Guterres: 'The world has failed on the 1.5 degree target'. Downward expectations on Cop30 in Brazil
At the Belem Summit, the UN Secretary General admits defeat: it is impossible to avoid an increase in global temperatures above the threshold already in the next few years. Starmer: 'Consensus is lost'. American Trump, Chinese Xi and Indian Modi absent. Lula: 'Extremist forces' spread lies about climate change
Ready, go: with the parade of government representatives from around the world, the United States aside, the show has begun at the UN Climate Change Conference in Brazil: the 'Cop of Truth', as the host, Inacio Lula, presents it. As with all COPs in recent years, the mood on the eve is one of 'tipping point'. As never before in recent times, however, expectations are on the low side.
The issues on the agenda at the Belem conference are many and critical: from the implementation of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which ten years on is dragging its feet, to aid to developing countries in the dual challenge of energy transition and adaptation to a climate that is already changing, overwhelming lives and economies.
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What is looming, however, is a self-referential result, as in the last three Cops, useful perhaps to save the negotiating process, but without marking significant progress in the fight against global warming. There will also be a fight to defend the principle of the gradual abandonment of fossil fuels and the red lines of the Paris Agreement, i.e. the objective of containing the increase in global temperatures to as close as possible to 1.5 degrees and well below 2 degrees at the end of the century, compared to the pre-industrial period.
Under current commitments, we are heading for an increase of close to 3 degrees, and 30 years after the first COP, greenhouse gas emissions have risen by a third, instead of falling. Exceeding the 1.5 degree threshold is now a foregone conclusion, even in the short term: "We have failed," said UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres in Belem, who urged governments not to "remain prisoners" of fossil industry interests.
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However, the spotlight of the leaders' parade, which takes place over two days and closes on 7 November, is mainly on empty chairs. Starting with that of Donald Trump, the president who took the United States out of the Paris Agreement, beyond the confines of climate denialism and into an unprecedented era of oil revanchism.
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