Since the United Nations treaty designed to limit climate change went into effect in 1994, international negotiators have met 29 times, in cities all over the world, to try to achieve its goals. Below is the record of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere across those three decades.

The 30^th meeting will occur this November in Belém, the large Brazilian city that serves as a gateway to the Amazon River system. It is a homecoming, in a sense: the famous Earth Summit, a set of meetings that ultimately led to the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, occurred in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro. Until now, none of the negotiating sessions called into existence by that treaty had occurred in Brazil.

Most likely, the ongoing rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and the climate disasters that rise is causing, would have been even worse without these three decades of negotiations. An organisation called Climate Action Tracker has estimated that international pledges have shaved almost a full degree Celsius, or nearly two degrees Fahrenheit, off the likely rise in global temperatures.¹ Nonetheless, it is hard to look at that relentless curve of rising CO₂, known as the Keeling Curve, and see anything but failure. Politicians made a promise to young people and future generations that emissions would peak and then begin to fall, and they have yet to fulfil that promise.

The consequences grow more ominous by the year. The overheating of the ocean and atmosphere seem to be accelerating. Heatwaves, heavy rains, droughts and floods are all intensifying. Events are unfolding essentially as climate scientists predicted decades ago, but faster than they predicted.

The upcoming meeting in Brazil represents a chance to start over. The meeting is to occur there at the invitation of Lula, the Brazilian president we mentioned earlier. He has offered ambitious plans to get the climate talks back on track. That includes looking for ways to ease the decades of hostility between rich and poor countries that have plagued the climate talks. Two years ago, countries pledged that they would begin to ‘transition away’ from fossil fuels, but have yet to devise any real plans for doing so. This is an urgent imperative, and perhaps a difficult one for the Belém talks, given that Brazil itself has been moving to develop new oil fields.²

One of the potential bright spots of the conference is that Lula has offered a creative proposal for a new global fund designed to save tropical forests. The proposed fund, to be known as the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, would introduce a new financial architecture to reward countries for protecting and restoring their forests. In the past, money has been offered to countries or landowners to stop them from cutting forests down, but the new plan would instead pay them for the forests they leave standing. Payments would be awarded for each hectare of maintained or increased forest cover, with deductions applied for forest losses. The mechanism could provide a powerful incentive for countries to halt and reverse deforestation in their territory, potentially one of the fastest and most effective ways to limit climate change.³

We do not know if Lula’s plans will succeed. The tardiness of countries in submitting their new emissions-limiting plans, which we mentioned at the beginning of this report, is certainly an ominous sign. Rich and poor countries remain bitterly divided over money, with the poor countries arguing that they deserve far more help to cope with a problem not of their making.

We hope the Brazilian president uses his famous negotiating skills to secure a solid agreement in Belém. With luck, the decision of the United States to walk away from the talks will backfire, prompting other countries to see that it is in their interest to stick together against Donald Trump’s bullying and threats. The best possible outcome would be a new determination by the rest of the world’s governments to redeem the promises that an earlier generation of leaders made in Rio de Janeiro more than 30 years ago.