COP30 Dispatch

What Congress Needs to Know from Brazil

Most negotiations happened behind closed doors today, with few updates for observers. According to the Presidency’s last comments, a more finalized package on finance, ambition gaps in nationally determined contributions (NDCs), trade, and transparency reporting is still expected to surface today. Since our last Dispatch issue, the Presidency has released draft negotiation texts on topics such as national adaptation plans and the Fund for responding to Loss and Damage.

The number of countries calling for a fossil fuel phaseout roadmap has jumped to 83, while support for a deforestation roadmap has grown to more than 40 countries, according to Climate Diplomacy Brief. Supporters are hoping to see both initiatives integrated into COP30 outcomes. For additional updates on the negotiations, see the Earth Negotiations Bulletin’s comprehensive daily reports and quick highlights.

Missed yesterday’s edition? Check it out here. We are also compiling key COP30 announcements throughout the conference—check back for updates.

You can find all EESI’s COP30 resources here. Getting lost in the COP lingo? Check out EESI's glossary of terms and other helpful guides in our Resources section! Looking for more information? Reach out to EESI Policy Director Anna McGinn at [email protected].

Key Takeaways for Congress

The UNFCCC Global Climate Action Tracker captures and shares the climate activities of 20,845 companies, 14,439 cities, and 6,273 organizations. (Around the World)
The Nature Conservation Index ranks countries on conservation efforts. Of 180 countries evaluated, Luxembourg ranks highest, and the U.S. ranks 37th. (Around the World)
The EU carbon border adjustment mechanism is growing as a hot-button issue at COP30. (Around the World)

U.S. Updates

California Food and Agriculture Secretary Karen Ross (second from left) with colleagues at the USA Climate Pavilion at COP30. | Credit: California Department of Food and Agriculture via Linkedin.

Climate-Smart Agriculture: California Secretary of Food and Agriculture Karen Ross spoke yesterday about the state’s substantial contribution to U.S. food security through the provision of healthy food from more than 63,000 farms. She dug into the multiple benefits of healthy soils, which are essential to the long-term sustainability of the agricultural sector. Ross described meeting with counterparts from around the world at COP, including countries with which California has memorandums of understanding on climate-smart agriculture such as Australia, Mexico, and New Zealand. She also described recent delegations she led to Peru to learn about specialty crop growing methods, and to Brazil to exchange information on pest management.
- EESI Series: Agriculture and Climate

Around the World

Participants at the UN Secretary-General’s Youth Roundtable yesterday. | Credit: UN Climate Change - Kiara Worth via Flickr.

Global Action Agenda: The Global Climate Action Agenda is designed to connect what happens under the negotiations to on-the-ground work. The COP29 and COP30 Presidencies ran a closing event for the Action Agenda to highlight progress on the initiative and share the new 2026-2030 plan to scale up global efforts. COP30 High-Level Champion Dan Ioschpe said that the plan is “practical, science-based, inclusive, and uses the global stocktake as its guiding star.” The COP29 High-Level Champion Nigar Arpadarai emphasized that COPs are an important “check-point for delivery of climate actions,” but that progress needs to be made year-round. This session recognized the essential role of civil society, businesses, Indigenous peoples, and youth in advancing climate solutions, and Ioschpe plugged the UNFCCC Global Climate Action Tracker, which captures the activities of 20,845 companies, 14,439 cities, and 6,273 organizations.

Hot Seat: European Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra played defense at a press conference today. When grilled about the EU’s lack of formal support for a roadmap for a fossil fuel phaseout, Hoekstra stated that the EU “liked the idea” but is not tied to specific terminology. According to Carbon Brief, all countries in the EU except Italy and Poland have individually voiced their support of the roadmap. He repeatedly emphasized the EU’s overall dedication to deliver on the climate finance that countries agreed to at COP29 and reduce emissions 55% by 2030 and 90% by 2040 (compared to 1990 levels).

