ECO 8, COP30
Cut through the confusion with our Justice Package
It came on a Sunday night: the COP presidency released its summary note from the consultation on four key topics that are not formally in the negotiations. A full week of consultations summarised in 5 pages. While ECO appreciates the Presidency’s effort to gather a wide range of inputs from parties into one document, it offered us a broad shopping list rather than a clear path forward. The one that does not reflect the political reality inside the negotiation rooms. It didn’t reflect the important outcomes from the adopted agenda items, notably Just Transition. It also suggested a set of options which could be brought together in a “mutirão decision”.
The Note does provide a good starting point with its spirit of multilateralism and the urgency of implementation, but it lacks clear direction in the way it assembles issues together. More worryingly, it leans too heavily on “investment signals” and “enabling environments. ECO thinks that the result is an outline that risks shifting responsibility onto developing countries while underplaying equity and CBDR-RC.
Yesterday, a new round of consultations opened and the presidency added a new twist as it was announced that this would be folded into one package, including related themes being negotiated such as adaptation and just transition, and a second for remaining items on the formal agenda.
ECO was confused enough after reading the summary note but imagine how baffled we were when the COP30 President issued his umpteenth letter announcing that the plan was to hold a plenary session to gavel through the first “Belém political package” by the middle of this week with no real indication of what this package would entail.
Let’s not get lost in consultations, packages and decisions. ECO was clear from the very beginning on the JUSTICE PACKAGE from COP30: the BAM (Belem Action Mechanism for Just Transition) approved, a GGA indicators that are fit for purpose and a new adaptation finance commitment which is at least 120bn/year from 2025 by 2030, and an accountability framework through GST that will review with strong accountability climate finance and emissions reductions.
If the presidency wants to complete the package with the outcomes of the consultations, justice means: the implementation of Article 9.1 which obliges developed countries to provide resources to developing countries and a call for revised NDCs to developed countries and major economies to meet their fair shares
Mr. COP President, make your package a justice package.
Canada’s Climate Plot Twist: Fossil Fuels at Home, Silence in Belém
ECO was disappointed to see Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a former UN Envoy on Climate Action, miss COP30 this year. Even more disappointing is what he’s doing instead: announcing a series of fossil-fuelled “nation-building” projects and currying favour for his party’s budget, which is high on oil and gas subsidies and military spending, but short on domestic climate policy.
In the months leading up to COP, Mr. Carney has been squirrelly about whether he’s still committed to Canada’s climate targets. Certainly his actions have said otherwise—from ending Canada’s consumer carbon price and home energy efficiency programs, to pausing the electric vehicle sales mandate, to ghosting the almost-finalized regulations to limit emissions from the oil and gas industry, Canada’s highest-emitting sector.
But that’s not all. While Minister of the Environment and Climate Change Julie Dabrusin was here for the first week of COP30, signing on to the Global Initiative on Information Integrity and Climate Change, the federal government budget indicated it would soften anti-greenwashing laws.
Canada was wearing hypocrisy better than denim on denim last week.
While the Minister was speaking about Canada’s commitment to the Global Methane Pledge, Prime Minister Carney was announcing new LNG projects. They should probably trade notes, given that methane leaks at every phase of the LNG supply chain.
This new LNG facility is being fast-tracked as a “Project of National Interest” by controversial new legislation that allows these projects to cut corners on environmental assessments and Free, Prior, and Informed Consent of Indigenous rights-holders.
Despite this, Prime Minister Carney wants to ride these PONIs all the way to being an “energy superpower” peddling fossil fuels and false solutions for decades to come.
Minister Dabrusin came and left COP30 without meaningful engagement on a key issue for this year’s COP: Just Transition. When asked about Canada’s position on the Belem Action Mechanism, the Minister pivoted to domestic “sustainable jobs” faster than Connor McDavid on skates. The Sustainable Jobs Act is one piece of Canada’s domestic architecture, but a true commitment to just transition, at home and on a global stage, requires a shared infrastructure of action and coordination at the multilateral level, centering the rights of workers, Indigenous Peoples, and communities at the frontline of climate impacts. In other words—the BAM.
