COP28 to COP30: What Actually Happened After the Promises

From 30^th November 2023 to 12^th December 2023, the United Nations Climate Change 28^th Conference of Parties convened in Dubai.  Red Sycamore attended.  As then President of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Equinox GEMTZ, I chaired a panel on “Carbon Credits: The Next Financial Instrument.”  Ng Kin Foong, Chief Executive Officer of Red Sycamore, chaired the panel on “ESG & Startups.”  Both panels ran in the Green Zone, under IEEE.  Two further conferences have taken place since.  The record of what those promises became is worth reading against what was said at the time.

We were past the point of climate change then, and should have called it what it is: a climate crisis.  We were not meeting our climate goals, and Red Sycamore’s position remained that investing in blue carbon credits addresses biodiversity, food security, and water table salination simultaneously.  Blue carbon refers to the carbon stored in coastal and marine ecosystems.

The Kunming-Montreal Framework, and What Followed It

COP28’s conversations built on the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted by almost 200 countries at the 15^th Conference of Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in December 2022, a plan to protect and restore nature by 2050.  The framework set targets for reducing threats to biodiversity, ensuring ecosystem resilience, and mainstreaming biodiversity across government and society, alongside the need for finance, capacity-building, and technology transfer.

COP28 hosted the first Global Stocktake under the Paris Agreement, a two-year process, beginning at COP26, assessing where the world stood on climate action.  The findings were blunt.  The world needed a peak in global greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, a 43% reduction by 2030, and a 60% reduction by 2035, against 2019 levels, to hold warming to 1.5°C.  Parties agreed at COP28 to submit updated climate plans by COP30, aligned with that same 1.5°C limit.  Parties also agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in the energy sector, and to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030, an outcome later branded the UAE Consensus.

COP29, Baku: The Year the Language Changed

COP29 convened in Baku in November 2024.  It set a new climate finance goal of US$300 billion annually by 2035, widely criticised as inadequate against developing countries’ own request for US$1.3 trillion.  Multilateral development banks separately pledged US$120 billion annually by 2030 for low- and middle-income countries.  The Loss and Damage Fund reached full operational status.  Article 6’s rulebook, governing international carbon markets, was finalised, a genuine structural milestone for the compliance carbon market Red Sycamore was built around.

The damage sat elsewhere.  COP28’s own commitment to “transition away from fossil fuels” simply vanished from COP29’s final text.  No mention.  Sustainable Energy for All called it plainly: a reversal of the hard-won progress made the year before.

COP30, Belém: Some Ground Recovered, Some Deliberately Softened

COP30 convened in Belém, Brazil, in November 2025.  The final text called for mobilising at least US$1.3 trillion annually by 2035 for climate action, alongside operationalising and confirming replenishment cycles for the Loss and Damage Fund.  Adaptation finance commitments were softened to “calling for efforts” to triple by 2035, five years later than earlier drafts had proposed.  More than 80 countries backed Brazil’s proposal for an explicit fossil fuel phase-out roadmap.  It did not survive the final hours of negotiation.  The adopted text refers only back to the UAE Consensus from COP28, two years stale.  Brazilian scientist Dr. Carlos Afonso Nobre warned, before the final plenary, that fossil fuel use must reach zero by 2040 to 2045 to avoid warming of up to 2.5°C, a trajectory he said would mean the near-total loss of coral reefs and the collapse of the Amazon rainforest.

One structural win emerged from COP30.  The Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism became fully funded and operational, a full year after Article 6’s rulebook was finalised at COP29.  Carbon markets, the actual commercial mechanism blue carbon credits depend on, are now credible, scalable infrastructure, not merely a negotiating chapter.

The Money, Set Against the Actual Cost

COP28 pledges to the Loss and Damage Fund totalled just over US$600 million by the conference’s close, against a cost the Swiss Re Institute projects could wipe out up to 18% of global GDP by 2050 if temperatures rise 3.2°C.  Asian economies face the sharpest exposure, a 5.5% GDP hit in the best case, 26.5% in a severe one.  At the time that the initial pledge was smaller than the cost of building the Dubai Expo City venue hosting the conference itself, a damning comparison that still holds after two further COPs of incremental progress.

Why Blue Carbon Still Matters More Than Ever

Seagrasses, mangroves, and salt marshes remain among the most effective blue carbon reservoirs available, sequestering carbon dioxide in biomass and sediment, with below-ground rhizomes and roots trapping organic carbon for extended periods.  Seagrass meadows cover a small share of the ocean floor yet account for a disproportionately large share of coastal carbon sequestration, while also stabilising sediment against erosion and sustaining biodiversity for the marine organisms living within them.  These ecosystems remain under sustained threat from coastal development, pollution, and climate change itself, and their degradation releases the very carbon they had locked away.

Article 6 regulates voluntary cooperation among countries pursuing their Nationally Determined Contributions, incorporating both market mechanisms and non-market approaches across finance, technology transfer, and capacity building.  With PACM now operational following COP30, the pathway toward fungible, compliance-grade blue carbon credits has moved from theoretical to structurally real.  Red Sycamore’s own position, built on measurable, verifiable coastal carbon projects, sits directly inside the infrastructure two additional years of negotiation have finally activated.

There is still much work to be done.  COP28 promised a transition away from fossil fuels.  COP29 dropped the phrase entirely.  COP30 recovered some of the finance ambition while failing, again, to secure an explicit phase-out roadmap.  To address this crisis, to advocate for real sustainability, saving the oceans remains the key to continued quality of life, and it remains the one commitment across three consecutive conferences that nobody has yet found a way to quietly delete from the final text.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith & Red Sycamore | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code