Reacción a "COP30 ends with a minimal agreement, leaving out any mention of fossil fuels"

COP30 was supposed to be the COP of adaptation, and all of us who work in this field are leaving Belém with mixed feelings.

On the one hand, we have financing. It is true that it has been agreed to triple the funding allocated to adaptation, but there is a catch to this decision. It has not been agreed that countries will contribute more funding to climate action, i.e. public contributions to climate action will not be tripled; what has been agreed is that the percentage of the funding approved in Baku during COP29 will be increased for adaptation. Although this is good news in general terms, the reality is that mitigation currently accounts for 80% of funding, and tripling the adaptation budget is only a stopgap measure because what is really needed is to triple public funding for adaptation.

On the other hand, we have the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA). One of the central themes of the discussions on the GGA has been adaptation indicators. We ended COP29 in Baku with a proposed list of 100 indicators that measured, for example, the number of countries that integrated climate adaptation measures into their national plans or the proportion of a country's territory dedicated to agri-food production that uses practices and technologies relevant to climate adaptation (to cite just a couple of examples). Today we ended COP30 with the adoption of a reduced list of 59 indicators and with the discontent of Latin American countries, the EU and the African bloc, among others, who consider that this list does not reflect the realities of many countries, mainly those in the developing world. The African bloc went further and called for the current indicators to be blocked, given their concern that they would be pressured to spend more of their own governments' scarce funds on adaptation, and called for the creation of a specific working group and the transfer of its approval to COP32, i.e. postponing the decision for two years.

But I choose to side with the words of Josep Garriga, a great connoisseur of negotiations with 18 COPs behind him, who says that "in climate change, a defeat can be a victory; there would never have been the Paris Agreement without the failure of COP15 in Copenhagen".