At the opening plenary, Simon Stiell set the tone very clearly. Ten years after Paris, he reminded governments that the emissions curve has started to bend downwards – not by accident, but because countries legislated, markets reacted, and a lot of hard, often invisible work has been done in rooms like the one in Belém. At the same time, he undercut any temptation to be self-congratulatory: we are overshooting 1.5°C, and the job now is to bring temperatures back down, not to hold a wake for a target. “Lamenting is not a strategy” was his line; the emphasis is firmly on solutions. Framing it this way quietly delegitimises a certain style of climate politics – the performative expression of grief or outrage with no pathway attached – and pulls the conversation back to policy design, finance and delivery.
The Amazon metaphor he used is doing a lot of work politically as well as rhetorically. Standing at the mouth of the river, he described the Amazon not as a single entity but as a system powered by more than a thousand tributaries. The analogy for the COP process is obvious: national pledges on their own are not cutting emissions fast enough, so implementation has to be “powered” by multiple streams of cooperation – finance, technology partnerships, sectoral regimes, local governments, private capital. It also implicitly acknowledges that UNFCCC negotiations are only one node in a wider regime complex. The message is that Paris will succeed or fail not just in plenary halls, but through what happens in shipping, aviation, energy systems, city planning and corporate strategy.
In parallel, he anchored that urgency in economics rather than only science. Stiell kept coming back to a simple point: the transition is now cheaper than the status quo in many places. Solar and wind are already the lowest-cost power options for roughly 90% of the world’s population, renewables have overtaken coal as the largest source of electricity, and investment in clean energy is running at about two-to-one compared with fossil fuels. That framing matters. It shifts the argument from “we must sacrifice to act” to “we would be irrational not to accelerate what is already economically attractive.” It is also a way of speaking to finance ministries and industry lobbies: if the transition is framed as a competitiveness and growth story, backsliding becomes harder to justify domestically.
The same balance between realism and insistence came through in his opening press conference with the COP30 President. There he stressed that the Paris Agreement has built an “engine”: updated NDCs submitted in the run-up to Belém mean that current pledges would reduce emissions by about 12% by 2035 compared with previous trajectories – not enough for 1.5°C, but a non-trivial shift. Describing Paris as an engine is itself a discursive move. It repositions the agreement from a one-off diplomatic achievement to a piece of infrastructure – something that can be tuned, upgraded and pushed harder. At the same time, he was explicit that this is still only “bending” the curve; the task in Belém is to “hit the accelerator” by moving quickly on the hardest issues: fossil fuel transition, finance, adaptation, and implementation in the real economy.
One of the more interesting moments in that press conference was when Stiell quoted President Xi Jinping’s recent remark in New York that “clean energy is the trend of our time”, adding that many governments now view renewables as a kind of “jobs jackpot.” It’s rare to hear the UN climate chief lean so explicitly on the political signalling of a major emitter, but it fits the broader narrative: climate policy is increasingly framed as an economic development strategy, not just an environmental obligation. Quoting Xi also broadens the ownership of the transition narrative beyond the usual Western references. It suggests that this is no longer only a European or “OECD” story; major emerging economies are being presented as co-authors of the clean energy script.
If the opening speeches gave the narrative, the Yearbook of Global Climate Action 2025 and the early COP30 “Action Agenda” announcements flesh out the infrastructure behind it. The Yearbook, released on 11 November, argues that the Global Climate Action Agenda has moved from a mobilisation platform to an implementation instrument. It documents a more than doubling of registered non-Party actors – from around 18,000 in 2020 to over 43,000 in 2025 – and an increase in cooperative initiatives from 149 to 243. It also introduces a set of indicators aligned with six thematic areas (energy/industry/transport; forests and oceans; food systems; urban resilience; human development; and cross-cutting enablers like finance and technology) to track whether all these pledges are actually delivering change. The language of “indicators” and “tracking” tells us something about where climate governance is going: less about grand bargains, more about metrics, dashboards and management.
