ITALIAN CLIMATE NETWORK AT COP30: EXPECTATIONS AND ANALYSIS

COP30 kicks off on Monday 10 November: Italian Climate Network will be on site for timely updates.

The Italian Climate Network team is about to leave for Belém, Brazil, where COP30, the 30th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, will be held from 10 to 21 November 2025.

As every year, we will be following the negotiations “from the inside” with a daily COP Bulletin providing timely updates, comments and insights thanks to our delegation, working both remotely and on site.

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Where we stand

After lengthy and difficult negotiations, COP29 in Baku succeeded in reaching two key decisions on the new climate finance target for 2025-2035 and on Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, although with many weaknesses.

In particular, the agreement reached in Baku sets a dual collective climate finance target of mobilising at least $300 billion per year by 2035, with industrialised countries taking the lead, as part of a broader global and multi-stakeholder increase that will aim to mobilise at least $1.3 trillion per year by 2035. 

With regard to Article 6 and carbon markets, the decisions concerned bilateral cooperation between countries (Article 6.2) and the Credit Mechanism under the Paris Agreement (new name and new acronym, PACM). However, the texts were still weak due to the absence of sufficient guarantees on the credibility of the mitigation contribution of the credits issued and on the protection of human rights in the projects that will be selected and financed, given the bad experiences of the last decade.

In June, the interim negotiations leading up to COP30 made very little progress. In particular, consultations on the so-called Baku to Belém roadmap, which should lead us to achieve the new collective quantified goal on climate finance, failed to reach any concrete conclusions: in this regard, the texts arriving at the Brazilian COP still contain numerous open questions.

After the United Nations General Assembly in September, when more than 100 countries announced new climate plans ahead of COP30 during the Climate Summit, the UNFCCC’s NDC Synthesis Report highlighted progress in the quality of commitments: 89% of Parties have economy-wide targets and 80% have updated their NDCs in light of the first Global Stocktake. However, even including all the new contributions, the estimated collective reduction by 2035 stands at -17% compared to 2019: this is still not enough. 

Expectations for COP30

The Brazilian climate COP promises to be crucial, but also complex.

The negotiating table will essentially feature the same points as in recent years on the main issues, in an agenda that is effectively procedural and aimed at reopening the discussion, starting with the complex negotiations on adaptation measures and their financing, with related indicators, through to gender policies in the climate field.

Items that were postponed in Baku are back on the agenda, such as the Work Programme on Mitigation, dear to the European Union, and the Work Programme on Just Transition, but also the now traditional “inaugural” and, if you will, provocative items on unilateral trade measures and the revision of Annex I and Annex II membership proposed by members of the G77 group.

Among the topics to focus on in Belém are the implementation of the 2023 Global Stocktake, which is certainly complicated given the numerous problems with the key document, and decisions on a series of financial reports, in particular on the Green Climate Fund, the Global Environmental Facility and, for the first time, the Loss and Damage Fund, on which delegations will be called upon to express their views.

In general, COP30 will be called upon to make a quantum leap because there are no longer any “pieces” of the Paris Agreement to be completed or tested in reality: this year’s COP will be the first to face the real dilemma of implementation, of realising the objectives of the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention and the Paris Agreement.

For more information on this topic, click on this link to read an analysis by Jacopo Bencini, President of the Italian Climate Network, on the expectations for COP30.