The Belém Political Package: Institutional Progress or an Illusion Masking Climate Regression? - Rami Abi Ammar
The Belém Political Package: Institutional Progress or an Illusion Masking Climate Regression? - Rami Abi Ammar
In the birthplace of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), COP30 concluded under the familiar tension between spectacle and substance. Headlines highlighted institutional innovations and new accountability mechanisms, yet the conference once again deferred action on the urgent, material realities of the climate crisis. More than three decades into the UNFCCC, this pattern raises a central question: how should we measure the success of a COP, and what does it mean to respond when procedural gains arrive without the concrete change the world urgently needs?
Headline Outcomes
Climate negotiations in Belém concluded with the adoption of the
'Belém Political Package,' a series of decisions that achieved some
institutional advances, amidst a process marked by significant procedural
tensions. Hailed as the headline outcome, the BAM creates, for the first time,
a political and institutional space through which states can be assessed
against clear mandates and indicators, shifting just transition from a
rhetorical commitment to a measurable obligation. Its strength lies not in finance
(since it provides none), but in the accountability architecture it introduces.
Yet its potential will depend entirely on whether civil society can use this
space to drive implementation at a moment when finance negotiations have
collapsed, and the material foundations of a just transition remain absent.
Despite
representing a major advance in the Just Transition Work Programme, the
mechanism’s operationalisation has been postponed. Instead of launching BAM at
COP30, Parties deferred action to COP31 and tasked the Subsidiary Bodies with
preparing a draft decision by mid-2026. This delay leaves workers, communities,
and countries without the immediate support urgently required to scale up just
transition efforts. Still, the Belém decision embeds the strongest rights-based
and gender-responsive framing to be adopted in a COP text on just transition,
affirming a wide set of human, labour, environmental, and collective rights,
including those of Indigenous Peoples, people of African descent, local
communities, migrants, informal workers, and groups in vulnerable situations.
By moving beyond earlier language that merely required governments to “respect,
promote and consider” rights, it establishes a more robust and actionable
foundation that expects Parties not simply to acknowledge rights, but to
realise them in practice.
However, across the board, COP30 delivered diluted responsibilities:
the financial obligation of developed countries under Article 9 was reduced to
voluntary collective efforts, the New Collective Quantified Goal on finance was
set without an operational delivery plan, and adaptation finance commitments
were pushed to 2035, far beyond what frontline countries can endure. Loss and
Damage remained a fund in name only, contradicting the International Court of
Justice’s affirmation of States’ reparations obligations. Critically, the final
decision that emerged in Belém did not include a single reference to fossil
fuels.
This outcome reflects deeper limitations in the UNFCCC process itself.
Over three decades, multilateral climate negotiations have evolved into a
system in which participation can sometimes substitute for action, and the
performance of consensus can overshadow the absence of real progress. The
mechanisms designed to build collective ambition now risk becoming an end in
themselves; spaces where speeches and processes generate the appearance of
movement even as fossil fuel production, and thus emissions, continue to rise.
The widening gap between rhetoric and material reality signals that the system,
as currently practiced, is not delivering the transformation required.
Actors and Access
The scale of the fossil fuel lobby participation at COP30 broke
records yet again, highlighting the deep structural capture of global climate
governance by the industry. According to the Kick Big Polluters Out (KBPO)
coalition, more than 1,600 lobbyists linked to oil, gas, and coal interests
were accredited, meaning that one in every 25 participants represented the very
industries driving the climate crisis. This marks a 12% increase from COP29 in
Baku and brings the five-year total to nearly 7,000 fossil fuel-linked
participants.
Their presence is not limited to trade associations or external
observers. Major corporations such as ExxonMobil, BP, and TotalEnergies were
embedded throughout the process, and in some cases, directly within national
delegations. The French delegation, for example, included 22 fossil fuel-linked
delegates, while Norway also brought senior industry actors into its official
negotiating team, blurring the line between public duty and private interest.
This structural entrenchment extends into emerging “solutions” spaces as well.
A parallel report from the Centre for International Environmental Law (CIEL)
found that 531 lobbyists attended COP30 promoting carbon capture and storage
(CCS), a technology increasingly criticised for entrenching fossil dependence rather
than enabling a genuine transition.