High Standards: The EU CBAM will go into effect in January 2026. A UNFCCC briefing gathered international trade and standardization experts to illustrate the work being done in the lead-up to implementation. Jacob Werksman, principal advisor to the European Commission, described the development of mechanisms to assess carbon prices and emissions, including rules around emissions verification. Some developing countries are concerned that CBAM policies unfairly impact their exports. Werksman defended the EU CBAM as a lever for green trade, rather than a trade measure in itself, and asserted that it will not have a negative impact on trade. According to the CBAM Economic Exposure Index, some countries will experience economic impacts if they do not shift their practices to reduce emissions (which is precisely the goal of this type of policy). Negative impacts are projected to be most concentrated in Egypt, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, India, and Mozambique.
- EESI Article: “Europe’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism: A New Age of Sustainable Trade”

Landmark Launch for Landscapes: The Scaling-Up Resilience in Africa’s Great Green Wall (SURAGGWA) program was officially launched this morning. The Green Climate Fund approved funding for the SURAGGWA program in July, with an investment of $222 million to restore degraded landscapes and build climate resilience across eight Sahel countries within the Great Green Wall region: Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal. The program will contribute to the broader initiative to restore 100 million hectares of degraded land, sequester 250 million tons of carbon, and create 10 million green jobs by 2030. Senegal’s Minister of Environment and Ecological Transition underlined the importance of fighting against poverty while ensuring sustainable development. He expressed hopes that the SURAGGWA program will foster collaboration across participating countries and stakeholders. Green Climate Fund Regional Director of Africa Catherine Koffman added that partnerships across all levels of governance will be especially critical due to the complex operating environment in a region marred by conflict.
- EESI Podcast: “Why Should Congress Care about International Climate Finance? With Henry Gonzalez of the Green Climate Fund”

Biodiversity, Quantified: An SDG Pavilion event showcased the Nature Conservation Index, which assesses conservation at the country level using 25 indicators spanning land management, threats to biodiversity, national capacity (financial, technical, and political), and future challenges to conservation. Of the 180 countries evaluated, Luxembourg ranks highest for its land protections, strong policies, and high biodiversity, followed by Estonia and Denmark. The last three ranks fell to Iraq, Turkey, and Kiribati, which holds the lowest score due to species decline and poor land protections. The U.S. ranks 37th, scoring low on indicators such as climate vulnerability, risk of ecosystem collapse, and species extinction.

Shell-ebrating Stories About Ocean Acidification: The International Alliance to Combat Ocean Acidification (OA Alliance) held a virtual premiere of its short film, Changing Waters: Time for Action on Ocean Acidification. Juliana Corrales of the OA Alliance described recent efforts to revamp the messaging around ocean acidification—the chemical reaction that lowers the pH of seawater as the ocean is forced to absorb increasing amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, hindering the ability of marine species to grow calcium carbonate structures like shells. With such a complex scientific topic, Corrales explained that the goal of the film is to motivate action by making the impacts of ocean acidification felt through stories from coastal communities in Washington State, Colombia, and Fiji.
- EESI Podcast: “Keeping U.S. Climate Action Afloat: Subnational Diplomacy on Ocean Acidification”

Investable NDCs: The We Mean Business Coalition is looking to NDCs as roadmaps for investment. Over the last year, the coalition has worked with partners in Australia, Brazil, the EU, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, and the UK to understand how NDCs could be written to attract more private-sector interest to help deliver on their goals. The country-specific recommendations include having clear international coordination on traded products, consistent national policy, and complementary economy-wide and sector-specific targets.

A View from Thailand: A press conference hosted by the Global Forest Coalition gave the mic to Wanun Permpibul of Climate Watch Thailand, who discussed “false climate solutions” that commodify ecosystems and put a price on nature. Permpibul branded the blue economy initiatives of wealthy nations as coastal and marine resource grabs and a “recolonization of the ocean, one carbon credit at a time.” She also criticized loans and debt-for-nature swaps that lock developing countries into cycles of debt and dependency. On the reliance on critical minerals for the clean energy transition, she called out the extortive practices of lithium mining in the Philippines, rare earth mining in Thailand, and nickel mining in Indonesia. True climate solutions already exist in the Global South, Permpibul concluded, with fishers and farmers alike working to restore ecosystems—without private loans or carbon credits.

