Mikael Karlsson, Environmental Scientist at Uppsala University and Scientific Advisor at 2050, was on the ground at COP30 in Belém, Brazil. Drawing from firsthand experience, Mikael shares his insights into why climate summits, despite frustration, slow negotiations, and burning urgency, remain essential for moving the world forward, one small but meaningful step at a time.
Ahead of COP30, the UN sends one email after another to accredited participants. One of them catches my eye: the dress code is being changed to “smart casual”, due to the heat and humidity in Belém. It’s as if the climate itself is sending a symptomatic signal before the negotiations begin.
And it is undeniably hot in the Blue Zone, the name for the negotiations area with the countries’ pavilions. At one point, an electrical fault even causes a fire. That prompts some media outlets that had ignored the meeting to start reporting, as if the problem were not that the planet is on fire.
The negotiations are heated too. As usual, countries in the global North – now without federal USA – demand faster emission cuts in the global South. This is met by demands from the South, with China hiding behind the curtain, for increased climate finance from the North. The demand is accepted, provided emission reduction, which is accepted, provided increased financing… And so it goes on.
The Catch-22 that follows tends to slow down the rest of the negotiations. When the host country also withholds compromise proposals, many become frustrated. Those watching from the outside wonder what the point of it all is. The negotiating parties inability to even mention “fossil fuels” – the core of the problem – appears incomprehensible.
So what is the point of climate summits? Should they simply be scrapped, as some propose? believe ending them would be disastrous for climate action. They send indispensable signals to both politics and business.
The mere fact that all parties to the Paris Agreement manage to agree is valuable in itself. Despite wars and geopolitical problems – and despite the fact that countries and regions that once led the way are now backtracking – the world still unites behind decisions to counter the climate crisis. The step forward is painfully small, but it must be taken. The world still takes on the climate challenge.
Even though the wording from climate summits is often weak, it continues to put pressure on countries. Some hesitate, but in the EU’s case the Council of Ministers recently put its foot down on new climate targets for 2040. That would hardly have happened without the meeting in Belém.
The slow but steady grind of the negotiations also charts a course for businesses. Everyone see that progress is sluggish, but also that the process moves on, despite opposition from fossil fuel lobbyists, together with China, Russia and the Arab Group. One more nail has been driven into the fossil coffin.
And the repeated political rounds – on whether the final text should say “phase out”, “transition away from”, or “Implementation Accelerator” – are probably not what matters most to businesses. The direction of travel is clear regardless.
The global dimension is clear as well. Climate finance must increase substantially, but it is now far higher than it would have been without these summits. How else would small countries in the global South be able to make their voices heard without the visibility and attention the meetings bring?
There are thus good reasons to continue holding climate summits. Taken together, the decisions made post Paris mean that projections now show 2-3°C of warming by 2100, instead of 4-5°C. Warming must be slowed more and faster, but the difference between the figures is enormous.
At the same time, these small advances must not lead to complacency. It remains crucial to continue highlighting the scale of the climate crisis, to continue showing solutions – which are increasingly accessible and affordable – and to keep scrutinising what countries are and are not doing.
If research, business and civil society step up, politics will follow. The road to the next summit is therefore important to travel, with presence at COP31 in Antalya as yet another milestone.
