Ahead of the 2025 climate summit, in the Amazonian port of Belém last year, the Brazilian hosts had taken off the table the issue that most had assumed would be at its heart: concrete plans from each country laying out exactly what they would be doing to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. Brazil was insisting, instead, that these plans – the bedrock of the Paris agreement – were the business of national governments and not up for negotiation. But, as the faultlines from the Brazilian decision deepen going into this year’s summit, it is clear that the Paris agreement, and climate action around the world, has reached an impasse.
And it is not just Cop insiders who are worried. For many outside the vast white air-conditioned conference halls, the question, as this year’s summit begins, will be: what is the point? Those same governments have pledged year after year since the Paris agreement was signed in 2015 – and entered into force a year later – to limit global heating to 1.5C above preindustrial levels.
Yet temperatures for two years have exceeded that threshold, and the UN revealed a few weeks ago that its most optimistic estimate was now for about 1.7 to 1.8C of heating. There could be no clearer evidence that the Paris agreement, on the face of it, has failed. It is impossible not to wonder whether the Cop process itself is just not fit for purpose.
The charge sheet against Paris is long, with the central issue being the failure to achieve its goal. Beyond that immediate failure, the negotiation processes are endlessly convoluted and cause their own problems. It took more than five years just to negotiate the Paris “rulebook” under which the treaty is interpreted and put into effect.
The convention that all resolutions must pass by consensus has given bad actors free rein. Donald Trump’s allies – in Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela and some other petrostates – frequently veto measures and obstruct progress. It took more than 30 years of negotiation since the UN framework convention on climate change was signed in 1992 for fossil fuels even to be addressed directly.
This was at Cop28 in Dubai in 2023, where countries agreed for the first time to “transition away from fossil fuels” but failed to set a timeframe or any policies to back up the resolution. The US, the world’s biggest economy and responsible for about one in every eight tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted today, has withdrawn from Paris under President Trump. Even parts of the developed world which support the process have mostly failed to come up with convincing plans: Australia, co-host of Cop31, has set no end to fossil fuel exports; its fellow co-host Turkey plans to increase its carbon output.
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