30 years of climate talks: Progress, pitfalls and a planet in peril

As leaders gather for the UN climate summit in Brazil in November – three decades after the world’s first annual climate conference – the data charting progress in the fight against global warming tells a sobering story.

Despite years of negotiations, pledges, and summits, greenhouse gas emissions have climbed by a third since that first meeting; fossil fuel consumption continues to rise; and global temperatures are on track to breach thresholds scientists say will unleash catastrophic damage to the planet.

“Yes, some good has come out of these conventions, but not enough to ensure the promise of life on Earth,” said Mr Juan Carlos Monterrey, Panama’s special representative for climate change, who is leading a push to streamline major environmental agreements.

Looking beyond the data

That grim assessment raises a fundamental question ahead of the Nov 10-21 summit in Belem, Brazil: Is global climate diplomacy failing? Or have the gatherings succeeded in ways that raw data cannot capture?

Mr Simon Stiell, the head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), says the annual meetings are helping.

“But clearly much more is needed, and much faster, as climate disasters hit every country,” he said.

Global greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 34 per cent since 1995. While this is a slower rate than the 64 per cent rise in the three previous decades, it still represents a trajectory incompatible with climate stability, according to scientists.

“We still have time to solve this problem. We still can win this fight if we will do the things we promise to do. We just have to kick ourselves in the rear end and get going,” said Mr John Kerry, US climate envoy under former Democratic president Joe Biden.

The World Resources Institute, a climate research and advocacy group, said in an October report that government targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions for 2035 remain insufficient to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 deg C above pre-industrial times – the threshold world governments set at a landmark 2015 climate agreement in Paris.

Global temperatures have surged past that 1.5 deg C mark in some years, with 2023 and 2024 ranking among the hottest on record, although the 30-year rolling average – the benchmark used by the Paris deal – is still below that level.

“There will be an overshoot, which is very unfortunate,” Dr James Fletcher, the climate envoy for the Caribbean Community and former energy minister to St Lucia, said in an interview. 

“Anything above 1.5 deg C will be catastrophic for small island developing states,” he said.

Mr Stiell told Reuters that without the COP process, world temperatures would be headed for a catastrophic 5 deg C of heating, instead of the under 3 deg C increase that is now projected.

Meanwhile, fossil fuel consumption – the primary source of planet-warming emissions – remains stubbornly high, driven by economic growth and, more recently, the energy demands of data centres powering artificial intelligence. 

The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that demand for coal – one of the dirtiest fossil fuels when combusted – will hold around record highs through 2027 as rising demand in China, India and other developing countries offsets declines elsewhere.

On the other side of the ledger, solar and wind power adoption have accelerated, electric vehicle sales have surged globally, and energy efficiency overall has improved, according to data from the IEA.

Global investment in clean energy reached US$2.2 trillion (S$2.87 trillion) in 2024, surpassing the US$1 trillion invested in fossil fuels, according to IEA data.  

“We could not have dreamt that those technological advances and the drop in price for electric vehicles (EVs) and renewables would have happened 10 years ago,” said Ms Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s former climate envoy and a veteran of every COP summit.

Still, the rise in renewables and EVs has largely offset growing energy demand rather than replace fossil fuels. And in the US, President Donald Trump – who has called climate change the

world’s greatest “con job”

– has slashed subsidies for wind and solar power and electric vehicles, added permitting obstacles to renewable projects and opened more lands to drilling and mining.

“President Trump will not jeopardise our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries,” Ms Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, told Reuters.

Successes and shortcomings

Yet despite those setbacks in the US, the Paris climate agreement – perhaps the biggest achievement of the COP process – has endured, even after the withdrawal of the US during both of Mr Trump's terms.

That means countries theoretically remain committed to preventing the worst of climate change.

However, the consensus-based nature of COP negotiations, which require unanimous decision-making from nearly 200 nations, has come under fire. 

“We are drowning in paperwork, drowning in reports, drowning in mandates that are only evaluated based on how many pages the document has versus how many lives that we’re saving,” said Mr Monterrey, the Panama climate envoy. 

“We need systematic reform,” he added.

Ms Christiana Figueres, who was the lead UN climate official during the Paris talks, said the COPs could consider shifting toward a voting approach, similar to the International Monetary Fund.

But Ms Figueres also said the political haggling was becoming less important as world economies embrace clean energy technologies. 

“Today, the pull force for the transition is no longer coming from governments. It’s in the private sector, in industry, in technology development.”

She pointed to China, which alone accounts for a third of global investment in clean energy across solar, wind, batteries and the electric vehicle industry, according to the IEA.

Catalyst or culprit

Some COP veterans argue the current process is the best option to ensure all countries have a seat at the table to address a global problem.

“I don’t think that there are any alternatives to the multilateral process,” said Mr Manuel Pulgar Vidal, who served as president of COP20 in Peru and is currently climate director of the World Wildlife Fund.

Former US climate envoy Kerry acknowledged the flaws in these annual gatherings, but said they have remained vital.

“We know they’re not enough, but banging away and keeping the process moving is better than absolute, abject nihilism,” he said. REUTERS