approve exploratory oil drilling at the mouth of the Amazon River, only a few hundred miles from Belém. Environmental advocates accused the COP30 host of hypocrisy.
Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has made tackling deforestation a core aim and used the COP30 summit opening on Monday to speak strongly in favor of tackling the climate crisis. But he also supports oil extraction and has rejected claims of hypocrisy. “I don’t want to be an environmental leader. I never claimed to be,” he said at a pre-summit meeting last week, adding it would be “irresponsible” for Brazil to quit oil.
What are the main issues at COP30?
Forests are high on the agenda. Brazil is keen to make this the “Amazon COP,” and Lula wants to raise $125 billion for a fund that would pay countries to protect their forests.
The most contentious issues at the summit are likely to be around finance and fossil fuels.
The wrangle over how much richer countries should give poorer ones to help them tackle climate change and adapt to the impacts they disproportionately face is likely to continue.
Last year, at COP29 in Azerbaijan, nations agreed to provide $300 billion annually by 2035, with a wider ambition to reach $1.3 trillion from a range of sources. A roadmap for scaling up climate finance was published last week and will form the basis for what are likely to be contentious negotiations.
Then there are fossil fuels, the drivers of the climate crisis, which were mentioned in a COP final agreement for the first time only in 2023 at COP28, when countries made an unprecedented call to transition away from oil, coal and gas.
The world is different now, however. Trump is pushing for more fossil fuels, and some countries, including many in South America, are rushing to exploit their oil and gas reserves. Petrostates and oil companies are increasingly emboldened to push back against any language blaming fossil fuels for climate change or committing to phasing them out.
Does the world have a chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees?
The United Nations says no, at least not in the near term. In a report this month, the UN said countries had acted too slowly to limit climate pollution and it was all but certain the world would exceed 1.5 degrees, at least in the near term.
Based on current policies, the world is on track for 2.8 degrees of warming, according to the UN. If governments’ new pledges for the future are met, this could be brought down to 2.3 to 2.5 degrees.
It is progress; a decade ago, the planet was on course for around a 4-degree temperature rise. But even this reduced level of heating will cause devastation and could push the planet over catastrophic tipping points, including the loss of coral reefs and the melting of the ice sheets.
If 1.5 degrees is overshot, the world could bring temperatures back down, but it would be exceptionally challenging and involve sucking large amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere using techniques unproven at scale.
What about the US?
The Trump administration will not be sending a high-level delegation to the summit. It follows a pattern of disengagement with global climate action that began with President Donald Trump withdrawing the US from the Paris climate agreement in January.
The US rhetoric on climate action has heated up over the year, with Trump calling climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” during a speech at the UN in September.
The absence of the world’s biggest historical climate polluter from the summit will be keenly felt. Some experts fear it could give other countries license to dial down ambition.
Others, however, believe the US absence may be beneficial as the Trump administration has proven a disruptive force in other global climate negotiations this year, helping derail what would have been two historic agreements: a global plastics treaty and a tax on the shipping industry’s climate pollution.
What will come out of COP30?
The closing session at the end of the two weeks is often delayed, sometimes by more than a day, as negotiators work around the clock to hash out a final agreement.
Decisions at COPs are made by consensus, meaning countries must agree on everything — a feature which technically gives any nation a veto and can make progress very slow and fraught.
At COP30, the aim is to create a roadmap of action for the next decade, and the final outcome could include commitments on finance, adaptation to climate impacts, nature, the clean energy transition, and possibly phasing down fossil fuels, although this will be incredibly challenging given current geopolitical headwinds.
Reasons to be positive?
While the world waits to see what might emerge from Belém’s vast conference halls, there’s a more positive story unfolding in the real world. Clean energy, dominated by solar, is gaining pace.
In the first half of 2025, for the first time ever, renewables overtook coal as the top source of global electricity — a major milestone, according to analysts.
The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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