Here are 3 big ideas to combat climate change, with or without COP

Belém, Brazil — The Amazon rainforest is a poster child for the perils of climate change. Deforestation and warming temperatures threaten to push the iconic forest past its limits.

So Belém, in the heart of the Amazon, was a momentous place for global climate leaders to meet on the 10th anniversary of an international pledge to try to rein in climate change. Some 196 nations signed that pledge, known as the Paris Agreement, promising to collectively reduce their greenhouse gas emissions enough to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius relative to preindustrial times by 2100. 

This year’s climate summit, the 30th annual United Nations Conference of the Parties, or COP30, was arguably the most important since the 2015 meeting in Paris. The future of international climate pacts is hanging in the balance: Confidence that such pacts can effectively address the climate crisis is waning as global temperatures soar and nations repeatedly fall short of their own promises. COP30, hosted and presided over by Brazil, was touted as the COP of action, a transition away from negotiation and toward implementation.

But delegates to COP30 faced strong geopolitical headwinds, including that under President Donald Trump, the United States — the world’s largest historical greenhouse gas emitter — withdrew from the negotiations and was a no-show at the summit.

And after days of tense, bitter negotiations, COP30, too, fell short on its stated goals: to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels, to reverse deforestation by 2030 and to amp up funding from wealthier nations to protect developing ones from the worst impacts of climate change.

The final agreement at COP30 — dubbed the “mutirão,” or “collective effort” — did include a pledge of $120 billion a year for climate adaptation. But that won’t happen until 2035, instead of the hoped-for 2030. No explicit commitments were reached on deforestation. And most frustrating of all, the wording in the delegates’ final deal omitted any mention of “fossil fuels” — a notable retreat even from the ambiguous agreement at COP28 in 2023 that the world should transition away from them.

“I understand that frustration,” said U.N. Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell at the closing plenary of COP30 on November 22. “Many of those [frustrations] I share myself.”

But, he said, “markets are moving, and a new economy is rising. The old polluting economy is running out of road.” And, despite the maddingly slow progress, COP is still vital to combat the climate crisis, he said. “For two weeks each year, COP brings climate to the top of the agenda. As we leave here, our job is to keep it there for another fifty.”

And progress is happening — even if much of it is not necessarily under the official COP imprimatur. Alongside the formal governmental negotiations, many nations, nonprofits and industry organizations used this intense global focus on the climate crisis to devise, coordinate and implement voluntary commitments and initiatives to accelerate real-world climate action. 

Here’s a closer look at three areas of climate action that are under way.

A new carbon market coalition could help emerging economies

One way that nations can keep carbon emissions below the thresholds promised at the Paris Agreement is by creating a market to buy and sell carbon credits. Carbon credits are markers representing emissions of climate-warming gases like carbon dioxide and methane. Those gases are released by burning fossil fuels for energy and electricity and during deforestation and other land-use changes. 

Companies that successfully reduce their emissions below a set limit can sell “credits” for those emissions to companies that exceed that limit. It can be a swift way to get businesses on board with decarbonization. But such systems raise concerns about greenwashing, allowing companies to claim they are “carbon neutral” when they are still contributing negatively to the climate crisis.

One sticking point tends to be regulation: how to ensure that there is a shared standard of carbon accounting around the world, allowing for better environmental regulation and greater transparency. 

To that end, on November 7, Brazil’s Ministry of Finance launched the Open Coalition on Compliance Carbon Markets during COP30. Along with Brazil, 18 other countries have already signed on to the voluntary coalition, including the European Union, China, the United Kingdom and Norway.

The idea was built on research from the Global Climate Policy Project at Harvard University and MIT, which proposed the concept to the government of Brazil in June, and released its flagship report in September.

“It’s a landmark” initiative at COP30, one that would encourage countries to both produce and sell products in the greenest way possible, says Arathi Rao, director of the Global Climate Policy Project. Low- and middle-income countries like Indonesia and India, which have not to date signed on, are expected to account for most of the world’s emissions this century, so their participation is essential, she notes. 

Joining this coalition could also be a boon to emerging economies, including many in Africa. In an environment where carbon-intensive industries are more heavily taxed on imports into regions like the European Union, products from industries like Mozambique’s relatively green, hydropowered aluminum production, for example, could become economically competitive on world markets.

