Rebecca Brown is president and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law. Lien Vandamme is its senior campaigner on human rights and climate change.
The world doesn’t just need stronger climate targets. It needs a fairer, faster and more accountable multilateral system to deliver climate action.
This November, with the world gathered in Belém, Brazil, for COP30, the negotiations unfold against a backdrop of a deepening climate crisis and rising frustration with the slow pace of progress.
These talks matter because the UN climate process is the world’s best platform for much-needed global action on the climate crisis. But after three decades, the process must evolve to meet the moment – which means changing the rules that too often delay action, dilute ambition and disconnect decisions from science, equity and the law.
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Powerful countries use procedural deadlock to block ambition. Polluting countries and corporations exert influence to protect their interests and weaken outcomes. And too often, the people most affected by the climate emergency are sidelined or excluded from the decisions that affect them the most.
Given its global nature, effective multilateralism is the only way out of the climate crisis. At COP30, leaders have a choice to continue with the status quo or revise the rules to deliver climate justice.
Reform of UN climate talks
The case for reform is undeniable.A systemic lack of compliance and accountability demands a serious, good-faith effort to reform the system.
For example, this year was supposed to mark a milestone, as all countries were expected to submit their new plans – known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) – to scale up their ambition, bringing us closer to truly limiting warming to 1.5°C. But around half of the plans have yet to arrive.
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Many of the plans that have been submitted largely missed the mark to keep warming below the legal limit of 1.5C. They avoid the one measure that science demands: an explicit fossil fuel phaseout. And the financing that developing countries need to raise ambition in their climate plans remains scarce.
Reforming the UN climate talks is therefore not procedural housekeeping; it is climate action. Without reform, the best science and strongest legal obligations will continue to collide with an outdated process. With reform, we can accelerate the phase-out of fossil fuels, deliver real finance at scale and protect human rights.
Principles for reform
Efforts are already underway. Calls for reform are coming from inside and outside the process: from civil societyand experts to former negotiators and even the UNFCCC executive secretary and the COP30 presidency.
States are also testing the waters, with a recent call from Panama to allow for majority decision-making and Vanuatu naming the need for additional architecture to force states to comply with their obligations. The momentum is real.
But to succeed, this reform must be grounded in a few basic principles.
First, voting needs to be possible when consensus fails. When one or two holdouts block the ambition the world needs, the majority must be allowed to move without them.
Second, fossil fuel interests must not warp climate action priorities. Fossil fuel and other polluting industry lobbyists outnumbered national delegations of almost every country at recent talks. It is time to enforce robust conflict of interest rules to limit the influence of those whose business model depends on delay and denial.
This has been done before. The World Health Organization excluded Big Tobacco from public health conversations. Climate talks should do the same with Big Oil.
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Third, there must be meaningful accountability. Shiny declarations from states and private actors made at COPs need criteria, monitoring, and compliance. States must be held accountable for the commitments they make.
While the Paris Agreement’s compliance mechanisms may be toothless by design, the International Court of Justice recently affirmed that states are responsible for meeting their climate obligations and can be held liable if they don’t.
They have a choice to make: set up legitimate accountability mechanisms under the climate regime or face their responsibilities in courts around the world.
Human rights at its core
Finally, reform also needs to guarantee human rights protections and civic space at every COP, and make negotiations participatory, inclusive and transparent. Civil society and the public have the right to know what is being decided in their name, and to challenge decisions when they fall short.
At its core, this reform is about restoring faith in international cooperation to solve global crises. It is about making the process stronger, fairer and more capable of delivering what science and justice require.
Comment: It’s time for majority voting at UN climate summits
In Belém, governments have the opportunity to begin closing the gap between promises and action, not just through stronger targets and better policies, but by changing the rules of the game.
The science is clear. The law is clear. Now, the process must catch up.
If COP30 is to be remembered as a turning point, it won’t be because the system was perfect, but because governments decided to make it better.
The post Not another COP-out: We must rewrite the rules of the UN climate talks appeared first on Climate Home News.
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