The 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) will convene in Belem, Brazil on November 10 and run until November 21, 2025.
A key highlight is Brazil's push for the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, a $125 billion (€108 billion) fund to reward tropical countries for forest protection starting in 2026.
It will bring together 198 states and other parties (for example, the European Union) to address the global threat posed by climate change.
Top officials from the United States will not be in attendance.
The stated goal of COP30 is to accelerate the implementation of the Paris Agreement by moving from promise to practice. Brazil has established an agenda focused on translating global climate goals into concrete, real-world action.
Before the summit, every country needs to submit, as required under the 2015 Paris Agreement, so-called Nationally Determined Contributions, NDCs, which detail how they plan to meet their share of cutting carbon in order to hold to the 1.5C limit. So far, fewer than a third of the world’s nations (62 out of 197) have sent in their climate action plans, and two of the biggest emitters — the European Union and China — are not among them, nor is the United States. Further complicating matters, the Trump Administration is pulling out of the Paris Agreement, did not attend the mid-year UN climate meeting in Bonn and will not attend COP30.
Those NDCs will then be compiled and presented to show just how far off the world is from the 1.5C objective. Even the most optimistic experts expect there to be a significant gap. And, the most recent estimates from late October seem to confirm that the NDCs would only cut carbon by about 10% --a sixth of the drop in global emissions needed to limit global heating to 1.5C.
“The big question is how Brazil will deal with the problem when we fall short on NDCs,” said Alden Meyer, a senior associate at think tank E3G and a veteran COP-watcher. “Are we gonna say, ‘Too bad, we lost the planet,’ and go home?”
The UN Climate Change Conference- Belem, Brazil website: https://unfccc.int/cop30
The Host Country Cop30 Brasil Amazonia, Belem 2025 website: https://cop30.br/en
