COP30: Climate Experts Assess Progress in Brazil And Beyond

The 2025 UN Climate Summit, known as COP30, is wrapping up its final week, with little evident progress on critical issues. Underscoring the rising costs of climate impacts and the lack of results to the assembled delegations on Thursday morning, UN Secretary-General António Guterres pleaded, “How much more must we suffer?” 

Brazil, the host country for this year’s talks, attempted to goose the process forward on Tuesday night by issuing a draft negotiating text [PDF] of almost herculean scope. Covering finance, trade, national transparency requirements on climate progress, and ways to close the gap between countries’ emissions-reductions plans and their agreed goal of limiting overall warming to 2°C above preindustrial levels, the draft text incorporated issues that had been deemed too sensitive to include in the official agenda, let alone the negotiating document itself.  

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has begun meeting one-on-one with delegations seen to be crucial to a successful summit, including BRICS allies such as China, India, and Indonesia. So far, however, countries appear to remain far apart. The buzz surrounding Brazil’s dramatic new text has also obscured the ongoing discussions about the issues that were meant to define this COP—adaptation and biodiversity. And, outside the conference center confines in Belém, innovation in clean energy technology is making strides with or without a UN agreement.  

CFR Senior Fellows Alice C. Hill, Daniel B. Poneman, and David M. Hart—members of the Council’s Climate Realism Initiative—offer their views on the critical work taking place behind the headlines.

Alice C. Hill: The Urgency of Climate Adaptation Measures 

Alice C. Hill is the David M. Rubenstein senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations. 

Brazil has dubbed COP30 as the “COP of adaptation.” One of the biggest tests for that branding will be whether negotiators can finally agree on how to measure the myriad ways countries will need to adjust to those climate impacts they cannot now avoid. The historic 2015 Paris Agreement did not just set a temperature target—it also established a global goal on adaptation. That goal aimed to boost countries’ abilities to cope with hotter temperatures, more frequent weather extremes, higher sea levels, and other climate impacts. But for years, the goal remained aspirational.  

Only in 2023 did countries seriously engage each other on what adaptation progress should look like. As a start, they mapped out indicators across seven areas that touch daily life—including health, food security, water, ecosystems, and infrastructure—and four areas tied to risk management, such as planning and monitoring. Experts then identified thousands of potential indicators. By this past May, the list had been whittled down to 490 indicators. In Belém, the goal is to finalize a list of no more than 100 indicators, creating a globally comparable scorecard that every country can use to measure and report on progress.  

But choosing the right set of indicators for adaptation is no easy feat. Measuring mitigation is straightforward: tons of avoided emissions of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. Adaptation, on the other hand, is messy, textured, and stubbornly local. What counts as success depends on geography, culture, and budgets.  

Take extreme rainfall. Vermont eased flooding by widening culverts, a low-tech approach. Tokyo, meanwhile, dug vast underground cisterns to capture stormwater before it swamped the streets. Both places have increased their climate resilience, but a solution that works for a well-funded coastal megacity will not resonate for a landlocked, low-income rural community. And most places need a mix of measures for the climate-worsened hazards—including heat, rain, storms, wind, drought, and wildfires—complicating any universal yardstick.  

All of this makes measuring adaptation progress really hard. But if negotiators in Brazil can get close to a final slate of indicators, the question becomes what happens next. A scorecard should drive action, not paperwork. And that’s the crux for COP30. Will the indicators become a catalyst for on-the-ground improvements in climate resilience, or is this another box to check as communities face growing risks? With temperature rise accelerating, real adaptation is needed more than ever. 

Daniel B. Poneman: Nuclear as a Vehicle for Delivering on Biodiversity 

Daniel B. Poneman is a senior fellow on nuclear security issues at the Council on Foreign Relations.  

Set on the doorstep of the Amazon rainforest, COP30’s location has shaped its agenda from the outset, pushing goals of conservation and biodiversity front and center. Inaugurated by Brazil a few days before the conference and since touted as the unofficial star of the show, the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF) is the host nation’s proposed response to the unignorable concerns of the rainforest next door.  

The facility aims to compensate eligible states for the conservation and growth of tropical forests within their borders, countering economic incentives that might come with logging, mining, farming, and other practices commonly associated with deforestation. Power generation, however, is an underappreciated threat to forests, particularly land-intensive power sources like wind and solar.  

It is fitting and proper that Brazil—by many measures the most biodiverse country in the world—should put biodiversity front and center in chairing COP30. Biodiversity is under increasing threat around the world, and far too little has been done to preserve it.  Each year, more and more species of flora and fauna face extinction.   

This worthy focus on biodiversity highlights the advantages of another technology receiving increasing attention at COP30 and beyond: nuclear energy.   

