On Nov. 10, when world leaders gather on the edge of the Amazon rainforest in Belém, Brazil, for COP30—the first global climate summit since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January—they will face the deepest crisis in climate politics since the collapse of the Kyoto Protocol. But while Trump has greatly accelerated and worsened the crisis, its origins lie in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Ten years after its birth, Paris is at once the most successful climate accord in history and, so far, unable by itself to drive sufficient action to avert catastrophe. It is both alive and at risk of being deemed dead by a new generation of climate activists. Its fate, like Schrödinger’s cat, remains uncertain until observed. COP30 will give the world an opportunity for such a measurement. The summit will not produce a new treaty, but its political outcomes should show whether the Paris process can rise to meet the current political moment. At the very least, political commitments in Belém might help make the Amazon a global model for sustainable agriculture and forest conservation. But those commitments, or the absence of them, will also reveal whether the Paris process can continue to turbocharge global climate action.
The Paris pact was born from the successes and failures of earlier efforts. The 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change created the institutions and principles of global climate diplomacy. Its most ambitious feature—a nonbinding promise by developed nations to modestly cut greenhouse gas emissions by 2000—was largely ignored. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol went further, setting legally binding reduction targets but only for countries responsible for about a quarter of global emissions. The United States refused to join, and developing nations such as China and India secured exemptions. Neither climate agreement set clear long-term goals, and both sought incremental progress rather than systemic change.
Paris broke that pattern. Adopted in 2015, the accord set an explicit, nonbinding global objective: to keep warming well below 2 degrees Celsius (ideally close to 1.5 degrees) above preindustrial levels. The agreement also called on countries to chart science-based paths toward national and global net-zero emissions, i.e., when emissions are balanced by sequestration from nature and new technologies. The agreement required countries to submit and update five-year action plans and to report transparently on progress.
Nearly every nation joined. Most major economies now have net-zero goals for midcentury; developed nations have pledged to get there by or before 2050, whereas China and India, with more poverty and lower per capita emissions, have committed to do so by 2060 and 2070, respectively. Cumulatively, these net-zero commitments are driving domestic policy decisions in many nations in ways that few considered possible prior to Paris. Only the United States has ever withdrawn from the accord—and it has done so twice, both times under Trump.
Despite its somewhat procedural orientation, Paris shifted the global economy and conversation. It redefined success by setting strong global norms applicable to all: not modest reductions but full decarbonization in a few decades. That vision reshaped markets, spurred innovation, and mobilized trillions of dollars in public and private investment. Governments at every level have adopted thousands of climate policies since Paris. The Paris transparency framework made national pledges and performance visible as never before, heightening accountability. Climate finance for developing nations has tripled in nominal terms, now exceeding $100 billion annually and rising as a share of all official development assistance. Last year, countries agreed to a new collective goal: mobilizing $300 billion in climate finance by 2035 on the way to $1.3 trillion a year from public and private sources.
All this is making a difference in the real world. Today, for example, renewable energy accounts for more than 90 percent of newly added electric power capacity, up from about 50 percent in 2015. Electric and hybrid vehicles are spreading fast, and outside the Trump administration, few governments expect traditional combustion engines to own the future. Paris is not solely responsible for the rapidly unfolding energy transition, but the accord helped drive investment, innovation, and policy that accelerated progress. Before Paris, the world was barreling toward around 6 degrees of warming. Today, expected warming has been cut roughly in half.
None of this sits well with the MAGA foreign-policy crowd. They believe that U.S. global power depends on energy dominance. With China far ahead on many key green technologies (from EVs to solar panels and advanced batteries), keeping America on top economically requires, in the MAGA worldview, stopping the clean energy transition. However quixotic that vision is, it is one reason why Trump has sought to undermine the Paris accord. Recently, he successfully gutted global efforts to reduce climate pollution from international shipping by threatening economic retaliation against nations favoring regulation.
The administration’s success on shipping could embolden it to try similar moves in Belém, where the future of the Paris Agreement will be at stake. U.S. bullying won’t work nearly as well there. The international community understands that the clean energy revolution is unstoppable. The price of climate inaction is astronomical, and climate solutions make economic sense. That’s why the Trump team has, despite years of opposition, failed to erode near-universal backing for Paris. The agreement endures, a testament to the power of global norms and cooperation even amid political fragmentation.
Yet, a decade on, the Paris system is under strain. A large number of countries did not fully implement the climate measures they promised for 2020 and 2025. Nations stepped up, but many also underdelivered. The new pollution reduction pledges submitted this year for 2030 and 2035, even if fully implemented, would fall short of what is needed to stay below 2 degrees—let alone 1.5. Physics and common sense tell us that time is running out to close this ambition gap. Since greenhouse gases remain in the atmosphere, warming the planet for decades, reducing emissions now is more effective at keeping temperatures below the Paris thresholds than cutting emissions later. The world is not living within its carbon budget. And just as we wouldn’t expect debtors that have lived beyond their means for decades to become solvent easily and quickly, we shouldn’t assume nations can magically make up later for today’s climate underperformance.
