COP30 came to a close last month with a mixed picture for global efforts to protect and restore nature. Enveloped by the Amazon rainforest, COP30 was promising in its symbolism, with the “unprecedented participation of over 900 Indigenous Peoples in the Blue Zone”, and an agenda that elevated Indigenous voices, rights and nature finance. But by the close of the final plenary, there was only evidence of small incremental changes – not the bold and ambitious outcomes needed to support transformative change.

The  COP30 cover decision was the 'Global Mutirão’: a call to unite humanity in a global mobilisation against climate change, acknowledging the successes of the Paris Agreement, but affirming that progress needs to “go further and faster” to uphold commitments towards intergenerational equity. However, the gap between political rhetoric and the transformational action required to meet the Paris Agreement and linked Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework goals remains wide. This is especially after text on cooperation between the Rio Conventions and climate-biodiversity synergies was hollowed out despite overwhelming evidence from science-policy processes that climate and biodiversity are interconnected and need to be tackled through integrated and inclusive action, governance and finance mechanisms.

Still, the high-profile and peaceful protests and blockades showed the power of civil society mobilisation – something absent from the past few COPs hosted in countries with restricted freedom of expression. They were effective, too: resulting in a much-noted consultation among the Indigenous protesters, COP President André Aranha Corrêa do Lago, and Brazilian Minister of Environment and Climate Change Marina Silva.

Recognition of Indigenous people’s stewardship roles

The Brazilian government approved the demarcation of ten new Indigenous lands, amounting to 59 million hectares. There were also significant land-tenure and finance pledges internationally: 15 countries endorsed the Intergovernmental Land Tenure Commitment; $1.8 billion was promised for supporting land tenure rights; and Colombia pronounced restrictions on new oil exploration and large-scale mining in their Amazon region, which is 42% of their country’s territory.

Safeguarding Indigenous lands and rights is more than a climate response, it is a matter of justice. These decisions protect and empower the communities who collectively protect 80% of the world's remaining biodiversity – and whose identities, livelihoods and cultures are inseparable from the ecosystems they have long stewarded.

Indigenous People’s leadership as environmental stewards and their special roles in climate action were reflected in the approved Belém Gender Action Plan: it specifically picks out Indigenous and local women as “agents of change” whereas the previous GAP recognised women generally as change agents but not the notable roles of Indigenous and ‘grassroots’ women. There is also a greater call for the protection and support of women environmental defenders in the Belém GAP, given the core role these women play in the frontlines of climate and biodiversity action.

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Some progress on financing for nature

Finance-wise, the Tropical Forest Forever Facility was launched as an innovative finance mechanism designed to reward countries for keeping their rainforests intact. It debuted with more than $6.5 billion in initial commitments, alongside a further $3 billion pledged for the Congo Basin. This was a significant initiative launched as part of the Brazilian COP Presidency’s Action Agenda. The Action Agenda is a set of voluntary commitments made by governments on the sidelines of the main political negotiations. Because these commitments do not need the full consensus of all Parties to the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement, they can typically embody greater ambition and be enacted by ‘coalitions of the willing’.

Back in the formal negotiating rooms, tensions were high as developing countries sought to secure more finance pledges from their developed country counterparts. The final COP30 decision contained a new commitment to triple adaptation finance from developed to developing countries between 2025 and 2035, which provides grounds for cautious optimism. This finance goal is intended to replace the Glasgow Climate Pact commitment of doubling adaptation finance by 2025, over 2019 levels; but it was weakened by being spread over a ten-year timeline instead of five, and having no dollar figure attached to it. The accounting of 2025 finance flows will not be available until 2027, and the Glasgow doubling target may not be achieved. So, there is potential for disagreement about what the 2025 baseline will be, which should be tripled.

As Barbados finance negotiator Ricardo Marshall noted, accessing adaptation finance is also a profound matter of righting injustices: “in an increasingly warming world, we as developing countries face higher and higher costs of adaptation, for a problem we did not cause.”

Adoption of indicators to measure ecosystem-based adaptation

A new package of 59 indicators was adopted by governments at COP30,  the Belem Adaptation Indicators. These are intended to measure progress in achieving the global goal on adaptation (GGA). The GGA is in the Paris Agreement as an overarching goal for strengthening resilience, enhancing adaptive capacity and reducing vulnerability to climate change. Over the years, governments decided to develop more specific targets under the goal, to guide adaptation efforts. Thus, at COP28 in the United Arab Emirates in 2023, they agreed on a set of eleven GGA targets covering water and food security, public health, ecosystem integrity and biodiversity, livelihoods, infrastructure, cultural heritage, and steps in the adaptation planning and action cycle.