Pacific Islands Plan for Climate Consequences: Delegates met at the Pacific Pavilion to discuss the Pacific Regional Framework on Climate Mobility Implementation Plan, which builds on a mobility framework that Pacific Island countries agreed to in 2023. The implementation plan states that planned relocation, migration, and displacement are all inevitable due to climate impacts. To prepare, the region can take priority actions like conducting country risk assessments, creating a Climate Mobility Action Hub, increasing country-to-country dialogue on planned relocation, ensuring plans are culturally appropriate, and finding adequate funding.
- EESI Article: “Last Resort and Next Frontier: Community-Driven Climate Relocation”

Governance for Resilient Infrastructure: The Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure released the Global Infrastructure Resilience 2025 report to guide countries in making climate-smart infrastructure investments. This second-edition report includes a broader set of risks that now includes extreme heat and cold events. It states that “resilience begins with governance. Weak enforcement of codes, outdated standards, and fragmented responsibilities often compound infrastructure risks. Strengthening regulatory compliance and institutional capacity must, therefore, be at the core of national resilience strategies.”

More on Resilience: At a side event on local leadership for global adaptation, speakers discussed the forces reshaping community resilience efforts. As Aditya Bahadur of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre explained, “the nature of risk is shifting rapidly,” and countries are seeing unanticipated pressure on emergency management systems due to multiple extreme events happening at the same time. Bahadur argued that it is unfortunately not realistic for public finance to close the adaptation gap, so local leaders need to use creative strategies like city resilience bonds and incorporating resilience into existing budget items. He further suggested using artificial intelligence to analyze big data sets that could inform more strategic investments of time and money. The event also highlighted the Beat the Heat Implementation Drive, an initiative launched last week at COP30, to support city-level resilience to extreme heat.

Hot Topic: At a UNFCCC side event, panelists shared examples of communities in vulnerable regions responding to extreme heat with early warning systems, adaptation finance, and other tools. Joyce Kimutai of World Weather Attribution said that national climate commitments have not kept up with the escalating heat risk associated with climate change even though predictions have improved. In the case of India, 76% of the population is in the high to very-high heat risk category. Vishwas Chitale of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water noted that many jurisdictions have heat action plans, but most lack information on localized hazards, humidity, and warm nights, and almost all lack heat vulnerability and risk assessments.
- EESI Briefing: Beating the Heat: A 2025 Heat Policy Agenda

Divine Intervention: Over 4,800 miles away from Belém, Pope Leo made a video statement imploring leaders at COP to take swift action on climate. “We must be honest—it is not the [Paris] Agreement that is failing, we are failing in our response,” he cautioned. “What is failing is the political will of some. True leadership means service and support at a scale that will truly make a difference.”

Resources

EESI Resources

Briefing series: What Congress Needs to Know About COP30
- What's on the Table for the Negotiations?
- Keeping it Cool: International Efforts to Reduce Emissions from Refrigerants
- International Trade and Climate Policy
Climate Change Solutions: Bi-weekly newsletter covering climate, energy, and environmental issues
COP30 Announcement Tracker: Key Announcements from the 2025 UN Climate Summit. Also, check out this article with updates on past COP announcements.
U.S. Leaders at COP30: Updates on Members of Congress and other U.S. Officials at the 2025 UN Climate Summit
EESI's United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Glossary of Terms

Tracking the Negotiations

CarbonBrief: Reporting and analysis on the UN climate talks, with in-depth tracking of country positions in the negotiations
COP30 Resource Hub: World Resources Institute's extensive set of resources on the climate negotiations
Earth Negotiations Bulletin: A play-by-play of the negotiations, plus expert analysis from the International Institute for Sustainable Development
ECO Newsletter: The climate advocate’s perspective from Climate Action Network International
C2ES Newsletter: Daily key takeaways from COP30 experts observing the negotiations
Nature Updates: Nature4Climate brings daily updates on all the nature-based solutions happenings at COP to your inbox

Background and Logistics

Brazil COP30 presidency website: Priorities, details, and logistics for the negotiations from this year’s host country
UNFCCC COP30 website: Conference details and all updates on documents produced during the negotiations
Congressional Research Service: Reports related to the UNFCCC

Questions about COP30?

Reach out to EESI Policy Director Anna McGinn with your questions. We will get back to you or include the information in an upcoming newsletter.

Thanks for reading!

This newsletter covering COP30 will be running from November 7 - November 24.
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Staff contributors: Daniel Bresette, Alison Davis, Laura Gries, Amaury Laporte,
Anna McGinn, Nicole Pouy, and Hannah Wilson-Black

About EESI

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit advancing science-based solutions for climate change, energy, and environmental challenges to achieve a sustainable, resilient, and equitable world. Founded on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress, EESI has been informing policymakers about the benefits of energy efficiency, renewable energy, and environmental conservation since 1984.

CFC #10627