https://www.ft.com/content/8e8f960f-1b25-4c10-b4a5-a0c745ad9054
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Excerpt: By PILITA CLARK
COP30 was always going to be different. The first UN climate summit to be held on the edge of the Amazon. The first to be so comprehensively spurned by the US administration. And the first since the world hit 1.5C of global warming for an entire calendar year.
It also turned out to be the first with a venue plagued by extreme heat, flooding — even a fire that brought the talks to a standstill for much of their second-last day.
Yet the conference in the steamy Brazilian city of Belém still managed something these huge annual gatherings should have done years ago: a shift away from showy pledges to tackling the real world complexities of cutting carbon emissions.
Delegates grappled with global trade rules, critical minerals, a pathway for phasing out fossil fuels and other issues long deemed too toxic or irrelevant for climate COPs.
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But the flashpoint in Belém was the EU’s pioneering carbon border tax, which is set to become operational in January.
An array of nations attacked the bloc’s carbon border adjustment mechanism, or CBAM, which aims to stop domestic industries being undercut by imports from countries lacking the EU’s robust carbon pricing system. It currently requires companies to pay around €80 a tonne for carbon pollution.
Saudi Arabia was among those attacking what it claimed was an unfair “economic transfer from the poor to the rich, disguised as climate action”, which would sap smaller countries’ efforts to decarbonise.
But several other countries are eyeing such measures amid signs the CBAM is fuelling the spread of carbon pricing. Researchers say more than 40 schemes in 37 countries have been launched, considered or implemented since the EU plan was first discussed in 2019.
Helpfully, Brazil used COP30 to launch a forum for countries to thrash out what seem certain to be rising trade and climate tensions. Just another talking shop? Perhaps, but it was refreshing to see immediate economic realities introduced into a process that often seems remote from such concerns.
Likewise, countries made a rare push to include the critical minerals central to the energy transition in the formal COP talks. Stamping out climate misinformation, another problem rarely addressed head-on at these gatherings, was also endorsed by a number of nations. And a pioneering $5.5bn tropical forest protection fund was launched.
To be clear, we are talking more of a totter than a wholesale lunge away from COP business as usual. Negotiators still spent hours wrestling over legal texts that would baffle any outsider, let alone those who understand how fast the world is racing towards uncharted changes in the climate.
There is no guarantee any of the new efforts will deliver meaningful improvements. Still, Brazil has begun the overdue job of redrawing how the world deals with a defining challenge of our age. It may not be the final answer but it is a start.