ECO regrets to inform Canada: the mask of your climate progressiveness is falling, and we can see the hypocrisy behind it.
A BAM for better BOOMS
Listening to negotiators discuss energy in the Just Transition rooms, ECO couldn’t help but wonder: if they’re talking about a Just Transition out of fossil fuels, what about the Just Transition into renewables? After all, renewables are booming. But emissions are rising and people still lack access to affordable and reliable energy. Developing countries are locked at the bottom of the value chain – exporting minerals and raw materials and importing solar panels and battery storage systems made from them. They are told to hand over their lands to foreign companies more interested in powering data centers than households and public infrastructure.
As people fight back and denounce tokenistic consultation processes, unmet job promises, biodiversity destruction and human rights violations, ECO fears that public distrust – not renewables – will be booming.
Yet, renewables are being developed by people and with people, leading to smoother and greener projects.. Local communities are taking ownership, using their voices to ensure renewables build resilience. Communities hosting transition mineral resources are economically benefiting from mining activities. Rooftop and balcony solar are easing pressure on land and coastal waters and cutting electricity bills. Governments are setting up green industrial policies to take advantage of their renewable resources.
These initiatives are the right ones – they could bloom with some coordination across all renewable energy stakeholders, including workers, communities, practitioners and financiers. And this is what the Belem Action Mechanism (BAM) is about. On top of coordination, the BAM would broaden public support and enable the exchanges of best practices, notably in terms of governance, benefit-sharing, and inclusive consultation processes, as well as facilitating the implementation of upskilling programmes and other support schemes. The BAM would enable technology transfer so that solar panels, batteries and electrolysers, for example, are not only in the hands of the few, but benefit the many. It would also support countries get technical and financial support, while also helping to identify and tackle structural barriers such as debt burdens and unfair trade rules.
In a nutshell, the BAM could bring better BOOMS – the ones that center people and the planet, drive socio-economic transformations, and power prosperous societies.
Methane – by any other name – is still super-heating the planet, Big Ag lobby!
Food and Agriculture day is upon us, so let’s get down to business, shall we? The livestock lobby business, that is! They are out in big numbers in Belém, the heart of the Amazon—which is being devastated by Big Ag’s large appetite for profit. In fact, the lobby has been working hard over the last few years for this very moment. Just ahead of this COP and inspired by the first major Annex 1 country (Congratulations, New Zealand!) to officially downgrade their methane emissions target, hence their climate ambition (see New Zealand Fossil of the Day): the lobby is trying to change the rules of the Paris Agreement for itself!
Instead of cutting emissions down to the Paris 1.5℃ red line, they’ve decided to give high levels of methane from industrial agriculture a free pass in NDC ambition. In the process, they are also reinforcing global inequality in the food system according to scientists. In fact, led by New Zealand’s very own successful Agbiz lobby, they have formed a newly coined “Split Gas Coalition” of 33 lobby groups from 14 countries calling for the creation of “separate emissions reduction targets for different types of GHGs”.
And though they don’t mention it by name, their goal is for governments to accept and adopt “No Additional Warming” or “Temperature Neutrality” targets for their methane emissions. In plain speak, it simply means that they more or less get to keep their current levels of methane as the mitigation goal. Now isn’t that clever? It seems the Irish lobby has also been successful with its current government advocating for this approach at the EU and global level.
Despair not, we are on to them and so are climate scientists! Over 100 global, regional and national organizations with representation in over 100 countries are calling for COP 30 Parties to oppose this approach and show climate ambition for food systems through a Just Transition to Agroecology! The big question is, will they listen?
CDM Forever Facility
The Clean Development Mechanism? Please refresh ECO’s memory. Was that not that ancient flexible mechanism that was widely called out for its non-additional credits and problematic projects? We thought we had left that behind us years ago, but the seemingly immortal CDM continues sucking the blood out of climate action. Does that bring any particular creature to mind?
The Paris Agreement was supposed to gently drive a stake through the CDM vampire: Parties agreed to a phase out where projects could transition to its successor mechanism (the PACM) under Article 6. There was just one thing… The CMA agreed in 2021 that host countries of these projects had to approve the transition request by 31 December, 2025.
