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Following a dramatic fire yesterday, the climate summit is due to finish this evening, but disagreements over the final text look difficult to resolve
As we wait for more reaction to the text it is worth catching up with this piece on Saudi Arabia and its role as the biggest blocker of climate action – even while its population wrestle with the devastating impacts of the climate crisis.
Reaction to the draft text issued overnight is starting to come in as Belem wakes up – and it is far from positive.
This is outrageous. We came here to secure a COP 30 package for justice and equity. The Presidency has presented a shamefully weak text that fails to mention fossil fuels, fails to deliver accountability towards rich countries’ finance obligations, and only makes vague promises on adaptation. The Belém Action Mechanism for a just transition needs to be protected at all costs in the final hours. But let’s be clear, we need all of these pillars to work together in one package: the just transition, public finance, and planning for a fair fossil fuel phaseout.
A large group of countries have been vocal in their support for a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels, but rich parties are still refusing to deliver the debt-free public finance on fair terms that is key to make it happen. Until they stop blocking efforts to address the systemic barriers developing countries face to phasing out fossil fuels, any roadmap will be a dead-end.
The latest draft text from COP30 is extremely disappointing. Vested fossil fuel interests and big agriculture must be celebrating the lack of any roadmaps to transition away from fossil fuels and to stop deforestation. We call for substantial improvements to stay on a pathway to a 1.5C world.
2035 emission targets are wildly off track and this Mutirão text might as well be blank as it does so little to bridge the 1.5°C ambition gap or push countries to accelerate action. There is no option here but for countries to reject it and send it back to the presidency for revision.
COP30 has shown rising support for a roadmap away from fossil fuels, so the Belem outcome must include it to ensure we end the burning of oil, gas and coal as quickly as possible. Reports and more talks are not enough. We need a global response plan.
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Climate sceptics tell us that more people die of extreme cold than extreme heat. What’s the truth?
I began by trying to discover whether or not a widespread belief was true. In doing so, I tripped across something even bigger: an index of the world’s indifference. I already knew that by burning fossil fuels, gorging on meat and dairy, and failing to make even simple changes, the rich world imposes a massive burden of disaster, displacement and death on people whose responsibility for the climate crisis is minimal. What I’ve now stumbled into is the vast black hole of our ignorance about these impacts.
What I wanted to discover was whether it’s true that nine times as many of the world’s people die of cold than of heat. The figure is often used by people who want to delay climate action: if we do nothing, some maintain, fewer will die. Of course, they gloss over all the other impacts of climate breakdown: the storms, floods, droughts, fires, crop failures, disease and sea level rise. But is this claim, at least, correct?
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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Since 1995, when the first Cop was held, carbon levels have increased from 360.67 parts per million to 426.68 parts now
In 1995, when the first “conference of the parties” (Cop) of the UN’s climate change convention met in Berlin, the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration was approximately 360.67 parts per million. The then German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, gave a passionate speech about how greenhouse gases must be reduced to save the planet from overheating. There was a relatively unknown East German woman, the environment minister, Angela Merkel, chairing the conference. She was red hot at keeping order. The UK journalists concluded she would have a bright future.
Immediately after the conference I was commissioned to write a book about climate change called Global Warming: Can Civilization Survive? It sold well and was the first of several.
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This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world
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Winkworth Arboretum, Surrey: This song is not the same as the full-throated spring version, and it’s impossible not to reply to
The arboretum feels like a place in slow transition. The trees are ablaze in shades of maroon, crimson, copper, amber and gold, but with every breath of wind, leaves detach and float to the ground. The spongy bark of a coastal redwood yields under my fingertips. Caught in a crevice, a single downy feather marks where a tree creeper roosted overnight. I scan the surrounding trees, listening out for the high-pitched seeee-seeee-seeee contact call they make as they spiral up a trunk, but there’s no sign.
The birdlife has quietened. All we can hear are carrion crows cawing from the treetops, an occasional croak from a ring-necked pheasant lurking in the bracken, and the wispy voices of a pair of goldcrests probing for insects in the canopy of a weeping Japanese maple.
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She was sure that there would be warnings if there was any danger. But then the floods came. This is Toñi García’s story
Location Valencia, Spain
Disaster Floods, 2024
Toñi García lives in Valencia. On 29 October 2024, devastating storms hit the Iberian peninsula, bringing the heaviest rain so far this century. The national alert system sounded at around8.30pm local time; by then, however, flood waters had already broken through the city. Scientists say the explosive downpours were linked to climate change.
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California faced evacuation warnings over flood risk, while Japan experienced heavy early season snowfall
Evacuation warnings were issued last week in California as heavy rain brought the risk of flooding and landslides. The storms in the US were linked to a phenomenon known as an “atmospheric river” – a long filament of moisture-laden air that originates above the Pacific Ocean and provides vital replenishment of reservoirs and snowpack along the western coast of the US. However, they can also bring destructive volumes of rain, particularly along coastal areas.
Elsewhere in the US, parts of Colorado experienced some of their longest stretches of snowless days ever this year, with Denver surpassing its third-latest snowfall date this week after recording its highest ever November temperature of 28C earlier in the month. The warm temperatures and lack of snowfall have also forced ski resorts to delay opening until December.
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Ending use of coal, oil and gas is essential in tackling climate crisis – but even talking about it is controversial
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Climate summit in Brazil needs to find way to stop global heating accelerating amid stark divisions
“It broke my heart.” Surangel Whipps, president of the tiny Pacific nation of Palau, was sitting in the front row of the UN’s general assembly in New York when Donald Trump made a long and rambling speech, his first to the UN since his re-election, on 23 September.
Whipps was prepared for fury and bombast from the US president, but what followed was shocking. Trump’s rant on the climate crisis – a “green scam”, “the greatest con job ever perpetrated”, “predictions made by stupid people” – was an unprecedented attack on science and global action from a major world leader.
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Brazil’s president welcomes world leaders while navigating divided government, promising action on deforestation and emissions
Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has welcomed world leaders to Belém for the first climate summit in the Amazon, where conservationists hope he can be a champion for the rainforest and its people.
But with a divided administration, a hostile Congress and 20th-century developmentalist instincts, this global figurehead of the centre left has a balancing act to perform in advocating protection of nature and a reduction of emissions.
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