The Belem Adaptation Indicators are intended to measure progress in all these target areas. Six indicators on the list explicitly seek to measure the linkages between ecosystems and resilience.

The challenge, per se, is that the list of ‘indicators’ is not really a list of indicators: they are broad descriptions of what indicators could be and will require very extensive further technical work and political deliberation and acceptance before they can actually be used. In the run-up to COP30, an ad hoc expert group – under UNFCCC instruction – produced a longer list of 100 indicators, which included confirmed methodologies and data sources, or suggestions on how to complete this technical work. At COP30, certain governments wanted to take the hatchet to the experts’ list and diminish it to a tiny fraction of its scope. In an effort to salvage the substance of the list, the Brazilian Presidency rewrote the indicator descriptions into the list of 59 we see in the final decision. However, by changing the meaning and scope of many of the experts’ suggestions, the new list hands a major task to the UNFCCC’s Chairs of science and implementation: they will need to resuscitate the indicator development process, along with the Secretariat and invited institutions.

The next major milestone will be at COP32 in Ethiopia (2027). Here, the complete work on indicators is due to be presented. One hopes it will create more significant momentum for valuing and measuring the linkages between climate and nature.

CDKN and Step Change programme partners have been active in contributing to the indicator development process thus far; CDKN will stay involved as a knowledge broker, connecting the priorities and voices of local leaders of ecosystem-based adaptation with the international process.

Lack of mitigation ambition will have consequences for nature

Another major outcome - or rather, lack thereof - was the absence of all-Party agreement on a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels in the negotiated decision text. This was blocked by major oil-producing countries, such as Saudi Arabia. Instead, a coalition of higher-ambition countries, spearheaded by Colombia and Brazil, announced they would pursue the roadmap to phase out fossil fuels as an Action Agenda item in parallel to the negotiated process: they will hold the first meeting in Colombia in April 2026.

Ricardo Marshall’s comment pinpoints the mounting challenge: without adequate ambition on climate change mitigation and specifically on phasing out fossil fuels, warming will increase and the price tag for adaptation and also for loss and damage will continue to mount. The window of opportunity for ecosystem-based adaptation will narrow in many contexts, if mitigation efforts do not adjust the world’s temperature pathway: it is already clear that coral reef ecosystems, for instance, are becoming damaged at almost 1.5 degrees of global warming. Some loss and damage to natural ecosystems is not easily recoverable. Ecosystem-based adaptation is still much needed and still yields multidimensional benefits the world over, but with increasing temperature rise, there will be increasing demands on funding to realise its potential.

What is more, when it comes to climate change mitigation, rapid decarbonisation to set the world on a temperature trajectory under 2 degrees of warming needs fossil fuel phase-out: and the less this happens, or the slower it happens, the more is required of ecosystems to lock up greenhouse gases and keep warming in check. This comes with its own risks and constraints. The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report makes this very clear: “Agriculture, forestry and other land use mitigation options, when sustainably implemented, can deliver large-scale greenhouse gas emission reductions and enhanced removals, but cannot fully compensate for delayed action in other sectors.... Barriers to implementation and trade-offs may result from the impacts of climate change, competing demands on land, conflicts with food security and livelihoods, the complexity of land ownership and management systems, and cultural aspects.”

In summary, the COP30 decisions that talked directly to nature signalled some modest wins. However, the bigger picture of missed opportunities around finance and mitigation are undeniable. In this context, CDKN continues to find reason for hope in the growing number of locally-led initiatives restoring ecosystems and strengthening climate resilience, including across our network. Whether its empowering women through forest-based enterprises in Nepal or supporting water funds to implement ecosystem-based solutions (EbA) in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, CDKN is showing that when decision-making and resources flow to local actors, they protect both people and planet; living proof that a just and nature-positive future is already taking root.

This is part of CDKN's short blog series on the recent COP30. 

Read the other blogs here:

• CDKN at COP30
• CDKN CEO ⁠Shehnaaz Moosa reflects on COP30 outcomes
• New UNFCCC Gender Action Plan finds nuance in women’s needs and opportunities