This connects directly to Stiell’s earlier messages on local leadership. In a speech at the COP30 Local Leaders Forum in Rio, he argued that climate action by cities, regions and other sub-national actors is central to delivering “healthier, wealthier and safer” communities – and, crucially, to making the COP process meaningful in people’s daily lives. The Yearbook notes that 95% of countries now say they engage non-Party stakeholders in NDC implementation, suggesting that multi-level governance is no longer a side conversation but a core feature of the architecture. Politically, this is a way of spreading responsibility and building coalitions: if national governments are under pressure or change course, embedded city, regional and business initiatives can help keep some momentum. The risk, of course, is that responsibility is devolved faster than resources, but the direction of travel is clear.
The official recap of Day 1 reinforces this pivot to implementation. COP30’s own communication frames the first day as “elevating adaptation by unleashing the power of technology” – highlighting the launch of the Green Digital Action Hub and an AI Climate Institute to help developing countries design digital climate solutions, along with an “Amazon as innovation hub” initiative through the Nature’s Intelligence Studio. On the finance and resilience side, we saw the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage issuing its first USD 250 million call, multilateral development banks announcing USD 26 billion in adaptation investments, and a Belém Declaration on Hunger and Poverty linking climate-resilient social protection with smallholder finance in 44 countries. The overall story is clear: adaptation, data and digital tools are being framed not as charity, but as part of a modernisation agenda for economies under climate stress.
Day 2 shifted emphasis toward local and sub-national action. The presidency’s narrative was that this is where “global ambition meets daily life”: in housing, water and sanitation, waste, transport, and local governance. The Plan to Accelerate Multilevel Governance and the operationalisation of CHAMP – the Coalition for High Ambition Multilevel Partnerships – were positioned as milestones in embedding cities and regions into national climate frameworks. The release of the Yearbook during the same window underscores that this is not just about mayors being invited to speak at plenaries, but about building feedback loops between NDCs and what actually happens in municipalities and regions. Seen through a governance lens, COP is trying to move from being a two-week diplomatic “event” to being a hub that coordinates a much denser network of implementation channels.
From an EU perspective, this is not an abstract discussion. Just before COP30, the European Union formally endorsed CHAMP, presenting itself as a jurisdiction with long experience in multilevel climate governance – from cohesion policy and the Committee of the Regions to initiatives such as the Covenant of Mayors and the EU Mission for climate-neutral cities. That move sits alongside more contentious debates over the EU’s own 2040 target and use of international credits, but in the multilevel governance space it is clearly trying to align its internal model with the COP30 emphasis on local implementation. In discourse terms, this allows the EU to continue to claim a form of climate leadership – “we know how to do governance at multiple levels” – even as its headline mitigation numbers are being scrutinised more critically.
Sector-specific side events are starting to fill in the picture for international transport – an area I happen to study, especially the interaction between EU policy and the regimes centred on the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). At COP30, the IMO is hosting a side event on “Charting the course of the energy transition in global shipping,” showcasing its 2023 greenhouse-gas strategy, which sets a net-zero timetable for around mid-century and discusses global measures including a potential carbon price. Reporting from that event makes clear, however, how exposed these negotiations are to geopolitics: the IMO Secretary-General has openly acknowledged that agreement on a Net-Zero Framework – including a proposed global emissions fee – has been delayed under political pressure from key states, even though many countries and industry actors want to move ahead. The pattern is familiar from other arenas I work on: technical pathways exist, but political sequencing and distributional conflict slow them down.
On the aviation side, ICAO is using COP30 to underline its own 2050 net-zero goal and the role of sustainable fuels and clean energy. Its side event “International Aviation and SDG7: Accelerating the Global Clean Energy Transition Skyward” is framed explicitly around how the sector can contribute to the clean energy goal, connect aviation decarbonisation with forest and biodiversity protection, and link into UN Energy Compacts. Together with reporting that sustainable biofuels will be a key COP30 theme, driven in part by an IRENA–ICAO partnership, this suggests that the politics of fuels, energy access and just transition will run through the transport discussions as much as through power and industry. It also illustrates Stiell’s Amazon analogy in practice: UNFCCC is increasingly positioning these sectoral bodies as tributaries feeding into the Paris river, rather than as separate technical worlds.
