Are UN climate summits a waste of time? No, but they are in dire need of reform

The United Nations’ global climate summit has finished for another year. Some progress was made in Brazil on climate finance and adaptation. But efforts to end reliance on fossil fuels were stymied by — you guessed it — fossil fuel powers.

It left many observers with a question: is this really the best we can do? Nearly every country (except the United States) joined the COP30 summit in the Brazilian city of Belém. The meeting showed the best and the worst of multilateralism — when countries try to address global problems beyond the capacity of an individual nation.

On one hand, COP30 managed to draw world leaders to the heart of the Amazonian rainforest to highlight the global issue of deforestation. And it maintained political momentum on climate action despite an unprecedented year of geopolitical turbulence, wars, finance cuts and UN job losses.

But the protracted climate negotiations failed to acknowledge the main drivers of climate change in the final text, including fossil fuels. And the UN’s decision-making process broke down on the final day of the summit. Many countries objected to the opaque and undemocratic way Brazil pushed through the final decision text.

A decade on from the Paris Agreement, there’s a growing sense climate summits are disconnected from real-world climate action. This begs the question: are the UN climate negotiations still fit for purpose? Or do they need to be reformed?

Consensus is too slow

Unlike most UN meetings, climate negotiations don’t use a majority voting rule, where the proposal with the most votes wins. Instead, decisions are always adopted by consensus. Every nation has to agree. This is a historical quirk that has been in place since COP1, where members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) successfully argued that all UNFCCC decisions should be taken only by consensus.