2.3.2 Global geopolitical efforts

News article

Q&A: what are the main issues at Cop30 and why do they matter?

Cop returns to its Brazilian roots and attempts to map a path to crucial emissions cuts that navigates financial, scientific and ethical aspects of the climate crisis

The Guardian · 10 November 2025

Key terms

• Adaptation
  • Means anticipating the adverse effects of climate change and taking appropriate action to prevent or minimise the damage they can cause, or taking advantage of opportunities that may arise.

• Climate finance
  • Money moved to lower-income countries to help them cut emissions and adapt. It can take the form of grants, loans or private investment, and the balance between them is contested because loans add to debt. At COP29 in 2024 richer countries agreed a goal of at least USD 300 billion a year by 2035.

• Common but differentiated responsibilities
  • The principle that all countries must act on climate change, but not equally. It recognises that industrialised countries produced most historical emissions and have greater capacity to act, so they are expected to lead and to help fund others. Written into the UNFCCC in 1992, it is the reason negotiations repeatedly stall over who pays.

• Conference of the Parties
  • The annual meeting where countries that signed the UNFCCC negotiate climate action. Usually shortened to COP and numbered in sequence, so COP21 was the twenty-first. Decisions are taken by consensus, which means a single country can block an outcome. COP21 produced the Paris Agreement in 2015.

• Geopolitical
  • Focuses on political power linked to geographic space. At the level of international relations, geopolitics is a method of studying foreign policy to understand, explain, and predict international political behaviour through geographical variables. These include area studies, climate, topography, demography and natural resources.

• Loss and damage
  • The harm from climate change that is too severe to adapt to or to prevent. It covers sudden events such as cyclones and slow processes such as sea level rise and desertification. Because the countries suffering most loss and damage are rarely the ones that caused the emissions, it is the sharpest point of dispute in climate negotiations. A dedicated fund was agreed at COP27 in 2022.

• Mitigation
  • The action of reducing the severity, seriousness, or painfulness of something.

• Nationally determined contribution
  • A country's own pledge of what it will do to cut emissions and adapt to climate change. Usually shortened to NDC. Every party to the Paris Agreement must submit one and update it every five years, each time more ambitious than the last. Because NDCs are set by each country rather than imposed, the Paris Agreement is described as bottom-up.

• UNFCCC
  • The 1992 UN treaty under which almost all countries negotiate on climate change. Its full name is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It entered into force in 1994 and now has 198 parties. It sets no binding emissions targets itself; instead it creates the annual Conference of the Parties at which agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement are negotiated.