So many CDM projects were allowed to request transition, that almost 1 billion worthless credits could be rebranded as Article 6 credits and flood the market. But now that deadline for approval is coming up, and only a handful of projects have been approved. So, disaster averted? Not so fast! As we speak, countries are considering an extension in the Article 6.4 room.
The vampire CDM keeps rising from its coffin in more ways than one. In the same negotiation room, Parties are asking to scrap the requirement of term limits for the PACM expert body – and by that, risk repeating another mistake of the CDM, where executive board members were able to stay on forever and ever (spin-off vampires, if you will), blocking any new blood from entering the decision making process. Not only was that original compromise a bad deal for the climate, it was also a fundamentally unfair one for every stakeholder involved – and a clear and pertinent lesson in how a dubious concept with bad designs and frameworks, riddled with poor integrity, weak accountability and feeble safeguards snowball and lead to disastrous consequences several years down the line, leaving everybody a loser and the planet much worse off. Parties would be saving themselves a lot of trouble in the future by taking note of this reminder as they seek to water down the already weak safeguards in Article 6.
In any case, ECO can’t believe we are still talking about the transfer of CDM funds. The CDM vampire has sunk its teeth deep into the millions and millions that could be made available to the Adaptation Fund.
While it is understandable that host countries are reluctant to lose out on their investments in the CDM, the projects that transition will use old, discredited methodologies to retroactively issue massive amounts of credits for the period 2021-2025 – credits that are non-additional from the outset. This means that if host countries authorize these hot air credits, it is their emissions balance that will have to account for it as a result of the mandatory corresponding adjustment, potentially compromising their ability to meet their NDC, and certainly compromising climate action globally. We are building a CDM Forever Facility when everyone has agreed this mechanism is incompatible with a Paris-aligned world, and it’s a lose-lose situation for the Global South and a blow for climate action for the whole world.
Money matters
ECO has heard the gamut of emotional reactions around last year’s NCQG. Some Parties still express cheerfulness and hail it as an achievement, while others recognize, with depression and anger, the betrayal to the Paris promise it represents, and some have even reacted to it laughing out loud. Yesterday, though, the Adaptation Fund contributor dialogue appeared to confirm what some said in Baku last year: that the NCQG seems like a joke.
We wonder, were Parties serious when they promised to significantly scale up the provision of public climate finance and triple the outflows of multilateral climate funds (MCFs) by 2030? From where things now stand, ECO is not seeing any humour in the situation.
Consider, for example, that for the third year in a row Parties have announced pledges for the Adaptation Fund in only the tens of millions of dollars, far short of the Fund’s minimum mobilization needs. And when the LDCF and SCCF pledging event also got cancelled, presumably because of concern it would come up empty-handed, that’s no joke at all.
This year, when the GGA outcome is critical, poses a litmus test for the NCQG. ECO reminds Parties that there are only four years to achieve the tripling of the outflows from the MCFs, in line with Para 16.
As for the provision of public finance to developing countries, the posturing around Article 9.1 has the features of a full comedy special, but the reality could not be more serious. Maybe in earlier times avoidance of the issue of provision would be laughable, especially in the context of new NDCs. But when the ICJ Advisory Opinion has reaffirmed developed country Parties’ legal obligations, the need for those Parties to rebuild trust on the fundamental issue of provision is urgent, given the fracturing of trust in the wake of the NCQG.
We challenge Parties to prove that they are serious about their commitments: Share a real delivery plan for the US$300 bn, with concrete and timebound targets that outline planned burden-sharing.
Fair shares in an Unfair World
The Paris Agreement could have been a turning point. It posited a world in which all countries — both the wealthy and the rest — would do their fair shares, as they saw them, to stabilize the climate system. Paris wasn’t ideal, not by any means, but it was at least a new hope.
Today, this hope has worn a bit thin. How could it not, when 1.5°C overshoot is inevitable and the NDCs threaten to take us to 2.6°C, deep into the land of uncontrollable tipping cascades? When the global oil and gas industry – which has invested $8.6 trillion in new infrastructure since Paris – is working hard to lock in exactly this outcome?
