Climate change cannot be ended by a piece of paper; this is the geophysical fact that haunts every Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climage Change. The COP30 negotiations were, however, an opportunity to lay the foundation for future security and prosperity. To achieve that, we have argued, the community of nations would need to:

1. Move beyond solutions to focused, cooperative adaptive design thinking;
2. Support multilevel governance to mobilize climate-resilient development in all contexts;
3. Enhance levers for multilateral climate cooperation, including through science insights, trade, and finance;
4. Treat risk reduction and resilience-building as everyday priorities for the benefit of all.

The Brazilian COP30 Presidency deserves credit for recognizing the need for multilevel climate governance and non-governmental climate action innovation—in finance, science and data, agroecological and regenerative land use practices, and support for climate-resilient infrastructure and adaptation measures.

Unfortunately, the community of nations was not able to agree key roadmaps and accountable timelines for:

• transitioning comprehensively away from fossil fuels;
• shifting to agroecological and regenerative practices in agriculture and across land use policy and activity;
• delivering a minimum of $1.3 trillion per year to climate-resilient development, with clarity and predictability.

Zero emissions economies need to become standard before 2040, if we are to have any chance of avoiding the pervasive persistent cost and chaos of unchecked climate disruption. It is not possible to achieve what the IPCC calls “successful climate-resilient development” without rapid, near total decarbonization. We remind leaders—as they face the reality that their own policies must go far beyond what was agreed at COP30—that efficient decarbonization strategies can build value in local communities and drive better incomes and new investment.

Even if we stop global heating, restore degraded lands, waters, and ecosystems, and return to better than 1.5°C, adaptation and resilience measures would still be a practical, moral, and economic necessity virtually everywhere. What is missing from the discussion is the basic understanding by policy-makers, investors, and industry that this is not a choice. The money and opportunity will either be invested wisely to achieve collective climate rescue, or it will be sacrificed to an ever-worsening polycrisis.

Years of hard work by a committee of experts, engaging with Parties and stakeholders, succeeded in narrowing thousands of proposed Adaptation Indicators down to 100 earlier this year. The COP30 finalized a further condensed list as the Belém Adaptation Indicators. The outcome is historic, though there is concern political decision-makers may have shaped the final list to reflect some countries’ domestic budgetary concerns, creating a risk of maladaptation and related preventable costs.

What remains clear is that leadership is still expected to be voluntary, sporadic, and not comprehensive. The COP30 modeled voluntary leadership in several ways: 

• Brazil committing to sustainably manage 100% of its national waters by 2030—3.68 million square kilometers in total.
• Launching the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, to support better livelihoods and stewardship of critical ecosystems.
• Driving new support for sustained Earth science and insight-sharing with a landmark Declaration on Information Integrity.
• Advancing a wave of emergence efforts aimed at catalyzing wider climate-resilient economic forces.
• The Global Climate Action Agenda shows promising progress in mobilizing major investments outside of government.

The idea of a Global Mutirão for shared climate-resilient development is a meaningful contribution to reshaping how we think about and talk about the future of climate cooperation. We have advocated for a multidimensional cooperative climate crisis response, since before the Paris Agreement, because we need to get a foothold in everyday practice for the new approaches that will allow us to pull each other back from the brink of that worst of all possible climate futures. Ad hoc multilateral cooperative efforts can functionally reduce risk and enhance the investability of climate resilience strategies. 

We wish to emphasize again Brazil’s commitment to sustainably manage all of its 3.68 million square miles of national waters. Integrating watersheds—from summit to sea, including glaciers and sensitive wetland ecosystems—into national climate action strategies will be essential for preventing grave impacts from worsening climate disruption. With everything else that is missing from the real-world activation of climate policy, letting waterways and the ocean be further degraded will make it impossible to rescue ourselves from climate breakdown. Sustainable clean water policies should be a foundational step toward any nation’s claim on future economic and geopolitical leadership. 

As we sift through the adopted negotiating texts that form the Belém Political Package, we see eight specific areas that will need urgent attention in the months ahead:

1. Rapid reductions in global heating pollution are needed, to avoid future risk, harm, and cost. Reshaping energy systems to meet a zero pollution standard is urgently needed.
2. Transformation of food systems is needed to support agroecological and regenerative land use, improved human health, and long-term fiscal stability.
3. Multilevel climate governance must become the mainstream norm, across the world, with local, national, and international efforts reinforcing each other.
4. Indicators of successful Adaptation and Resilience need to be activated, localized, and linked to finance, trade, and incentives.
5. Climate-resilient infrastructure and adaptive design and capacity are needed everywhere; they cannot be an afterthought or a luxury.
6. To ensure these priorities are being met, stakeholders need to play a functional role in the development of multilevel climate policies, through open cooperative climate civics.
7. The health and resilience of ecosystems, watersheds, and biodiversity, are essential to overall security and prosperity.
8. Information integrity and continuous, precise, reliable, cross-referenced, and evolving Earth science observationsis essential to success in all areas and regions.

