Belém’s Fractured Consensus

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COP30, the 2025 UN climate summit, was held late last month in Belém, Brazil. The city, known as the gateway to the Amazon, was a puzzling logistical choice, with too few hotel rooms or conference spaces to accommodate the sprawling event. But, it was a powerful symbolic one, underscoring the fragility of both the climate and climate diplomacy systems.  

An intact Amazon is the architect of its own survival. Comprising some four hundred billion trees in just under three million square miles—the equivalent of more than a thousand trees per New York City block—the sheer, awesome density of Amazonian life is powerful enough to breathe the weather into being. Tiny exhalations of water vapor from microscopic holes in countless trillions of leaves cohere into vast rainclouds that help sustain the most diverse ecosystem on the planet.  

The 2015 Paris Agreement, which has served as the governing architecture for international climate policymaking for the last decade, was built on similar principles. The weight of universal involvement was designed to create its own momentum, as all countries participated in a virtuous cycle of rising ambition and regular accountability.  

Both systems, however, are now facing similar threats. Deforestation and wildfires are fracturing the forest, interrupting its ability to cycle the water that sustains it. And, national interests and geopolitical conflicts, long a subtext at UN climate summits, have burst into the foreground, splintering the summits’ fragile consensus. Both may now be approaching tipping points, at which each system risks spinning into incoherence and decay. 

The Belém summit was not a total failure, insofar as it did manage to reach a consensus agreement. But even the headline commitments were lackluster; countries called for “efforts” to triple adaptation finance, for example, but did not promise to deliver.  

The United States played a unique role in the summit’s trajectory. 

For the first time, the United States did not send a delegation to the summit. The United States has recently torpedoed global pacts on plastics usage and emissions in international shipping, so its absence was, if anything, seen as an opportunity. If Washington didn’t attend the talks, the thinking went, at least it couldn’t work to scupper them.  

But if the United States was absent in body, it was very much not absent in spirit. Over the two-week course of the summit, the Trump administration made a series of energy policy announcements that sent an unmistakable message: the United States was out of the climate business.  

The Interior Department announced plans to open more than a billion acres of U.S. federal waters to oil and gas drilling and loosen Endangered Species Act protections that might impede exploration in sensitive areas. The Department of Energy, meanwhile, initiated a major reorganization that will see clean energy-related offices subsumed into other bodies whose purposes are so far ill-defined. Perhaps most notably, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made a friendly visit to the Oval Office during the climate summit’s pivotal second week. The diplomatic rehabilitation of a petrostate autocrat spoke louder than any press release.  

None of this was lost on delegates to the climate summit in Belém.  

To be sure, climate justice advocates and diplomats from climate-vulnerable countries made impassioned moral appeals for action. Addressing one of the summit’s thorniest issues, they urged negotiators to go beyond the general call to “transition away from fossil fuels” included in the 2023 UN climate accord and lay down a clear roadmap for quickly reducing fossil fuel use, with funds to back it up.  

But with the United States implicitly aligned with reactionary rather than ambitious parties, the audience for those appeals was limited. The European Union could not exercise enough authority to force a strong deal and China elected not to, prioritizing its own development and commercial interests. Beijing instead lined up with major oil-producing countries, including Russia and Saudi Arabia, and other large emerging economies to resist any direct mention of a transition away from fossil fuels.  

So, COP fractured. Countries agreed to hive off future discussions about the fossil fuel transition to a separate, voluntary group, outside the universal mechanism of the Paris Agreement. With no requirement and little incentive to participate, it seems unlikely many fossil fuel–producing countries will join, let alone feel obligated to respond to whatever this group agrees.  

The Belém decision makes mercilessly plain a reality that has long been unspoken in these talks: moral authority means little without power.  

What these developments mean for climate action remains to be seen. China may have resisted a UN deal on fossil fuels, but its clean energy executives were out in force in Belém, working tirelessly to ensure that the future of energy would be made in Beijing.  

And as even its closest allies rethink their longstanding economic and security ties, Washington is beginning to find that power is brittle without moral authority. If a future U.S. president hopes to repair what my CFR colleague Max Boot has called the United States’ “rogue nation” status, serious competition in clean energy technology, combined with robust partnerships with the emerging economies that most need it, could be a promising route back to global leadership.  

In the meantime, global climate cooperation, like the Amazon itself, will tiptoe on the edge, trying to stay on the right side of viability. But it will take more than moral authority to pull it back from the brink.