Still, we’re learning. And despite the diplomatic niceties, we know how to assign responsibility for our predicament. The 2025 edition of the annual Civil Society Equity Review is quite frank:
“Global North countries . . . must radically increase their stated ambition to meet even the lower end of their fair share. Their pledges fall catastrophically short, both in domestic action and international finance. Conversely, most (but not all) Global South countries . . . have made pledges that are much closer to or even exceed their fair shares. However, the Global South’s ability to exceed these fair shares and plan for full decarbonization and adequate adaptation is largely conditional on access to adequate climate finance from the North.”
We also know that, to find that finance, we’re going to have to think beyond “the North” and “the South” and talk as well about the rich. Any real finance breakthrough must break the impunity of the wealthy, and force them – as nations and as classes – to do their fair share.
All details aside, the finger of blame must eventually point directly at the world’s rich elites, who have repeatedly used their vast wealth to amass disproportionate political power, and then used that power to service their often catastrophically short-sighted self-interests.
Let’s make this crystal clear. The world’s rich could easily afford to finance a just global climate transition, and would barely even notice, say, an expenditure of $1.3 trillion, the amount needed to deliver on the Baku to Belem roadmap. Such a figure fades to insignificance compared to the additional $33.9 trillion the global one percent have accumulated since Paris. The rich could pay the entire cost of the roadmap, say by way of progressive global climate taxes, and hardly feel it.
You Can’t Footnote Your Way Out of the Law
Having been locked out of almost the entire discussion, ECO was patiently waiting to find out what the new WIM for Loss and Damage review text was all about. And what a surprise it was: colors so bright ECO had to take out its sunglasses, and even a precedent with the first ever reference to “hot topics”! Unfortunately, it seems that one of those was human rights. Yes, you heard that right, the rights we all have – and the obligations all States have – have been removed altogether. No, wait, ECO stands corrected: can’t forget to mention the lonely footnote referring to a preambular paragraph of the Paris Agreement only by its number. Yes, a footnote! That’s what our rights have been shrunk to. Instead of the full and explicit recognition of the obligations as recently clarified by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that we need, Parties in the WIM review are managing to hide their obligations so well that only UNFCCC nerds can understand them. It’s almost as if they think that they can footnote their way out of their obligations. Let’s not go down that road. It is high time that the self-proclaimed human rights champions of this world step up, fight back, and hold the line for across the board: in the loss and damage, gender, adaptation, AND just transition rooms. Remember, the ICJ climate ruling was clear: States must prevent climate harm; co-operate to address loss and damage suffered by people and ecosystems; provide reparations for climate harm; and uphold human rights in their responses to the climate crisis.
Brazil hosts the largest population of people of African descent in the world
Dear readers, did you know that you are standing in the country where 56% of the population identifies as people of African descent? People of African descent represent approximately 200 million people worldwide, a definition established by the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent. This population is composed of descendants of the victims of the transatlantic and Mediterranean enslavement trade, which includes the trafficking of sub-Saharan African peoples who experienced diaspora across North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean.
While some Parties still treat the recognition of people of African descent as “something for later,” new evidence shows that “later” is already long overdue. A recent study by Geledés – Black Women’s Institute, in partnership with Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV) – School of Law, demonstrates that people of African descent are among the most exposed, impacted, and with the least access to adaptation policies — precisely the policies that COP30 aims to strengthen.
The data is clear: ignoring people of African descent means ignoring millions of people in situations of climate vulnerability. Including this group is not a political gesture; it is an evidence-based obligation.
The geographic distribution of people of African descent reflects historical processes of resistance and, above all, marginalization that shape distinct territorial experiences, which in turn determine differentiated vulnerabilities to climate change.
At this COP30, the drafts already mention us, but we need the final hammer to fall and formally recognize people of African descent in the Gender Action Plan, Just Transition, and Global Goal on Adaptation. The world has a chance to finally correct a historical gap. ECO reminds: without people of African descent in the text, there is no climate justice.
WE STAND IN SOLIDARITY WITH ALL PEOPLES SUFFERING FROM GENOCIDE, WARS, OCCUPATION, AND GOVERNMENT VIOLENCE THROUGH CLIMATE CHANGE.
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Download file: http://ECO-18-November-2025.pdf