By Deborah Martinez
As delegates gathered in Belém, Brazil, from November 10 to 21 for the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30), expectations ran high. Marking a decade since the Paris Agreement, the summit raised hopes for breakthroughs in climate-adaptation finance, green energy transitions, and stronger emissions pledges. Instead, it exposed how populism has reshaped global climate governance, replacing cooperation with confrontation, facts with opinions, and urgency with delay.
The atmosphere in Belém was tense from the start. Just days before COP30 opened, Bill Gates released a controversial memo arguing that climate change is less urgent and “not life-threatening” compared to other global challenges. The timing was devastating: Long regarded as a prominent advocate of climate action, Gates handed corporations a convenient rationale to retreat from their commitments precisely when they were most needed. Yet his message did not emerge in a vacuum. It echoed rhetoric long used by Donald Trump to downplay the urgency of global warming and aligned with a broader trend of corporate leaders hedging their bets as populist forces gain ground.
The United States’ (U.S.) absence from COP30, the first time in the conference’s history that the country sent no delegation, further crystallized populism’s influence. Trump’s January 2025 withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, his second exit from the accord after first leaving it in 2017, had immediate consequences. The world’s second-largest emitter severed itself from climate obligations, leaving a vacuum that fundamentally altered negotiations. Its withdrawal not only made visible the reduction of global emission commitments; it also eroded the fragile spirit of multilateral cooperation that had sustained previous agreements, signaling that even long-standing obligations can be abandoned without meaningful consequences and rendering negotiations increasingly performative and agreements less reliable. As European Union (EU) Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra put it, “the most dominant geopolitical player” walking away was a “watershed moment,” one that was bound to damage the entire process.
But the U.S. retreat was only the most visible symptom of a global pattern. Across continents, populist leaders have redrawn climate politics in strikingly similar ways. Figures like Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán have fueled skepticism toward scientific evidence and cast climate institutions as part of a distant, self-serving elite. Others, such as Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, have claimed green credentials yet clashed with international bodies and promoted extractive practices. These differences in rhetoric have masked a shared incentive structure.
Populists gain electorally from casting climate policy as an external imposition, from politicizing measures whose benefits are dispersed and whose costs are immediate, and from converting climate questions into identity battles that mobilize their base.
The outcome is not incidental but engineered: The populist logic exploits the gaps and exclusions embedded in sustainability efforts and discourses, such as energy transitions that raise household costs, carbon policies that penalize workers, conservation schemes that displace Indigenous and rural communities, and global frameworks that ask the South to adjust while the North maintains its privileges. These structural blind spots make it easier for populists to claim that they alone defend the people, ensuring that climate action is slowed, regulatory oversight hollowed out, and high-emission sectors strengthened.
While the incentive structures and mechanisms may vary across cases, scientific evidence corroborates the broader pattern in their effects: Countries governed by populist leaders consistently post lower Environmental Performance Index scores and display deeper gaps between their environmental pledges and actualoutcomes. This shows that populism is not only a discursive logic shaped by sets of ideas and internal contradictions, but also a force that manifests in measurable environmental outcomes and concrete policy effects.
The paralysis manifests in concrete failures. The long-awaited five-year update of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the nonbinding climate action plans submitted individually by countries and meant to be COP30’s centerpiece, quickly unraveled. India, under Hindu-nationalist populist Prime Minister Narendra Modi, announced it would postpone submitting its pledge until December, while Russia, governed by an authoritarian populist regime, presented targets so weak and dependent on questionable forest-absorption calculations that they effectively allow emissions to rise. These are not peripheral players. They rank among the planet’s biggest polluters, making their diluted commitments catastrophic for global climate goals.
The numbers tell a damning story. Since the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015, global greenhouse gas emissions have not gone down—they have shot up. In 2024, emissions hit a record 57.7 gigatonnes of CO₂ equivalent, a 2.3% increase from the previous year. This growth rate exceeds the average annual increase of the 2010s and rivals the rapid rise of the 2000s. The trajectory is no anomaly; it is the predictable outcome when major emitters delay, dilute, or abandon their commitments under populist pressure.