Adaptation and cooling are another thread running through these first days. UNEP’s Global Cooling Watch 2025 report, launched in Belém, warns that global demand for cooling could more than triple by 2050 under business-as-usual, driven by rising temperatures, population growth and expanding access in emerging economies. Without a rapid shift to efficient, low-carbon cooling, this becomes a major driver of additional emissions. The associated “Beat the Heat / Mutirão Contra o Calor Extremo” initiative – a joint effort by the Brazilian presidency and UNEP – is framed as an implementation drive to close finance and policy gaps for extreme heat resilience, especially at the local level. Politically, cooling is a smart entry point: it turns abstract discussions about adaptation into something immediately tangible (heatwaves, working conditions, urban comfort), and it exposes the inequality in who can afford protection from extreme heat.
Given all this, what can we reasonably expect from COP30 after these opening days? The messaging from the UN system is quite coherent: Paris is delivering measurable progress, but the pace is insufficient and the benefits are uneven. The Yearbook shows that non-state and sub-national climate action has scaled up significantly, yet there are still major gaps in areas like grid investment, deforestation and building emissions. Early media coverage from Belém underlines how many countries are arriving with fresh memories of storms, floods and fires, which is why resilience and adaptation finance are so prominent. The political space for pretending that climate impacts are a distant issue is shrinking.
My own sense, based on these first signals and the way the agenda has been framed, is that COP30 is unlikely to produce a single “big bang” equivalent to Paris. Instead, it is more likely to consolidate an implementation turn: clarifying indicators for the global goal on adaptation, making the Baku-to-Belém roadmap more concrete on finance, operationalising funds like the FRLD, and locking in stronger roles for cities and regions through CHAMP and related processes. On mitigation, the key test will be whether Parties can translate the previously agreed language on “transitioning away from fossil fuels” into something that carries weight in NDCs and sectoral plans, rather than just being repeated in preambles. In other words, the outcome will probably be judged less by new slogans and more by whether the machinery behind them has been tightened.
That may sound modest compared to the scale of the climate problem, but it is broadly consistent with what Stiell himself has been saying: the Paris engine is built; the question now is whether governments are willing to press the accelerator hard enough, and in a way that is fair. From a researcher’s perspective, especially if you are interested in how institutions like the EU, IMO and ICAO navigate their overlapping roles, these early days of COP30 are less about surprise announcements and more about watching how the pieces of a more complex, implementation-heavy climate regime are being fitted together. The discourse has clearly shifted toward delivery; the real test will be whether the politics follows.
#COP30 #ParisAgreement #ClimateGovernance #Decarbonisation #CarbonMarkets #Adaptation #MultilevelGovernance
[1]: https://unfccc.int/news/paris-agreement-is-working-to-deliver-real-progress-but-we-must-strive-valiantly-for-more-simon
[2]: https://unfccc.int/news/transcript-of-opening-remarks-of-un-climate-change-executive-secretary-at-cop30-opening-press
[3]: https://unfccc.int/news/yearbook-of-global-climate-action-2025-tracking-progress-and-building-momentum-10-years-after-paris
[4]: https://unfccc.int/news/local-climate-leadership-key-to-delivering-healthier-wealthier-and-safer-communities-and-economies
[5]: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/cop30_cop30-climateaction-globalmutir%C3%A3o-activity-7393804847151583232-7PeG
[6]: https://cop30.br/en/news-about-cop30/cop30-evening-summary
[7]: https://climate.ec.europa.eu/news-other-reads/news/ahead-cop30-eu-joins-champ-backing-cities-and-regions-key-partners-boosting-climate-action-and-2025-11-05_en
[8]:https://wwwcdn.imo.org/localresources/en/MediaCentre/Documents/Charting%20the%20energy%20transition%20in%20shipping%20IMO%20COP%20side%20event.pdf
[9]: https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news-and-insights/latest-market-news/2752377-cop-imo-pushes-forward-with-carbon-pricing
[10]: https://unfccc.int/event/icao-international-aviation-and-sdg7-accelerating-the-global-clean-energy-transition-skyward
[11]: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/irena-chief-expects-sustainable-biofuels-feature-key-cop30-theme-2025-10-27/
[12]: https://www.unep.org/resources/report/global-cooling-watch-2025
[13]: https://www.unep.org/events/unep-event/high-level-session-beat-heatmutirao-contra-o-calor-extremo
[14]: https://www.investing.com/news/world-news/cop30-highlights-growing-need-of-countries-for-resilience-to-storms-flood-and-fires-4348358
[15]: https://unfccc.int/news/un-climate-chief-on-eve-of-cop30-the-paris-agreement-is-delivering-real-progress-but-we-must