BELEM, Brazil — Negotiators at COP30 adopted a slimmed-down “Belém Package” Saturday that calls for efforts to at least triple adaptation finance by 2035 and sets new markers for judging how countries are responding to worsening climate impacts. Approved after talks ran into overtime, the package avoids any explicit fossil-fuel phaseout language and drew complaints from several delegations, Nov. 22, 2025.
Brazil’s presidency said 195 parties backed 29 decisions spanning adaptation, finance, trade, technology and a new just transition mechanism, outlined in its official overview of the adopted Belém Package.
What COP30’s Belém Package means for adaptation finance
The summit’s headline “global mutirão” decision leans heavily on adaptation and support. It reaffirms the earlier call to double adaptation finance by 2025, then raises the political ambition with nonbinding wording: The text “calls for efforts to at least triple adaptation finance by 2035,” according to the final UNFCCC decision released at the close of the talks.
Finance is the connective tissue running through the package. The same decision again points to a post-2025 climate finance pathway of at least $1.3 trillion per year by 2035 from all public and private sources, while emphasizing a goal of mobilizing at least $300 billion per year by 2035 for developing countries, with developed countries taking the lead.
Brazil framed adaptation as a test of credibility for COP30 and for the wider U.N. climate process. A U.N. report cited in Reuters’ reporting on Brazil’s pre-summit adaptation finance push put developing-country adaptation needs at about $310 billion a year by 2035, compared with roughly $26 billion in international public adaptation finance flows in 2023.
Negotiators also endorsed 59 voluntary indicators under the Global Goal on Adaptation, intended to track progress across sectors such as water, food and health. Critics said a shorter, less prescriptive list could make it harder to compare results and defend future finance increases, even as vulnerable countries argue they need faster, simpler access to grants and concessional funding.
Where COP30 leaves the fossil-fuel phaseout debate
For many governments, the summit’s defining absence was what the package did not say about the fuels driving most emissions. Reuters reported the compromise omitted any mention of fossil fuels, after late-stage objections from some Latin American countries and European officials who wanted explicit language on transitioning away from oil, gas and coal. Acknowledging the frustration, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said, “I’m not saying we’re winning the climate fight. But we are undeniably still in it, and we are fighting back.”
The stop-and-go pattern is familiar. The IISD Earth Negotiations Bulletin summary of COP26 in Glasgow recorded the first reference in the U.N. process to phasing down unabated coal power and phasing out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies, alongside a call for developed countries to double adaptation finance by 2025. Two years later, the IISD summary of COP28 in Dubai described the global stocktake outcome as acknowledging the need to transition away from fossil fuels — language many countries wanted COP30 to strengthen rather than sidestep.
Brazil’s presidency said the fossil-fuel conversation will continue outside the formal COP30 decision text. In an Associated Press account of the final plenary, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago said the tough discussions would continue “even if they are not reflected in this text we just approved.”
Whether COP30’s finance-forward bargain becomes a bridge to faster emissions cuts — or a ceiling — will be tested quickly as countries update climate plans and negotiators turn to COP31.