With the world’s major emitters operating under a populist logic, smaller and more vulnerable nations were left to carry the weight of the unresolved, or even unaddressed, issues of the summit.
That imbalance became clear in the wrangling over the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) indicators—an initiative aimed at creating a common set of metrics for tracking countries’ preparedness for droughts, floods, heat waves, and other climate impacts. The African Group, the Arab Group, and the Like-Minded Developing Countries argued that the proposed indicators were “intrusive,” misaligned with national policy processes, and risked shifting responsibility onto developing nations without securing the finance they had been promised. They pushed to delay adoption until COP32, turning what was meant to be a technical milestone into another flashpoint in a negotiation landscape increasingly shaped by mistrust, fragmentation, and the spillover effects of populist retrenchment.
The weakening extended beyond policy to information itself. Populist leaders and their allies have spent years amplifying climate disinformation, attacking scientists, and sowing cynicism about the crisis’s urgency. This sustained assault generated the very confusion that seeped into the COP30 negotiations. In response, Brazil and 11 other countries launched the Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change—the first intergovernmental pledge to confront climate disinformation and promote science-based communication. The declaration was an implicit rebuke to populist narratives undermining cooperation, but it also revealed how defensive climate advocates have become.
The conference’s physical disruption mirrored its political chaos. On November 20, a fire broke out in the Blue Zone, the official area where the negotiations took place, forcing evacuations at a critical moment. Countries were locked in tense debates over fossil fuel phaseouts and climate finance, racing against Friday’s scheduled conclusion.
The fire in COP30’s primary venue symbolized the broader emergency: time running out, talks stalling, misinformation rising, and the machinery of climate governance breaking down under pressure.
Yet populism’s impact extends beyond immediate summit failures. It fractures the very foundation of collective action. The challenge facing global climate politics is no longer simply about building consensus or mobilizing resources; it is about learning to govern effectively when powerful actors operate from a political logic that destabilizes cooperation itself. Populist leaders thrive on rejecting international constraints and casting global institutions as threats to national sovereignty. This makes the Paris Agreement’s architecture, which depends on voluntary commitments and mutual trust, increasingly untenable.
Some observers detect opportunity in the U.S. absence. Without American negotiators potentially weakening deals or advocating against climate action, other nations might forge stronger agreements. China, the EU, and emerging powers like Brazil can step into leadership roles. But this optimism overlooks a harder truth: The populist challenge is not confined to any single country or leader. It represents a broader ideological shift that privileges short-term national interests over long-term collective survival.
COP30 will ultimately be remembered not for breakthrough agreements but for revealing just how deeply populism has seeped into the machinery of global climate governance. The summit exposed fractured negotiations, opaque backroom bargaining, and a system struggling to operate under mounting geopolitical strain. It is no coincidence that the conference closed without a single new commitment on fossil fuels, despite the promises raised by the new package of NDCs.
As the talks in Belém limped toward their conclusion, one question loomed over the proceedings: How can climate action stand when the very actors meant to uphold it are the ones pulling its foundations apart?
The answer remains uncertain. What is clear is that the old playbook of scientific reports, international agreements, and voluntary and long-term commitments no longer suffices. Climate diplomacy must grapple with a fundamental reality: Populism is not a temporary disruption to be weathered but a structural challenge that demands new strategies. Until climate advocates develop effective responses to populist politics, summits like COP30 will continue producing paralysis rather than progress, leaving the planet’s future hostage to the very forces accelerating its destruction.
Deborah Martínez is a PhD candidate at Radboud University studying how populist discourses frame sustainability. She was a Global Forum Fellow at the CEU Democracy Institute and serves on BYU’s OPUS Steering Committee. Before academia, she worked as an international journalist for Nikkei, Russia Today, and TV Azteca.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