TFFF-eligible countries, all in the Global South, have witnessed explosions in energy demand in recent years. Continued demand-driven growth in the energy sector will likely steer governments to march on with power plant construction. Nuclear power’s unbeatable energy density makes it one of the most biodiversity-friendly energy sources. The Nuclear Energy Institute estimates that a standard 1,000-megawatt nuclear plant requires a site of around 1.3 square miles, smaller than the size of Belém International Airport. By contrast, a solar facility with the same capacity would demand an area fifty times as large, or half the size of the city of Manaus—the largest city in the Amazon—while a similar wind facility could take up to 360 square miles, almost the entire Belém metropolitan area.  

States seeking to meet surging demands for clean energy may therefore find additional value to investing in nuclear energy, a carbon-free savior to vast swaths of vulnerable forest cover. The business case to invest in nuclear energy will only be enhanced once the economic incentives associated with TFFF are factored into the equation. 

Interest in nuclear energy among TFFF-eligible countries is well-established and expanding. With the biodiversity advantages provided by nuclear energy, the trend may readily catch on for states under TFFF’s umbrella. 

TFFF and nuclear energy can work together to live up to this year’s COP emphasis on implementation of previously announced commitments. In this way, the TFFF can become an enabling mechanism to help the thirty-three governments that have embraced the COP commitment to triple their installed nuclear capacity by 2050—most recently Rwanda and Senegal, at COP30—achieve that goal. Coupled with announcements earlier this year by major global corporations to join the tripling effort, COP30’s focus on biodiversity-friendly energy creates a global environment more conducive for nuclear growth. 

Taken together, the TFFF and the nuclear tripling pledge could serve as a powerful combination to address energy demand growth in a way that fights climate change and protects our planet’s precious biodiversity. If that happens, future generations will record COP30 as a rare occasion of promises made and promises kept.

David M. Hart: I Went to The Real COP. It Was in Canada, Not Brazil 

David M. Hart is a senior fellow for climate and energy at the Council on Foreign Relations. 

Diplomats, campaigners, business do-gooders, and hangers-on have converged in Belém, Brazil, this month for the annual climate policy jamboree. I’ve never been to an official COP, but last month, I went to something better: the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Energy Innovation Forum in Toronto. To me, this was the real COP. If governments spent as much energy thinking about energy innovation as they do about climate diplomacy, we would be a lot better off. 

I have nothing against diplomacy. It is essential that the nations of the world make promises and signal to their citizens and one another that climate change is an important problem and that something needs to be done about it. COPs are focusing events that draw attention to the fact that the world, like the frog in the proverbial pot, is heating up. 

But COPs alone don’t make nations spring to action. At best, they ratify what nations already understand to be in their interests. They may reinforce good behavior and build a modicum of trust. More often, they inflate expectations through cheap talk and are followed by recrimination when the inevitable disappointment sets in. 

Yet, climate progress is being made. The heat is being turned down. Median projections of global temperature rise made in Belém are about 1°C less than when the Paris Agreement was signed ten years ago.  

Why? In my view, diplomacy doesn’t have much to do with it. The main driver of progress is innovation. Clean energy is getting cheaper. Sometimes it’s even cheaper than dirty energy, which makes it easy for nations to use it and even easier to include it in their climate commitments.  

The Toronto meeting showcased some of the incredible work being done to sustain the clean energy momentum. A session on demonstration projects, for example, featured sustainable aviation fuel, geothermal power, carbon removal, and clean aluminum technologies. The assembled scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs were candid about the challenges—technological, economic, political—that they face, but they were unified by their enthusiasm and optimism that these obstacles can and will be overcome. 

This work depends heavily on supportive national policies. In his book on solar power, Professor Gregory Nemet of the University of Wisconsin describes its development as a relay race in which the United States took the first leg through the 1970s, before handing leadership off to Japan, Germany, and China in succeeding decades. Each country has made significant financial investments and provided regulatory support to drive solar production. In the process, solar power costs dropped by a factor of 500, making it the cheapest form of energy in much of the world today. 

Much has been made of the absence of the United States government in Brazil this week. That’s not good, but I’m much more worried by the administration’s retreat on energy innovation policy than its abandonment of climate diplomacy. Promising technology programs supported by bipartisan congressional majorities have been decimated, and even basic science is being slashed.  

Yet, as the Toronto meeting shows, innovators persist. Canada is doubling down on its strategy. European nations are making outsized contributions. China is already an energy innovation giant, and it’s growing ever bigger. Plenty of Americans attended, too, seeking new sources of support to carry them through this period of federal austerity. 

I left Toronto inspired. For readers who find COP30 a letdown, my advice is to visit your local cleantech incubator, go to a trade show, or even a project site. Let that be your COP and use it to power your hope for the future. 

This work represents the views and opinions solely of the authors. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional position on matters of policy.