Brazil: As Brazil hosts COP30 in Belém—the city symbolically close to where the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was born at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit—questions are mounting about whether global climate governance has drifted away from its original moral and practical purpose.
More than three decades after the UNFCCC came into force, the international climate regime appears increasingly dominated by procedures, mechanisms, and technical negotiations, even as global emissions continue to rise and climate impacts intensify. Observers argue that the system, once grounded in equity and collective responsibility, has become entangled in complexity that often prioritises process over outcomes.
The moment has drawn comparisons with a reformist call from history. In 1875, Swami Dayanand Saraswati, founder of the Arya Samaj, urged Indian society to go “back to the Vedas” through his seminal work Satyarth Prakash. His appeal was not to reject progress, but to return to first principles after religious practice had become burdened with ritualism and orthodoxy. Climate governance, many argue, now faces a similar reckoning.
From Moral Clarity to Procedural Complexity
The UNFCCC was conceived as a simple yet ethically grounded framework. Its central objective was clear: to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that would prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system. Embedded within this goal were principles of equity, precaution, and sustainable development.
Articles 3 and 4 of the Convention established common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (CBDR–RC), explicitly linking mitigation and adaptation efforts in developing countries to financial and technological support from developed nations. Climate action, in this framing, was inseparable from justice.
However, the evolution of the climate regime—from the Kyoto Protocol to the Paris Agreement—has gradually shifted emphasis from moral responsibility to procedural governance.
Kyoto, Paris, and the Rise of Market Logic
The Kyoto Protocol, adopted in 1997, sought to operationalise equity by imposing legally binding emission reduction targets on developed countries. Its flexible mechanisms—the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), Joint Implementation (JI), and International Emissions Trading (IET)—were intended to deliver cost-effective mitigation.
In practice, critics argue, these mechanisms often prioritised market efficiency over environmental integrity. The CDM became a vast carbon credit marketplace plagued by questions of additionality; JI suffered from weak verification; and emissions trading enabled the circulation of surplus allowances, or “hot air,” that diluted real reductions. Rather than dismantling fossil fuel dependence, the system frequently protected existing carbon-intensive structures.
The Paris Agreement, adopted in 2015, retained and expanded this approach. Articles 6.2 and 6.4 introduced new cooperative and market-based mechanisms, accompanied by elaborate accounting, reporting, and registry systems. While framed as tools for ambition, they entrenched a technocratic model in which carbon metrics often eclipse ethical responsibility.
COP30 and the Persistence of Procedural Drift
This procedural drift has become more pronounced in recent COPs—from Glasgow and Sharm el-Sheikh to Dubai and now Belém. Negotiations have increasingly focused on methodologies, indicators, and templates, while implementation lags behind.
The Loss and Damage Fund illustrates this pattern. Celebrated politically at COP27, delayed by governance disputes at COP28, it still lacks meaningful and predictable disbursement. The Global Stocktake, intended as a mechanism for course correction, has largely become an exercise in data aggregation.
At COP30, similar trends were evident. The adoption of the Belém Adaptation Indicators under the Global Goal on Adaptation marked a formal step forward, but their voluntary and non-binding nature raised concerns about real-world delivery. Finance negotiations, including the Baku-to-Belém Roadmap on the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), clarified procedural pathways but postponed decisions on scale, timelines, grant components, and predictability.
Mitigation discussions and loss-and-damage outcomes remained constrained by unresolved debates over accountability, replenishment, and ambition.
A Call to Return to First Principles
Critics argue that the expanding architecture of climate governance risks obscuring the Convention’s original purpose. Market instruments, reporting regimes, and technical dialogues now dominate the agenda, often without demonstrable impact on emissions trajectories or vulnerability reduction.
The central question, they say, is whether procedural innovation is advancing the UNFCCC’s objective—or merely refining how failure is measured.
As Swami Dayanand Saraswati warned in Satyarth Prakash, when means overshadow ends, both truth and purpose are lost. With India proposing to host COP33 in 2028, analysts suggest it has an opportunity to champion a return to the moral core of climate action—recentring equity, finance, and responsibility as non-negotiable pillars of global cooperation.
Such a shift, they argue, may be essential if the climate regime is to move beyond procedural sophistication and deliver the transformative action the crisis demands.
The author is a Research Associate at Chintan Research Foundation. The views expressed are personal.