To make matters worse, outside U.N. negotiating halls many major economies are easing off the accelerator. The Trump administration’s all-out assault on climate policy, coupled with misinformation about climate science and risk, has made the United States—the world’s largest economy and historical emitter—a rogue state when it comes to addressing the global climate threat. That vacuum has allowed China, the largest current emitter and source of roughly 60 percent of recent emissions growth, to appear constructive simply by staying in the Paris process. In September, Beijing was both praised and criticized for pledging to cut emissions to 7-10 percent below peak levels by the early 2030s.
While this pledge was the first Chinese target that anticipated a reduction in its emissions, many experts consider the target far less ambitious than China’s true capability or even its business-as-usual outcome. More significantly, that target would allow climate pollution to rise to levels that are incompatible with the Paris temperature goals, which many scientists already consider dangerously weak. China is building more renewable energy capacity and EVs than any other country—but also most of the world’s new coal plants. When announcing its recent target, China had an opportunity to lead by example and entice other nations to adopt targets compatible with 1.5 or 2 degrees, but instead it chose to protect its economic sovereignty and minimize international accountability.
The climate policy malaise extends elsewhere. In Britain, decades-long cross-party consensus on climate action has fractured. Economic troubles in France and Germany are eroding support for net-zero commitments, compounded by the growing realization that achieving net zero by 2050 would require more reliance on Chinese clean energy products than many Europeans feel comfortable with, particularly after the U.S. Congress repealed Biden-era programs that would have helped Europe diversify its supply chains via alliances with U.S. companies. Japan and Canada, meanwhile, worry about competitiveness as U.S. firms gain advantage under Trump’s deregulatory agenda. And despite agreeing last year to expand international climate finance, the world’s largest aid donors—including Britain, France, Germany, and Japan—are now cutting or threatening to cut their climate budgets for developing nations. Washington has halted climate aid entirely.
The Paris Agreement, then, is at a crossroads. And the Belém summit will be the first test of whether Paris can evolve to meet this new political moment: Can it help close the emissions gap, mobilize financial resources, and shift trade patterns commensurate with the scale of the crisis?
Few expect breakthroughs at COP30 on these massive political questions. On the emissions gap, nations are likely to acknowledge the problem and take note of nonbinding recommendations—hardly inspiring. On finance (such as funding for climate adaptation and for paying for climate-related losses in developing nations), negotiators might score modest procedural wins, such as agreeing on how various funding mechanisms should be governed or operated. Yet large new flows into the real economy are unlikely amid rising populism, isolationism, and protectionism in the global north.
In Belém, in sum, the world will likely see that Paris remains alive, with all nations except the United States declaring the conference a success. But close observers will also see that the Paris system needs to be strengthened and supplemented because today it lacks the muscle to address the ambition gap: the gulf between the political leadership we need and what our political systems have delivered. Victory on the big issues in Belém might merely mean establishing a process that could facilitate braver, science-based political decisions in the future—a sad consolation prize.
Still, nations know the world is watching, and they may yet surprise. The most promising opportunity in Belém lies in the bioeconomy: the forests, food systems, and land sectors that together account for roughly a quarter of global emissions and could become a major source of carbon removal. Brazil, betting that sustainable growth in this sector can attract foreign investment and create jobs, has made the bioeconomy a centerpiece of its national climate strategy and the focus of COP30. This is why COP30 will occur in Belém, an otherwise odd choice—a remote city lacking the infrastructure to handle a major global conference. (Long lines, too few hotel beds, and too few taxis and buses may sour the mood.)
Over the past two years, Brasília has invested substantial political capital in a proposal to reward tropical forest nations for conserving their standing forests. Brazil’s Tropical Forests Forever Fund (TFFF) initiative aims to create a $125 billion sovereign-backed investment facility to finance forest conservation by borrowing at a low cost from institutional investors and investing in global equity markets, which historically have provided higher returns. Profits, if any, would flow back to developing countries as payments for keeping carbon-rich forests intact for the world. The plan has drawn rhetorical—but not yet financial—support from across the Amazon region and some major powers, including Britain and China.
Brazil is also advancing a national forest carbon market and helping to expand voluntary markets through state-led initiatives such as a recent partnership with Silvania, a natural capital investment platform. These programs would reward reductions in deforestation in places where that is a problem, while TFFF aims to prevent deforestation from spreading to new areas with intact forests.
If COP30 produces tangible commitments to scale Brazil’s bioeconomy as a global model for protecting forests and creating sustainable prosperity, or if it comes up with a real plan to begin closing the overall gap in climate ambition and finance, Belém could mark the beginning of the next phase of Paris—one defined less by negotiations over rules than by mobilization of capital, technology, and political will. In that case, Belém would show that the Paris Agreement, though challenged, still has the capacity to evolve—and that the world’s most important climate framework is, for now, still fully alive when observed.
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