World leaders have agreed to a deal at the United Nations climate conference in Brazil that seeks to address the crisis, but the agreement does not include any mention of phasing out the fossil fuels driving climate change.
The text was approved on Saturday afternoon after negotiations stretched through the night, well beyond the expected close of the two-week COP30 summit in the Brazilian city of Belem, amid deep divisions over the fossil fuel phase-out.
The agreement pledges to review climate-related trade barriers and calls on developed nations to “at least triple” the money given to developing countries to help them withstand extreme weather events.
It also urges “all actors to work together to significantly accelerate and scale up climate action worldwide” with the aim of keeping the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) mark for global warming – an internationally agreed-upon target set under the Paris Agreement – “within reach”.
Wopke Hoekstra, the European Union’s climate commissioner, said the outcome was a step in the right direction, but the bloc would have liked more.
“We’re not going to hide the fact that we would have preferred to have more, to have more ambition on everything,” Hoekstra told reporters. “We should support it because at least it is going in the right direction,” he said.
France’s ecological transition minister, Monique Barbut, also said it was a “rather flat text” but Europeans would not oppose it because “there is nothing extraordinarily bad in it”.
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla also said in a social media post that while the outcome “fell short of expectations”, COP30 demonstrated the importance of multilateralism to tackle global challenges such as climate change.
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