What I learned watching COP30
I’m writing from the vantage point of having participated in Quaker Earthcare Witness’s Quaker Youth UN Ambassadors Program. It was a distinct pleasure to spend two weeks following the Finance and Mitigation Tracks of COP30 alongside Mercy from Kenya and Simeon from Rwanda. We were virtual observers rather than delegates at this COP, watching livestreams and reading all the negotiating documents we could get our hands on, trying to track discussions that often ran late. We had expected negotiations to be like a technical conference. Not quite. Everything we observed seemed to be organized around conflict management: who could speak, which subjects could be named, what language survived drafts, and how long disagreement could stay within procedure.
COP30 demonstrated the usefulness of disciplined procedure and the limits it imposes. The formal courtesies of UNFCCC negotiations and the deliberately slow pace of strategic delay gave the proceedings the ritual formality of a medieval court and the strategic concealment of a poker game. Witnessing the negotiations changed my understanding of the United Nations—not as world government or a homeowners’ association, but as a forum where nearly every government can confront problems no single government can solve. COP30 also showed us the limits of the consensus rule that governs decision-making in UNFCCC negotiations. Because the parties never adopted a fallback voting rule, UNFCCC decisions are made by consensus in practice. This gives determined opponents considerable power to delay, weaken, or sometimes block an outcome. I came away with a different view of what the UNFCCC negotiations aim to do and what it would take to do that work better.
At COP30, more than eighty countries supported a proposal to develop a formal roadmap for transitioning away from fossil fuels. The roadmap did not enter the final agreement, which instead referred back to the language adopted at COP28 in 2023. Brazil subsequently indicated that it would continue developing fossil-fuel-transition and deforestation roadmaps outside the formal COP process. COP30 also produced outcomes on finance, adaptation, implementation, and loss and damage. Its final decision called for urgent action toward the COP29 goal of mobilizing at least $1.3 trillion annually from public and private sources for climate action in developing countries by 2035. COP30 also took note of the Baku-to-Belém Roadmap, developed by the Azerbaijani and Brazilian COP presidencies as a framework for reaching that goal. The document gathers proposals, instruments, and leverage points already under discussion rather than creating a new financing mechanism of its own. Shortly before the formal negotiations began, Brazil launched the Tropical Forest Forever Facility on November 6, 2025. If the new facility proves feasible and effective, it could provide long-term payments to tropical-forest countries that maintain standing forests. The facility is designed to use sponsor capital to attract large-scale private investment, with investment returns funding those performance-based payments.
As with the Baku-to-Belém Roadmap, the success of Brazil’s new program depends on the institutions that put the payment mechanisms to work: raising capital, monitoring performance outcomes, and maintaining transparent governance. The new mechanism also needs safeguards against displacement and fraudulent claims, along with meaningful participation by Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Such participation is essential to the facility’s legitimacy and effectiveness. Top-down financial instruments—and bottom-up finance regimes alike—depend on public rules that harness incentives without allowing existing wealth to dictate every outcome.
Climate clubs and universal diplomacy
The conclusion of COP30 shows that “climate clubs” come in different forms. Smaller coalitions may sometimes move more quickly than universal forums, although their narrower membership creates distinct problems of legitimacy and fairness. But climate clubs will not generally thrive without transparent rules, access to climate finance and climate technology, and meaningful participation by large and small countries alike. A smaller, more flexible coalition can test policy ideas and act before universal consensus emerges. The UNFCCC, in turn, offers broad representation and a form of negotiating legitimacy that smaller coalitions cannot replicate.
The technical work of activism
There are already plenty of websites offering reasonable, well-considered views on the climate crisis, so for my part I will not rehearse those arguments here, even though I largely agree with them. But COP30 should remind us that effective action requires more than repeating established facts and well-supported conclusions. Technical competence is itself a part of activism. It means understanding how to measure contributions, how to demonstrate additionality, how to put monitoring programs in place, how to avoid leakage effects, and how different policies might alter distributional effects. Some questions will remain moral and political, and those questions are best addressed through publicly accountable decision-making and reasoned deliberation in which activists can participate.
The Quaker art of discernment
Quaker meetings are not meetings of fair-minded observers waiting politely for everyone else to agree to the one right answer. Nor do they aim at unanimity at all costs. The practice of Friends is rather to be open to the possibility that no participant has at the outset the whole answer. We discern the best answer by attending to the promptings of Spirit, ever open to the possibility that the answer we find turns out not to be what we thought it was. And we discern the best next step by looking at what we have done so far—not loyally to one inherited opinion or another, but hoping always that we are learning in the doing to do even better next time around. At the same time, we learn quickly what we need to learn and decide actively what we need to decide, moving promptly to the next step without treating disagreement as irrelevant to what we have yet to decide, or allowing the needs of the process to become an alibi for unnecessary delay.
The fire
On Thursday, November 20, a fire broke out in the pavilion area of the COP30 venue, forcing the evacuation of the site and interrupting negotiations for several hours. The fire was quickly contained and extinguished, and thirteen people were treated for smoke inhalation. Watching remotely, we could follow the official updates but little of the confusion at the venue.
In the end, we take what we can from what we’ve experienced. And I find myself concluding that though the UNFCCC is necessary, it’s insufficient. Abandoning it in pursuit of alternatives would do nothing to stop the power politics I witnessed during COP30. The work ahead requires overlapping institutions and practices that have the capacity to learn, to act before universal agreement arrives, and to remain answerable to those whose lives will be altered by the decisions these institutions make.