The EU Has Come To A New Climate Agreement, But Will It Be Enough?

COP30, the most significant global climate summit of the year, is well underway. Around 50,000 people are set to land in the Amazon city of Belem for the summit, including leaders from over 190 countries. Negotiations began this week, and over the next eleven days these leaders and representatives will try to come to a sort of global agreement on what needs to be done to prevent a climate disaster before it’s too late. The question is, is it already too late?

Last week, in the lead up to COP30 in Brazil, leaders from EU nations met in Brussels to agree on goals and demands that they could bring to this week’s summit. After negotiations that ran late into the night, the members came to an agreement that would require each country to cut their carbon emissions back 90% compared to levels in 1990. They plan to achieve this commitment within the next fifteen years. Minister for Climate Darragh O’Brien has praised this agreement as a deal that “represents an important milestone in shaping Europe’s long-term response to the climate crisis and in setting a clear direction for our collective efforts beyond 2030.” 

However, many climate activists and political leaders believe that this agreement falls short of an appropriate response to the scale of the climate crisis we’re facing, and that is because of the amount of concessions and compromises that were made to satisfy the more reluctant members during the talks. For example, this deal allows countries to buy enough carbon credits to make up 5% of the 90% goal. This means that the target is technically weakened to an 85% cut-back, while EU nations can pay other countries to cut back on emissions on their behalf. On top of this, the members agreed that this carbon credit allowance could be reviewed in the future and possibly increased to 10%. It seems to many that the EU is already offloading responsibility onto other countries before they even seal the deal. 

 

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Even after this, countries including Poland and Hungary felt that the deal was too ambitious. To appease them, EU members also agreed to delay the launch of the EU carbon market until 2028. Similar to the carbon credits, this carbon market would essentially put an annual cap on the amount of greenhouse gas emissions allowed from sectors such as industrial installations and power plants. These companies would have to use carbon credits to account for any excess emissions each year.

It’s quite clear that these compromises, that weakened the deal significantly, were made in a rushed attempt to come to a solid agreement before COP30 this week. It left a lot of advocates, leaders and citizens unsatisfied, and it’s becoming hard to believe that COP30 will be much different.

The summit opened on Monday, when UN climate chief Simon Stiel urged delegates to see this an opportunity to cooperate with each other, saying, “In this arena of COP30, your job here is not to fight one another – your job here is to fight this climate crisis, together.” In a year full of international tension and fracturing global politics, it’s unclear whether this summit will result in an effective global agreement, but we will have to see. 

A recent UN analysis of countries’ current emission-cutting plans predicted that global greenhouse gas emissions would reduce by 12% by 2035, compared to levels in 2019. This prediction is an improvement from the 10% decrease that was predicted last month, but it still falls very short of the 60% reduction goal that was needed by 2035 to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial temperatures. Scientists have been saying for years that the effects of climate change will be much more severe, and irreversible, once this limit is crossed, but it doesn’t look like we can stop it. 

The constant failure of our world leaders to take effective action against the climate crisis begs the question, do they really have the planet’s future in their best interests. Even as they sit and negotiate all these climate deals and goals, money and financial gain still seems to be at the centre of everything. Climate change is already affecting millions of people across the world, and it often feels like the voices of these people are being drowned in the noise of carbon credits and market values.

While the world’s biggest polluters, China, India and the USA, decided to opt out of the summit, Indigenous leaders travelled from the Andes by boat, covering around 3,000km, to play their part in the negotiations. Indigenous communities suffer the impacts of climate change significantly more than the Western world, despite doing significantly less harm to the environment. At COP30, their representatives have demanded more control over how their territories are managed, as harmful industries such as mining, logging and oil-drilling destroy more and more of their spaces. Pablo Inuma Flores, an Indigenous leader from Peru, said, “We want to make sure that they don’t keep promising, that they start protecting, because we as Indigenous people are the ones who suffer from these impacts of climate change.”

And he’s right, Indigenous communities and countries in the Global South are already suffering the consequences of carbon emissions, rising sea levels and increasing temperatures, a lot more than the West (and arguably, the main perpetrators) are. But, perhaps all of us should demand more action from our governments and leaders. Although we have come a long way in the journey to prevent an irreversible climate disaster, we still have so much more to do, and every day brings us closer to the “too late” point.

These decades of summits and negotiations have no doubt helped the world reach huge milestones in climate action, but they also come filled with empty promises and a deferral of responsibility from global leaders and companies that need to be held accountable. The climate is in a state of emergency, and should be treated accordingly. As world leaders settle into the second day of COP30, let’s hope these negotiations will bring solid, effective action that nobody can simply “opt out” of.