Yet while over 3,000 Indigenous delegates
travelled to Belém, many at great personal cost, their access to negotiation
rooms, ministerial huddles, and high-stakes negotiations in the ‘Blue Zone’
remained limited to only 360. Their movements were constrained, their
interventions relegated to side events, and their lived experiences outweighed
by the numerical advantage and institutional reach of fossil fuel lobbyists.
The dynamics inside the COP also reflect a broader structural inversion, where
instead of advocacy shaping the COP, COP increasingly shapes advocacy. Civil society groups arrive with ambitious demands
grounded in science and justice, only to be channelled into pre-determined
processes, constrained by diplomatic red lines, and forced to tailor their
strategies to the shrinking space available within negotiations.
Taken
together, these patterns illustrate a governance landscape in which fossil fuel
interests maintain disproportionate access and influence, shaping language and
agendas, weakening outcomes, and undermining efforts to deliver an equitable
and science-aligned climate response. Major oil producers and several emerging
economies made clear that any reference to a fossil fuel roadmap was
unacceptable. Delegations spent nights in huddles trying to find compromise
language, but every formulation that hinted at a structured transition away
from coal, oil, and gas was rejected. As the hours passed, all mention of
fossil fuels was gradually stripped from the negotiating text.
Fossil Fuels at the Core
Even as voluntary targets become more
ambitious, emissions and climate metrics fail to capture the full dangers of
the fossil fuel economy. Fossil fuel extraction and expansion present a
critical human rights issue, unfolding in the intermissions between
negotiations. More than two billion people, disproportionately from
marginalized and low-income communities, now live dangerously close to
polluting fossil fuel infrastructure, heightening health, environmental, and
human rights risks, according to Amnesty International. Fossil fuel extraction
is inseparable from patterns of violence, dispossession, militarisation, and
systemic discrimination - realities that Indigenous Peoples, local communities,
and marginalised groups across the world have been documenting for decades.
These are not collateral impacts. They are the predictable consequences of an
economic model that treats territories and people as expendable inputs in the
pursuit of profit and power. At COP30, Indigenous representatives repeatedly
drew attention to this reality, emphasising that the struggle for climate
justice cannot be disentangled from struggles for land rights,
self-determination, and protection from state–corporate violence.
Even the most celebrated aspects of the
Belém package, BAM, cannot ultimately serve people and communities if they are
decoupled from the material reality of a world still expanding fossil fuel
production. A just transition is not merely an institutional architecture, but
a reordering of economies, livelihoods, and rights. Its purpose and its
integrity depend on moving in tandem with a credible and time-bound trajectory
to phase out oil, gas, and coal. Without such a pathway, BAM risks becoming an
elegant framework suspended above an unchanged energy system, unable to
translate its principles into the protections and opportunities that workers
and frontline communities urgently need.
This is not a call to withdraw from
multilateral spaces, but a call to re-imagine the relationship between advocacy
and diplomacy. If COPs are to serve as instruments for transformation rather
than arenas of managed decline, civil society must reclaim its agenda-setting
power. That requires treating the UNFCCC not as the primary arena for climate
justice, but as one theatre among many, and refusing to allow its limitations
to define the horizon of what is possible. It requires strategies that confront
fossil fuel expansion at the national and regional levels, that strengthen
rights-based frameworks, that build cross-movement alliances, and that organise
political pressure capable of shifting state behaviour outside the narrow
confines of consensus-based negotiations.
At this moment, Arab civil society in
particular has an opportunity, and an obligation, to articulate a climate
politics that centres rights, equity, and material transformation, as outlined
in ANND’s Civil Society
Position Paper. This means
confronting the expansion of oil and gas across the region, demanding
accountability for environmental harms and human rights violations linked to
extraction, defending the sovereignty and self-determination of Indigenous and
local communities, and insisting that any transition begins with an end to
fossil-fuel expansion, not with promises of distant decarbonisation. It also
means challenging the narrative that COP outcomes, no matter how thin,
constitute progress. Progress must be measured by reduced emissions, safer communities,
restored ecosystems, and fulfilled rights, not by institutional innovation or
the appearance of multilateral momentum.
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