World strikes climate deal but fails to agree to a roadmap away from fossil fuels after contentious, chaotic summit

The world struck a new climate deal at the COP30 summit in Brazil Saturday, which calls for a tripling of funding to help countries adapt to increasingly severe climate impacts. But countries failed to agree to a roadmap away from fossil fuels, after entrenched divisions threatened to collapse the talks.

The agreement came after more than two weeks of increasingly fraught negotiations between representatives of more than 190 countries in the port city of Belém, known as the gateway to the Amazon.

The final text contained no mention of fossil fuels — the drivers of the climate crisis — signaling a retreat from consensus agreements only two years old. It included only a general agreement on deforestation, rather than more explicit commitments, which had been another key issue in the negotiations.

More than 80 countries supported the concept of a “roadmap” to transition away from fossil fuels, building on a commitment made at COP28 in Dubai in 2023. However, intense opposition from petrostates and heavy users of fossil fuels prevented consensus.

As part of reaching the deal, the COP presidency in Brazil instead said it would produce side texts detailing a global roadmap for moving away from fossil fuels and addressing deforestation that not all countries signed off on.

This unorthodox move was intended to demonstrate that all countries’ issues were heard at the summit and allow them to potentially build off the language at future summits.

The reaction from global climate experts was mixed. A decade after the landmark Paris agreement, under which countries pledged to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the Brazil summit proved the process “is working,” said former German climate envoy Jennifer Morgan.

“While far from what’s needed, the outcome in Belém is meaningful progress,” Morgan said in a statement. “Despite the efforts of major oil producing states to slow down the green transition, multilateralism continues to support the interests of the whole world in tackling the climate crisis.”

And Sierra Leone’s minister of environment and climate change Jiwoh Abdulai said this year’s summit had “moved the needle” in terms of richer, developed nations accepting more financial responsibility to help the rest of the world adapt to climate change.

But where some saw cautious forward progress, others identified a much darker trend. “Science has been deleted from COP30 because it offends the polluters,” said Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, Panama’s special representative for climate change. “A ‘Forest COP’ with no commitment on forests is a very bad joke. A climate decision that cannot even say ‘fossil fuels’ is not neutrality, it is complicity. And what is happening here transcends incompetence.”

Harjeet Singh, COP veteran and founding director of the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation, agreed. “The hypocrisy of the Global North has been laid bare,” he said. “They offer us endless new ‘dialogues’ that cannot pay for adaptation or rebuild homes destroyed by climate disasters.”

This story is breaking and will be updated.

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