Apathy reigns ahead of UN climate summit

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/08/2025 (388 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There is a worldwide problem in the fight against climate change: no one in power is taking it very seriously.

Ahead of the upcoming Cop30 climate summit, its host country Brazil is pleading with participating nations to send along its (hopefully enhanced) national climate change plans. As of Aug. 20,only 28 of the 198 participating UN nations have provided carbon-cutting plans to the UN, and the world’s biggest emitters are notably absent from those 28, including the EU and China.

China, at least, seems to have mollified Brazil, leaving senior diplomat Andre Correa do Lago convinced they will be submitting a plan. It won’t be much of a surprise if they do — China has been receiving some fairly positive press of late for its efforts to greatly expand its solar generation capacity. It would be more surprising if it did not wish to show off such efforts.

Other major emitters seem unlikely to be in any rush. (The U.S. had submitted a climate target under former president Joe Biden, but since then President Donald Trump has pulled out of the Paris Agreement.)

However, concerns from Brazilian organizers of the summit come off as slightly hypocritical: the BBC reported earlier this year that the country has cut down “tens of thousands of acres” of the vulnerable and protected Amazon rainforest in order to build the highway which will take thousands of foreign dignitaries to the event in the city of Belem. In July, the country’s legislature passed a bill weakening environmental regulations.

That the host country is not even putting its best face on ahead of this supposedly important UN climate summit is sure to ignite old criticisms that the gathering is seldom productive and not worth the effort.

In 2024, a group of high-profile climate policy experts wrote to the UN to suggest that future summits only be held in countries which are clearly making an effort on climate change.

It is easy to see their point. The COP summit is a massive undertaking — 50,000 people are expected to descend on Belem for this year’s event, sparking concerns about lodgings for all the attendees in the relatively small city. This huge influx of international guests is no doubt an appetizing prospect for any country, one rife with possibilities to network, showcase the country, and of course wring out a few tourism dollars.

It’s similar to the Olympics, albeit at a much smaller scale. The other major difference from the Olympics is that the games tend to do what they set out to achieve.

But COP often doesn’t, instead resulting in a lot of discussion and a lot of plans, few of which end up producing long-term results. And now, the vast majority of its participants don’t seem to be in any rush to come up with a plan at all.

In its 2024 letter, those aforementioned experts advised that the process of gathering all these leaders be streamlined, and broken up into more meetings. Let’s go a bit further: let’s make international climate change policy an ever-present topic, one which all leaders are obliged to take part in on an ongoing basis, for the simple reason that it’s extremely important to life on this planet that we get a handle on the issue, and make progress. And beyond that? Have the meetings over Zoom.

That way, at least we won’t have burned jet fuel flying 50,000 people to one spot, all for a meeting that could have been an email.