As Europe sweltered through a deadly heatwave in which the climate crisis claimed over 1,500 lives, climate negotiators in Bonn, Germany were wrapping up two weeks of mostly fruitless talks. They’d spent the first two days of their meeting arguing over the agenda. After three decades of climate diplomacy, the contrast between the accelerating reality of climate breakdown and the glacial pace of international talks is increasingly hard to ignore.

The Bonn talks formed part of the annual multilateral cycle leading to the peak global climate summit, the conference of parties (COP) to the United Nations (UN) Framework Convention on Climate Change. At the yearly mid-point, states meet to try to hammer out drafts of agreements to be finalised at the end-of-year COP. The 30th COP takes place in Brazil this November.

The Bonn talks came at a particularly fraught time for negotiations. Trump announced the USA’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on his first day in office in January, meaning the US government didn’t turn up in Bonn. Trump has also dismantled the USA’s international aid system, ending almost all US climate funding, leaving civil society and states that received support scrambling for alternatives.

And while the US cuts are the deepest, they’re not the only ones: France, Germany and the UK are among other states that have announced retreats from aid spending commitments.

More broadly, the notion of a rules-based international order, in which states negotiate in good faith to solve global problems and then stick to the rules, is under extraordinary assault. Trump has put transactional politics at the heart of US international relations. Authoritarian states such as China and Russia pursue self-interest, including by ignoring treaties and international human rights laws. Nationalist and populist politicians have risen in power and prominence in many countries, promising to prioritise narrow national interests and often practising climate denial, including by pledging to break with climate commitments and extract more fossil fuels.

Emissions cuts plans fall short

These geopolitical realities come in what’s supposed to be a key year for action on greenhouse gas emissions. The 2015 Paris Agreement established a ratchet mechanism that requires states to produce increasingly ambitious emissions cuts plans every five years. The deadline for the new plans – nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – to cut emissions by 2035 was 10 February. Shockingly, 95 per cent of states missed it.

Delay signals that most states see no urgency about cutting emissions. Many are likely waiting to see what major emitters such as China, India and the European Union (EU) do first. In a volatile context where states are now grappling with the impacts of Trump’s unpredictable tariff policies, ambition seems unlikely.

States have a final September deadline to submit their NDCs ahead of COP30. Delays are troubling because earlier publication of plans would help climate campaigners assess the gap between what’s promised and what’s needed, and advocate for more ambition.

What’s been produced so far isn’t encouraging. Last October, the UN Environment Programme said a ‘quantum leap’ in ambition is needed to hold global temperature rises within 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels, the highest target set by the Paris Agreement. But most new NDCs, including from Brazil, Canada, Japan, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), aren’t strong enough to meet the target and don’t place enough emphasis on phasing out fossil fuels. Of major historical emitters, only the UK’s new plan shows enough ambition – although the current government is having to catch up after its predecessor did too little.

The new NDCs are supposed to be informed by the ‘global stocktake’ completed at COP28, which assessed efforts to address climate change so far; it concluded that states aren’t cutting emissions quickly enough, global north countries aren’t providing enough financial support and states haven’t planned adequately for the impacts of climate change.

The global stocktake led to a pledge at COP28 to transition away from fossil fuels, triple global renewable energy capacities and double the rate of improvements in energy efficiency by 2030. But there’s been no elaboration since of any plan for fossil fuel transition. No progress was made at COP29 or the recent Bonn meeting. This raises the danger that COP30 may fail to do anything to advance fossil fuel phase-out.

Financing impasse

The Bonn talks achieved little despite a packed agenda, making it more likely that COP30 will be the latest in a series of disappointing climate summits. The last three COPs were held in deeply repressive states with closed civic space, and the last two in countries where oil and gas extraction is the dominant industry: Azerbaijan in 2024, the UAE in 2023 and Egypt in 2022. In each, civil society struggled to access and influence delegations.

