F05: From Collective Climate Ambition to Fragmented Adaptation

Bottom Line

COP30 marked the UN's first admission that crossing 1.5°C is inevitable. Yet petrostate opposition, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, with backing from China and India, kept “fossil fuels” out of the official text—the forum can't name the problem it was built to solve. The US sent no delegation to Belém and “drill baby drill” was the message from the White House. Meanwhile, new pipelines and LNG terminals are locking in decades of more extraction. The fight to prevent catastrophic warming is being lost.

This forecast examines what comes next. Cities, states and regions are stepping in with their own bilateral partnerships, their own finance, their own adaptation plans. This distributed model may prove faster and more adaptive than top-down coordination from larger, less agile powers that have shown they won't act. But local action has limits. We may become very good at building sea walls while ignoring what's making the seas rise. 

Go Deeper

• This forecast was updated with a correction on 14.2.26.