New funding efforts for tropical rainforest restoration

Forests were nearly absent in COP30’s final agreement, in a particularly bitter disappointment to many experts who hoped the summit’s Amazon setting would inspire delegates to increase protections for the world’s green spaces.

“The solitary mention of forests in the mutirão text is sobering as we convene here on the doorstep of the Amazon,” says Clare Shakya , the global managing director for climate at The Nature Conservancy, who is based in Charlbury, England. The text included a commitment to halt deforestation and forest degradation by 2030, but offered no clear road map to do so.

“This prompts reflection on whether COPs remain the strongest platform for driving real progress on forests,” says Subhra Bhattacharjee, the Bonn, Germany–based director general of the nonprofit Forest Stewardship Council. “Governments, businesses and communities must continue working together within — and beyond — the U.N. process to reduce forest loss on the ground, and that is where we remain focused,” she says.

One such effort is a new initiative championed by Brazil and shaped with the aid of the World Bank. The Tropical Forests Forever Facility, or TFFF, is an international financing program to preserve tropical forests. Unlike traditional climate funds that rely on countries’ donations of money to a fund, the TFFF is an endowment that rewards stakeholders: It would use profits from investments to reward countries that take actions to conserve their forests. TFFF received broad support from COP30 attendees, with some 53 countries endorsing its launch.

Despite that show of political support, the project — launched on November 6, just before the start of the summit — isn’t quite off and running financially. TFFF’s initial goal was to collect $25 billion from governments and philanthropies, which could attract another $100 billion from private investors.

But at COP30, the fund so far has received pledges totaling only $6.6 billion. One possible sticking point to contributions is concern that TFFF’s financial structure will bypass Indigenous groups. TFFF’s organizers now hope that the fund will attract $10 billion by the end of Brazil’s COP presidency at the end of 2026.

Other efforts were also launched during COP30 to protect the forests. France is spearheading an initiative to contribute at least $2.5 billion over five years to protect the Congo Basin rainforest. And more than 35 government and philanthropic funders announced a new $1.8 billion pledge to support Indigenous Peoples and other local communities in securing land rights around the world, including tropical rainforests. That could also be a boon to the climate, as forests managed by Indigenous Peoples tend to have consistently lower rates of deforestation.

There’s a rising tide of ocean-based climate solutions

Ocean and coastal ecosystems experts pushed hard this year to place ocean-based solutions to the climate crisis in the spotlight, even though they were not ultimately incorporated into the summit’s final agreement. And the ocean advocates delivered, with numerous new ocean-related initiatives unveiled alongside the stormy waters of formal negotiations. 

Brazil set the tone by naming marine scientist Marinez Scherer of the Federal University of Santa Catarina to be a Special Envoy for the Oceans to COP30. During the meeting, Scherer unveiled the Blue Package, a voluntary plan to speed up the development of existing ocean-climate solutions by 2028, such as offshore wind farms, zero emission shipping, marine conservation and eco-friendly aquatic food systems. The package highlights that “we don’t have to ‘reinvent the wheel’ to address marine issues,” Scherer says. “We already have solutions that can serve as examples or be replicated.”

Similarly, Brazil and France unveiled the Task Force on Oceans, a new initiative to integrate ocean-based solutions into how countries create their national climate action plans. Such climate action plans, or “Nationally Determined Contributions,” are how nations comply with the Paris Agreement. Some 17 countries announced they had joined this Blue NDC Challenge to incorporate ocean solutions in their updated climate plans. “At least four of the 10 of the world’s largest economies are in this group,” Scherer says.

The meeting also saw Brazil joining 18 other nations in an initiative launched in 2018, the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy. Brazil pledged to manage all of its coastal waters sustainably by 2030, covering an area of 3.68 million square kilometers, the largest coastline of South America. 

Despite these wins, there is a long road ahead for the oceans themselves and for the planet, Scherer says. Energy transition needs to be treated in an urgent and objective manner, and climate finance needs to flow for the most vulnerable nations, she says. “All these agendas are connected, directly or indirectly, to the ocean. COP30 helped align forces and consolidate concrete strategies for marine solutions. Ocean-based action is climate action. Now, the challenge is to move from message to implementation.”

It’s efforts like these outside of the official COP framework that are most likely to turn words into action, advocates say. Noted Panamanian economist and COP30 delegate Juan Carlos Monterrey Gomez on Instagram: “If there is to be a turning point, it will not come from a COP. It will come from people.”