COP27 finally made a commitment to set up a fund to compensate global south states for the loss and damage caused by climate change, largely resulting from global north emissions. But the fund remains vastly under-resourced, with only US$768 million pledged so far. This is tiny given the scale of the impacts of climate change: just one set of impacts, the extreme weather events made more likely and frequent by climate change, cost the global economy over US$2 trillion in the past decade.

Then COP28 finally brought an acknowledgement of the need to transition away from fossil fuels, language kept out of previous agreements by the power of the fossil fuel lobby. The global stocktake ultimately made this a conclusion impossible to avoid, but even so, the text was watered down under pressure from petrostates such as Saudi Arabia.

COP29 then focused on the funding needed to enable global south states to transition to low-carbon economies and adapt to climate impacts. But it ended with a US$1 trillion annual gap between what’s needed and what states committed.

One of the main causes of the dispute over the Bonn agenda was a move by many global south states to bring financing back into negotiations, including the question of funding for adaptation; they accuse global north states of funding domestic adaptation but not providing enough global support. The funding disagreement dominated the meeting’s debates on a global adaptation goal, leading to no clear outcomes, and also meant no progress on agreeing national adaptation plans, which were supposed to be finalised at COP29.

Arguments over funding are sure to rumble on, with clear dividing lines between global north and south. And yet amid all the climate financing disputes, states keep finding money for military spending, which soared to US$2.7 trillion globally in 2024 and is guaranteed to keep rising.

Civil society is urging fresh thinking on financing, promoting options that have been kept off the table, such as redistributing the immense wealth of the destructive fossil fuel industry. The oil and gas sector has made profits averaging US$2.8 billion a day over the past five decades, investing only a fraction in alternatives. This wealth buys huge lobbying power: at least 1,773 fossil fuel lobbyists registered for COP29. A levy on extractions could start putting that wealth to use, raising US$900 billion by 2030.

The case for reform

COP30 in Brazil offers some hope: for a change, it will be held in a country with more enabling civic space and a robust civil society tradition. It will take place in the city of Belém on the Amazon River, hosted by a government keen to talk up its green credentials – although last month Brazil’s oil regulator announced a plan to auction exploration rights to 172 potential developments, including 47 in the Amazon basin.

But even if recent COP pitfalls are avoided, there are fundamental flaws in climate processes. Climate talks are characterised by opaque bureaucracy, highly formalised procedures, endless wording tussles and a tendency to defer tough decisions to future meetings. All of this is starkly at odds with the reality of an accelerating climate crisis. Agendas have grown increasingly bloated as COPs have ticked by, bogged down by legacies of initiatives launched at previous summits, signalling the avoidance of difficult decisions rather than ambition.

Multilateral negotiations can be slow, but some states deliberately obstruct progress. States with major oil and gas industries tend to talk out every point for as long as possible, as seen in Bonn’s lengthy and detailed debate about a potential online platform. States opposed to climate action can make talks not a way of solving the problem, but a way of perpetuating lethal delay. The fact that the coming COP is the 30th yet temperature rises are on track to far exceed targets shows the process isn’t working.

Civil society is demanding change. The Bonn negotiations were accompanied by a call backed by over 200 civil society groups for urgent reform of UN climate processes. The call demands more transparent negotiations and more accountability over commitments. It urges decision-making by majority vote when the consensus normally required can’t be reached, preventing petrostates from vetoing stronger language on fossil fuels. Civil society wants meetings to be hosted by states that have shown progress in meeting climate commitments and that respect civic freedoms and guarantee space for genuine participation. It demands the exclusion of fossil fuel lobbyists from state delegations and the institution of a conflict-of-interest policy.

States that want climate action should back civil society’s call. They should also be wise to the danger of using efficiency excuses as a pretext to further limit civil society access, at a time when the UN system is cutting participation channels to save costs. Reforms should expand rather than reduce space for civil society engagement. Time and again, civil society brings the ambition and innovation needed to address climate change. Any effective climate process must place civil society at its heart.

After three decades, world leaders should realise the folly of continuing the processes that have allowed emissions to soar while the planet burns. They should embrace the reforms needed to turn climate talks into climate action.

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