Something unsettling happened in Brazil. After two weeks of bargaining, stalling, corridor whispering and outright obstruction, COP30 ended without a single mention of the world's largest source of the climate crisis. The final agreement avoided the word fossil altogether. Not oil. Not gas. Not coal. Language was treated as a threat.
In Belém, Brazil, on the edge of the Amazon, negotiators faced a world in distress, and it still produced a document drained of meaning. More than eighty countries pushed for a fossil fuel transition. They left with a document that felt trapped in another era, while fossil fuel-producing countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, India, Russia, and the 1600 lobbyists moving through the venue without resistance walked away satisfied.
To see why, you only had to stay inside the tents, where heat, fatigue, and a faltering system showed how fragile the whole process had become.
Inside the Tent: A Dundee Voice from Belém
This year, Dundee actually had someone on the ground, and that someone was my colleague Dr Nandan Mukherjee. When he returned from Brazil, we found a moment to talk. As Director of the BINKS Institute for Sustainability in our School of Social Sciences, Law and Humanities, he had seen COP30 up close. I wanted to know what it felt like from the inside. He described the experience bluntly. He felt they were in a very bad situation and that they had not delivered anything meaningful. His words were quiet but heavy. He said the meeting felt “literally designed to fail”.
And he meant it. He explained that major players, the US, the EU, and the UK, arrived without real leadership or commitment. Negotiations barely took place. Instead of bargaining through the official process, decisions were delivered from the presidency with no serious collective ownership behind them. He told us they simply could not agree on anything.
There were the conditions. As Dr Mukherjee recalled it, Belém’s heat really was brutal. Outside, it read thirty-two or thirty-three degrees, but inside that tent, it felt like forty, maybe more. The whole place was a plastic shell struggling to breathe, and the air conditioning could barely keep itself alive. These issues did not reflect an absence of goodwill from Brazil. They reflected something else. The United States boycotted the summit entirely under Donald Trump’s renewed climate sceptic leadership, a withdrawal reported extensively in global media. Trump also publicly mocked Lula and climate justice initiatives, framing them as ideological excesses rather than planetary necessity. Without the United States in the room, the political structure that usually stabilises COP meetings weakened immediately. Brazil was left carrying a responsibility that is normally distributed across major powers.
Dr Nandan Mukherjee’s experience may seem minor next to the scale of planetary collapse, but it tells the truth about COP30. The system is so strained that even the host country’s generosity could not bring any real light or momentum to a moment that demanded urgency.
The world arrived at COP30 expecting action. What they found was a sweltering tent, weak resolve, and the steady advance of 1600 fossil fuel lobbyists who moved through the summit like an occupying force. This isn’t how any species prepares for a future, let alone one running out of time.
The UN Climate Architecture and its Cracks
To understand why COP30 fell apart, you have to see the structure behind it. Two bodies anchor global climate governance. The first pillar is the UNFCCC. That long title hides a simple truth. It is where governments come to negotiate while also protecting their own skin. Consensus rules the room. It slows everything. A single government can freeze the whole process. At COP30, several did, and the rest just had to watch.
The second pillar is the IPCC, the scientific core of the entire system. Since 1988, its purpose has been to show governments, with evidence rather than comforting speeches, where the climate is actually heading. They map heat, species loss, rising seas, all the slow violence that’s already underway. Scientists from almost every country send in what they know, and what they fear. Their work is evidence, not ideology, and this year it came across with a kind of quiet alarm. We are heading toward roughly three degrees of warming. If there is any hope of keeping the planet alive, global emissions have to fall by about 43 per cent by 2030 and around 60 per cent by 2035, and reach net zero by mid-century.
Belém should have been the hinge between science and action. Instead, the hinge gave way. The science says one thing. The politics say another. The gap grows clearer. Belém made it impossible to pretend otherwise.
From Kyoto to Paris: How Compulsory became Voluntary
Kyoto once tried to make responsibility real. It had binding targets. Industrialised states had obligations. Polluters had to answer for something.
Over time, the system softened. The Paris Agreement rested on trust. In 2015, the world convinced itself that countries would rise to the moment, tighten their promises every few years, and let friendliness stand in for real enforcement. Ten years on, in Belém, that belief fell apart in real time. The trust that once held Paris together felt worn out, almost see-through. Major emitters arrived without conviction, lobbyists moved through the venue with ease, and the very countries that needed action most were left waiting for promises that never came. A decade after Paris, we’re forced to confront a simple truth. And in the end, it wasn’t trust that failed. It was power, and who held it.
The Commons, the Free Riders, and the Ones Who Pay
The tragedy of the commons isn’t a theory anymore. It has become the script of international climate politics. Everyone benefits from a stable climate. But every fossil fuel power waits for someone else to blink. The free rider problem becomes real when you watch wealthy states speak of ambition while missing their own targets. It becomes even clearer when the United States does not attend at all. Trump’s boycott removed a key player who, in previous years, leaned on the obstructionists and forced compromise. Without the US, the spoilers had no one to fear. Without fear, they had no reason to move.
Adaptation Without Mitigation Is a Funeral Plan
Pro-fossil states tried to redirect the conversation toward adaptation. Colombia’s former environment minister, Susana Muhamad, put it plainly. Adaptation without cutting emissions is nothing more than a bag with no bottom. You cannot talk about resilience while ignoring the source of the harm. Money without action turns into theatre. Even the adaptation commitment at COP30 came diluted. The baseline year slipped away. The finish line moved to 2035. A small change on paper, but it showed exactly where the politics stood.
Indigenous Movements and the Spirit Outside the Tents
Inside the summit, fossil lobbies had badges and air-conditioned lounges. Outside, indigenous leaders marched in the blistering heat. They shut down parts of the summit. They carried photographs of murdered land defenders. They spoke of fires that move faster than authorities can respond.
Belém revealed a split world. Those who protect forests and rivers still struggle to be heard. Those who accelerate extraction walk into negotiating rooms without friction. If climate justice means anything, it must reverse that order.
When the Process Fails, Movements Step Forward
COP30 failed in substance, but something else began. Colombia and the Netherlands announced they would convene the first global meeting centred on a just transition away from fossil fuels, beyond the reach of the usual vetoes. A coalition of the willing, moving faster than the slowest actors in the room. This is not symbolic. It is pressure at scale. It is the beginning of a parallel track because the official one is stuck.
Every major shift in global politics has begun this way. When institutions stagnate, movements step around them.
Beyond Belém
The Amazon is inching toward points it may never recover from. Each IPCC cycle sharpens that truth. And here’s the part we keep skipping over. For billions in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, the Pacific islands, and the Sahel, the heat has already crossed into the unliveable. These aren’t distant disasters. They are happening right now. COP30’s silence was not accidental. It was engineered. It was the outcome of a structure that asks the most vulnerable to wait while the most powerful stall.
But the silence also created something unexpected. A clarity that the world can no longer pretend that this is a technical misunderstanding. This is a confrontation between those who want to keep the planet habitable and those who will extract it until nothing remains. Dr Mukherjee’s testimony captures the truth. When a broken negotiation system overshadows the actual content of a climate summit, something fundamental has cracked.
The question now is what we do with that crack. Do we retreat into resignation, or do we step through it and build the political courage the process keeps avoiding?
Because after Belém, one thing is certain. The planet will not wait for consensus.