It is particularly important that climate-related policy and commerce make urgent progress in understanding the value of investment in the most vulnerable. The sooner we reduce serious climate risk to zero, the safer we will all be.

We welcome Brazil’s frequent mention of stakeholder inclusion and of prioritizing the needs of marginalized, front line, and vulnerable communities. But climate justice must be an activated, full-spectrum agenda, through which better choices are made that reduce harm and improve equity and human security. 

The Belém Gender Action Plan can be an important example of putting justice into practice—if it is activated, funded, and mobilized in a cooperative and earnest way. No one benefits from allowing women and girls to remain more vulnerable and marginal, even as climate disruption effects threaten societal breakdown. 

That food systems have been largely left out of the Global Mutirão—the primary COP30 outcome—is a major disappointment, and a surprise. Food systems tie together all 8 of our urgently needed areas of improvement, including urgent decarbonization; they also connect to all 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and they hold the most promise for boosting livelihoods and improving budget outlooks for nations.

The world is burning through $40 billion every day from cost and waste linked to poor performance of food systems. That immense wealth could create the organic funding support, through the everyday economy, needed to consolidate the climate transformation and rescue all nations from senseless cost and chaos. 

The Financial Times notes that “Delegates grappled with global trade rules, critical minerals, a pathway for phasing out fossil fuels and other issues long deemed too toxic or irrelevant for climate COPs.” These discussions are breakthroughs in themselves, but far more progress is needed (trade will eventually need to be 100% climate-aligned and resilience-building), and time is running out. 

It is also true that key countries, heavily invested in climate pollution, spent significant energy trying to prevent those discussions from unlocking major climate progress. Those nations see victory in preventing a reiteration of the agreed universal commitment to a transition away from fossil fuels. Their own future relevance and influence will be gravely diminished if their rhetorical obstruction leaves the world unable to pull together and end the climate crisis before it is irreversible. 

It is meaningful that the COP30 has recognized the crucial role of family farms, both as engines of food security and as levers for a shift to climate-resilient development. The next logical step, beyond talk, is to put in place the moving pieces of a Just Transition to Agroecology and a commitment to regenerative systems as standard practice.

Support for a Roadmap to End Deforestation has grown substantially. At least 92 countries now support a Deforestation Roadmap. A key element of this effort is the shift to removing practices that lead to deforestation from all forms of finance, aligning financial flows with climate goals as called for in Article 2.1c of the Paris Agreement.

The COP30 Presidency notes in its announcement of the RAIZ initiative (Resilient Agriculture Investment for net-Zero land degradation): 

According to a FAO study, more than 20 percent of the world’s agricultural land is currently degraded, equivalent to approximately 1 billion hectares. Degraded soils are less productive and less resilient, contributing to food insecurity and encouraging expansion into natural ecosystems, including deforestation. RAIZ responds to the growing global demand for food security and the preservation of productive ecosystems. United Nations estimates indicate that 2 billion hectares of land are degraded worldwide, directly affecting 3.2 billion people. 

The RAIZ Project will support countries in four primary ways: 

1. mapping of degraded landscapes to identify priority investment areas;
2. identification of viable restoration solutions and the assessment of financing needs;
3. bring together interested investors to create or adapt co-investment vehicles that use public financing to reduce private investment risk and the cost of capital;
4. promote collaboration and knowledge exchange within the restoration ecosystem.

The Global Mutirão is effectively a new way of talking about the cooperative-competitive innovation effort implicitly required by the 1992 Climate Convention. We see the road ahead as requiring added attention to:

• Adaptive design and systems thinking as catalysts for adaptable, locally‑driven solutions;
• Climate-aligned economic security efforts, emphasizing jobs, food affordability, health, and risk-management;
• Attention to tipping points such as disappearance of mountain glaciers, which will have significant costs to all of society;
• Emerging collaborative models that allow vulnerable communities to drive action timelines.

Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Climate Change secretariat, described the COP30 as defined by “unity, science, and economic common sense”. There is no pathway to a sustainable future that is not also a climate-resilient future in which the health of people and resilience of Nature are mainstream metrics.

The most common sense approach to future investment, governance, and geopolitics, is to lead in securing a climate-resilient future for every community, nation, and sector of the economy. The Mutirão—the cooperative engineering of a climate-resilient future—must be much more than hopeful language; it must play out as a real-world cooperative endeavor to raise ambition, spark the climate-resilient economy everywhere, and secure a livable future.