COP30 in the Amazon Proved the Paris Agreement is Failing Us

Despite being held in the Amazon rainforest, the world's latest climate summit still couldn't agree to phase out fossil fuels. If that doesn't tell us the Paris Agreement is failing, I’m not sure what will.

At COP30 in Belém, negotiators argued well into the night as usual and ended up with what's being spun as yet another breakthrough: a voluntary deal to begin discussions on a roadmap for an eventual phase-out of fossil fuels. Those three words - voluntary, begin, eventual - are the key weasel words. They create the impression of momentum without requiring anyone to actually stop digging up coal and pumping out oil and gas.

This was the so-called “rainforest COP”, held in Brazil, on the edge of the world’s most important tropical forest. Yet negotiators even dropped a roadmap to halt deforestation! At a minimum, a Paris system that was working would have delivered two concrete outcomes in Belém: a dated fossil fuel phase-out and a serious plan to end deforestation. It did neither.

Defenders of Paris insist things would be worse without it. They are right in one narrow sense: before 2015 we were headed for roughly 4°C of warming; now current policies point to something more like 2.5-2.8°C. But that's not just a world that's a bit hotter; it is one of permanent coral reef collapse, routine killer heatwaves, failing harvests, drowned coastal communities and hundreds of millions of people dead. And that’s without the risk of major tipping points like collapse of ocean currents. The atmosphere doesn't respond to “historic” communiqués, it responds to tonnes of CO₂ pollution.

When leaders hugged in Paris in 2015, global CO₂ global fossil fuel emissions were 32 billion tonnes a year. But they've kept growing and are now about 38 billion tonnes per annum. Total greenhouse gas emissions have risen even more. To a whopping 58 billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalent. In other words, in the decade since we signed an agreement meant to “hold the increase in temperature to well below 2°C and pursue 1.5°C”, annual emissions have gone up by something like 15 per cent and are still rising.

That's not what securing a safe planet for humanity and nature should look like. At one point the Belém COP's 'Blue Zone' itself caught fire and delegates had to be evacuated - a grim but perfect metaphor for a process that's failing our children and planet!

Leading climate scientist Johan Rockström says we lost our bet on the Paris Agreement gamble of trusting voluntary national pledges, ratcheting up every few years, and cutting emissions fast enough to stay below 1.5°C. We've already seen a full year with global temperatures more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. There's no carbon budget left. But at COP30, instead of an immediate, binding fossil fuel exit schedule, all we got was a promise to talk about maybe doing it later - and even then, only voluntarily.

I'm not arguing Paris achieved nothing. It created a common framework, normalised net zero (which makes Matt Canavan hysterical), and helped unleash a renewables boom. But as it stands, the Paris Agreement isn't matching atmospheric physics. Voluntary pledges with no enforcement, no explicit cap on fossil fuel production, and endlessly delayed climate finance are a political answer to a scientific emergency.

Belém shows us the truth. If, ten years after Paris and in the middle of an escalating climate crisis, the best we can do in the Amazon is “voluntary”, “begin discussions” and “eventual”, then the Paris Agreement isn't working. It is a floor, not a ceiling - and right now, governments are using it as cover for delay.

Of course, we still need the UN system. Global rules and shared frameworks matter, and Paris is all we have. But this year I wasn’t in Belém’s Blue Zone; I was at AlterCOP in Brizzy, sitting in circles with young and old people, First Nations leaders and citizen activists who don't have the luxury of pretending “eventual” is good enough. Maybe this is what the future of climate politics looks like: not waiting for petrostates to agree to stop selling their products, but ground-up citizen action that treats a safe climate - not diplomacy - as the final word.

COP30 in Brazil