COP isn’t broken - it’s doing what it was built to do

Clare Shakya is Global Managing Director of Climate at The Nature Conservancy.

As the United Nations climate talks roll around each year, so too does a familiar refrain: “The COP is broken!”

Having attended the past nine COPs, I see something different.

Sure, these gargantuan events are messy, frustrating and slow - but this is what consensus-building looks like.

In Belém, Brazil, COP30 is doing its job: driving higher collective ambition, setting shared rules, and putting every level of climate action - global, national, and local - under intense scrutiny.

While progress is incremental, and perhaps frustratingly slow, COP30 shows real advances in carbon markets, ocean and forest initiatives, and it is pushing for more implementation.

The Paris Agreement set a goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050.

Even with this year’s new pledges we remain seriously off-track.

Yet, the world continues to innovate and deliver more climate action to close the gap between where we need to be and where we currently are.

COP cannot pass domestic laws, but it can influence essential levers like tax policy, land use, grids, permits and budgets – all of which drive climate action.

Take Article 6, the provision establishing high-integrity carbon markets under the Paris Agreement.

Last year at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, countries finally agreed on standards for a U.N.-run carbon market under Article 6.4, and technical decisions to link that market with national and international registries under Article 6.2.

That has huge implications. It builds confidence in carbon markets through a regulated system for high-integrity carbon crediting that can channel serious finance to domestic action.

The current debate in Belém over how nature-based solutions fit into these rules is part of a maturing framework. Put another way: 195 countries are actively determining what integrity actually means instead of ignoring it.

Ocean focus

Another example of COP delivering can be found in ocean protection policy.

Not long ago, advocates for the ocean hoped for a solitary sentence in COP decisions since less than 1% of global climate finance goes to the ocean. Now, the ocean is central in the agenda.

The Blue NDC Challenge, launched by Brazil and France, calls on all countries to put ocean-based climate action at the heart of their national plans, or Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).

Initiatives like the Mangrove Breakthrough are aiming to mobilise $4 billion to protect and restore 15 million hectares of these carbon-critical, resilience-boosting ecosystems by 2030.

COP is playing its part by building accountability for these commitments. The real test is whether finance ministries and development banks follow through.

On adaptation, we appear to be moving from vague concern to a structured plan.

The Baku Adaptation Roadmap, launched at COP29, is designed to advance the Global Goal on Adaptation. Here in Belém, negotiators are arguing over the details, how prescriptive those indicators should be and how countries will report on them.

At the same time, the Paris Agreement’s Enhanced Transparency Framework is live: countries have begun submitting the first biennial transparency reports, giving the world a common lens on emissions, policies and climate finance.

That may sound bureaucratic. It’s actually the receipts that citizens and investors can use to check who is delivering and who is stalling.

Protecting forests

Perhaps the clearest example of COP enabling real-world change is in forests and Indigenous land rights.

COP30 saw Brazil launch the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), which pays countries to maintain forests through a protection fund starting with $5.5 billion and targeting $125 billion, with 20% of benefits dedicated to Indigenous, traditional, and local communities.

Alongside it, the Intergovernmental Land Tenure Commitment aims to secure legal recognition for 160 million hectares of Indigenous and community lands by 2030, backed by an expanded $1.8 billion land and forest tenure pledge.

These are not side events - they are implementation vehicles born from the global political space COP creates.

Alas, none of this tangible progress means we are on track yet to fulfil global climate goals.

The world’s rising energy consumption, still overwhelmingly powered by fossil fuels, is the central driver of the climate crisis. There is too little progress on this in the official COP negotiating streams.

Yet this year 80 countries have taken it upon themselves to organise a statement - external to official texts from the U.N. climate agency UNFCCC - outlining plans to collectively phase out fossil fuels.

If we hope to deliver a substantial breakthrough on the core cause of the climate crisis, we must accelerate the clean energy transition and the phaseout of fossil fuels that underpins the spirit of the Paris Agreement.

It’s also telling that the loudest cries about the COP being ‘broken’ tend to originate from developed countries. For small island states and least developed countries, COP isn’t political theatre - it’s their one guaranteed opportunity each year to exert leverage over bigger emitters and ensure their survival concerns can’t be ignored.

These critical voices rely on how the process works: the U.N. requires consensus.

Calling a process ‘broken’ because it doesn’t magically fix the climate crisis once a year - or because very few COPs end with Paris-level breakthroughs - fundamentally misunderstands what these gatherings are for.

If we abandon the only global climate forum we have, the alternative isn’t faster progress, it’s no progress at all.