Every year, nearly every country on earth meets to argue about the planet's fever. The COP summits have produced the Paris Agreement, a loss and damage fund, and a new finance goal. They have not yet bent the emissions curve.
Published 14 October 2026 · 06:00 GMT
There is no other meeting on earth like it. Every year, delegations from nearly every country gather in a single city, along with scientists, activists, oil executives, indigenous leaders, bankers and journalists, to argue about the temperature of the planet. The meeting is the COP, the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Thirty years of these conferences have produced the only universal climate treaty the world has, a fund for the damage that cannot be prevented, and a library of promises. They have not yet produced the one thing the physics demands: a decisive turn in global emissions.
The story begins in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, at the Earth Summit, where governments adopted the Framework Convention, a treaty that recognized climate change as a shared problem and set a deliberately modest goal: stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations before they dangerously interfere with the climate system. The Convention entered into force in 1994. Its Conference of the Parties, the COP, first met in Berlin in 1995 and has met almost every year since. The COP is the treaty's decision-making body, and its rule, in practice, is consensus: nothing is agreed until everyone, or nearly everyone, agrees, which is why the final hours of every COP are an all-night exercise in exhaustion diplomacy.
The first great attempt at binding targets came in Kyoto in 1997. The Kyoto Protocol set quantified emissions limits for developed countries, on the principle that the rich, who had produced most of the historical emissions, should act first. It entered into force in 2005, but its coverage narrowed over time: the United States never ratified it, and several major emitters declined second-round targets. Kyoto taught the negotiators a hard lesson. A treaty that binds only part of the world, and that punishes rather than persuades, will be abandoned by the governments it binds. The next attempt would be built the other way round.
The Paris Agreement, adopted at COP21 in Paris in 2015, is the centrepiece of the modern climate regime, and it works by a logic that is almost the opposite of Kyoto's. Instead of negotiated quotas handed down from above, every country sets its own pledge, called a nationally determined contribution, and the treaty binds the process, not the number: pledges must be submitted, must be updated every five years, and each update is expected to be more ambitious than the last. The shared goal is to hold warming well below 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees. The agreement also promises transparency, so that every country's reported emissions can be checked, and a regular Global Stocktake, to measure the collective gap between promises and physics.
The elegance of Paris is also its weakness. Because pledges are voluntary, no country can be punished for a weak one, and the sum of the pledges has consistently fallen short of the goal. The IPCC's Sixth Assessment found that human activity had warmed the planet by about 1.1 degrees above pre-industrial levels over 2011 to 2020, and its authors warned that every additional increment of warming increases the risks of heatwaves, floods, droughts and sea-level rise. The UN Environment Programme's Emissions Gap Report, published annually, has repeatedly measured the same shortfall: current pledges, even if fully implemented, leave the world on course for warming well above 1.5 degrees. Paris built a machine for ambition. The machine has not yet produced enough of it.
If Paris is about pledges, the summits since have been about money. The oldest fight is over climate finance: the flow of money from rich countries, which industrialized on fossil fuels, to poor countries, which must now develop without them. Developed countries pledged in 2009 to mobilize 100 billion dollars a year by 2020. OECD data showed the goal first met in 2022, two years late, and developing countries argued, with justification, that much of the money arrived as loans rather than grants, and that some of it was relabelled aid. Trust, in climate negotiations, is denominated in dollars, and the account is overdrawn.
At COP29 in Baku in 2024, the parties agreed a new goal to replace the old one: 300 billion dollars a year by 2035 from developed countries, within a wider ambition of mobilizing 1.3 trillion dollars a year from all sources, public and private. The reaction was bitter. Developing countries and many analysts called the headline figure far short of the need, and estimates of that need vary widely, from several hundred billions to over a trillion a year for adaptation, mitigation and damage combined. The Baku outcome is best read as a down payment on a longer argument: the number will be revisited, the sources will be fought over, and the gap between what is promised and what is needed will remain the central fact of climate politics.
The second great money fight is loss and damage: compensation for the harm that adaptation cannot prevent, the village swallowed by the sea, the harvest lost to a drought that no irrigation scheme could have survived. For three decades, rich countries resisted the idea, fearing open-ended liability. At COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh in 2022, the resistance broke, and the parties agreed to create a dedicated fund. At COP28 in Dubai in 2023, the fund was operationalized, alongside the first Global Stocktake, and the summit also produced the first COP call to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems. The pledges to the fund so far are small against the scale of the damage, and the question of who pays, and how much, is still open.
COP30, hosted in Belem in the Amazon in November 2025, put forests at the centre of the process for the first time, a recognition that the climate cannot be stabilized without the ecosystems that store carbon. The summit's deeper significance was structural: it was the first COP held in the Amazon, hosted by a developing country that is both a major forest power and a major oil producer, and it tested whether the process could speak to the tension between conservation and development that defines the Global South's climate dilemma. The physics, meanwhile, does not wait for the process. Every COP is a deadline that the atmosphere ignores.
Western coverage tends to frame the COPs as a test of political will. In this telling, the science is settled, the technologies exist, and the failure is one of leadership: governments that sign pledges at summits and underfund them at home. The Western lens is the most focused on emissions numbers and on the gap reports, and the most impatient with process. It also carries the West's own contradiction, which its critics note: the countries that lecture most loudly about fossil fuels are often the ones whose consumers burn the most of them.
The Western lens is also the most attentive to private finance. The argument runs that public money will never be enough, and that the real prize is redirecting the trillions in pension funds, banks and insurers toward clean energy. The COPs, in this telling, are useful less as negotiating rooms than as signals to markets.
From Beijing, Moscow and New Delhi, the story is about development and fairness. In this telling, the West industrialized on coal and oil for two centuries, and now asks the countries that industrialized later to bear the cost of stopping. China presents itself as both the world's largest emitter and its largest installer of solar and wind capacity, and argues that its pledges must be judged against development needs. India argues that its per-capita emissions remain far below the West's, and that energy access for hundreds of millions of people is a moral claim, not an excuse.
The Eastern lens also notes the geopolitics of the summits themselves. The COP is one of the few rooms where the emerging powers negotiate as equals with the West, and where the language of common but differentiated responsibilities, the principle that all countries share the task but not equally, is still defended. In this telling, the COPs matter because they are the one place where the historical ledger is read aloud.
From the Global South, the COP is a courtroom and a marketplace at once. In this telling, the stakes are not abstract degrees but survival: island states that may disappear, African farmers watching rains fail, Bangladeshi families rebuilding after floods that used to be once-in-a-century events. The loss and damage fund is read here as a moral victory decades in the making, and its small initial pledges as proof that victory and justice are different things.
The Southern lens also carries the sharpest critique of the finance system. Loans for adaptation, counted as climate finance, add debt to the countries least responsible for the crisis. The demand, repeated at every COP, is for grants, for direct access, and for a system that treats climate money as reparation rather than charity. Until that demand is met, the South will keep coming to the COPs, and will keep leaving disappointed.
