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The Brazilian president-designate of the UN COP30 summit warned the widening gap between country pledges and a Paris accord goal to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5C in the industrial era would make it a key point of tension at the world’s most important climate talks.
André Aranha Corrêa do Lago, a senior diplomat, said the fact that some scientists had concluded the world had already surpassed the long-term 1.5C level of warming would make it “one of the inevitable important debates of the COP”.
Before the November summit, almost 200 countries must submit detailed plans about how they will meet their share of the Paris goal agreed a decade ago. These will be compiled to show how far the world is off-track from the dangerous threshold of warming. Even optimistic assumptions indicate a wide gap.
“This is a complicated debate [about how to be 1.5C compatible],” Corrêa do Lago said in an interview with the FT. “But the fact is, that this is what we have decided, so we all have to try to have NDCs [national defined contributions] that are adjusted to 1.5.”
Fewer than 30 countries have submitted plans so far, with top emitters the EU and China yet to do so, while the US has quit entirely under President Trump.
The Brazilian presidency is under pressure to address the critical issue, at the same time as major oil-producing countries resist moves that would limit fossil fuels.
During the past two weeks of UN meetings in Bonn, representing the halfway point to the annual COP, the strong pushback from the Saudi Arabia delegation was a recurring feature, those involved said.
The Alliance of Small Island States, which represents some 40 countries drawn from Africa, the Caribbean, Indian and Pacific oceans, described what it said was an “attack on science”.
“Acting upon the latest and best available science to keep 1.5C within reach is a priority for AOSIS,” the group said on Friday. “It is alarming that the reflection of scientific fact is being challenged. That the mere mentioning of 1.5C seems to be a red flag is an extremely concerning development.”
A rare win for the UN climate arm was an agreement in Bonn to recommend a 10 per cent budget increase to €81.5mn in 2026-27, thanks to an increase in China’s contribution from 15 per cent to 20 per cent.
COP30 chief executive Ana Toni noted the competing pressures of energy and defence spending facing governments as a result of conflicts involving Russia and the Middle East. “Geopolitics is not helping us,” she told the FT.
The Brazilian contingent, including environment minister Marina Silva, was in the UK, along with officials from the EU, Singapore, Germany and Kenya, for informal discussions at London Climate Action Week.
But UN secretary-general António Guterres was forced to cancel his London visit when Middle East tensions escalated at the start of the week, illustrating the difficult international backdrop.
More than 700 events took place across the capital, rivalling New York climate week which is typically held alongside the UN General Assembly in September but cast into shadow this year by the Trump assault on climate action.
Standard Chartered chief executive Bill Winters said the US was “undermining actively” global climate action, as he called on other governments to focus on “increasing the do-the-right-thing motivation”.
“A combination of facts, coercion and modest regulation doesn’t impose uncompetitive restrictions on local businesses,” he said.
Many of the business discussions in London focused on the use of technology to address emissions, including AI to gain energy efficiencies, as well as leaps in electrification and battery energy storage.
Energy Transitions Commission chair Lord Adair Turner set the tone, telling the One Univers conference that the cost of batteries had fallen 95 per cent in 15 years, and the internal combustion engine car was a “dead man walking”.
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