As COP30 in Belém came to a close, it didn’t end with a single, tidy gavel. Instead, it wrapped up as a complex package—balancing new initiatives for implementation with the COP decision itself, and reflecting the mutirão spirit of compromise across diverse voices.
We came into COP30 knowing we are still falling short of our climate goals. Yet over these two weeks, we also saw real movement: beyond the formal outcome text, countries, communities, businesses, and civil society began pulling in the same direction.
The pavilions and dialogues revealed an axis of action—solutions we can deploy now and build on tomorrow. Global ambition still falls short, but the inspiration here was clear: the future depends on how quickly we turn ideas into implementation.
Ultimately, COP30 must be assessed in its entirety, not just through the lens of negotiations. For EDF, we measure success at COP30 through partnerships ignited, finance mobilized, and voices engaged.
From tropical forests to the food sector, air quality to adaptation, here are the bright spots that EDF is building on after Belém:
Financing for forests
In the Amazon, the link between forests, people and climate is immediate. That made progress on forest finance one of the most important signals from COP30.
The COP30 Presidency formally launched the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF) with an initial multibillion-dollar pledge from over 50 countries, including Brazil, Indonesia, Norway, Germany, and France. The goal is to provide long-term, reliable finance for countries that keep their tropical forests standing, with a dedicated share (20 percent) of funding for Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
EDF also helped launch the J-REDD+ Coalition, a new effort to help countries to bring high-integrity jurisdictional forest credits to market, and to ensure that the benefits reach the people who are keeping forests standing – from the Amazon to other critical forest regions around the world.
Finally, the COP30 Presidency announced that it plans to draft a roadmap to halt and reverse deforestation, to be presented this time next year. While this roadmap was not included in the formal COP decision, it nonetheless will have the potential to set out a pathway for timely and urgent actions.
Wildfire resilience
Belém also elevated one of the fastest-growing climate risks in forest regions: wildfire.
EDF and partners launched the Wildfire Action Accelerator Pledge, bringing together partners from 18 countries and regions have joined – such as Ecuador, Peru, Ghana, and Kenya – and more than 30 Indigenous and local community organizations. Its aim is to move from reacting to wildfires to preventing them, through community-centered approaches, stronger climate ambition and innovative finance for integrated fire management.
Brazil’s Call to Action on Integrated Fire Management and Wildfire Resilience, endorsed by 50 countries, reinforced that shift. Taken together, these efforts begin to build the global cooperation needed to keep forests – and the communities who depend on them – safer in a hotter, drier world.
Adaptation
Another clear signal from COP30 was the growing centrality of adaptation. Within the final COP30 negotiated outcome, Parties agreed to triple the support for developing countries to increase their resilience against climate change by 2035
But we need to scale adaptation solutions faster, as the impact of climate change are hitting communities and affecting economies today. Throughout the two weeks, EDF convened and joined events that framed adaptation not only as a moral imperative, but as an economic one – a way to reduce risk for municipalities, businesses and households while safeguarding lives and livelihoods. That framing ran through discussions, highlighting the need to move the market on adaptation and make resilience the common-sense economic choice.
Health and air quality
Short-lived climate pollutants, such as methane and black carbon, have outsized impacts on both warming and human health. New efforts including the Super Pollutant Country Action Accelerator and coordinated national plans to target black carbon demonstrate promising steps to reduce these pollutants, while also generating critical co-benefits like cleaner air and economic savings.
Renewed efforts to slash super-pollutants are critical to meet the Global Methane Pledge goal of a 30 percent methane reduction by 2030. Achieving this target could prevent 180,000 premature deaths annually.
EDF was proud to root our work on healthy air at COP30 in the Amazonian communities that hosted us. EDF’s new report, ‘Breathing Life into Amazonian Cities’ set out practical steps to cut air pollution in Brazil’s Amazon region and detailed the health and economic benefits of doing so. Partners used the report in Belém to show how cleaner air, public health and climate action reinforce one another.
The Belém Health Action Plan, backed by more than 80 countries, and the announcement of a Climate and Health Funders Coalition pledging hundreds of millions of dollars to climate-health initiatives, underlined the point: protecting people’s health is a powerful driver to cut pollution.
Global coordination on carbon markets
COP30 delivered an important step toward making climate policy more effective for fast action.
The Open Coalition on Compliance Carbon Markets launched with an initial group of 18 countries. The coalition is designed as a platform for governments to learn from one another and build carbon markets that are more connected, more transparent and better aligned with real-world emissions cuts. Done well, the Coalition can pave the way for these compliance markets to align and collaborate unlocking innovation and investment to cut climate pollution around the world, while promoting cleaner and affordable development.
Sustainable agriculture
Agriculture is a leading driver of climate pollution – it accounts for 40 percent of annual global methane emissions from human-related activities.
In Belém, EDF and partners put forward a plan to scale up finance and increase practical solutions for methane mitigation in resilient agri-food systems. EDF also released a survey of insights from over 150 agricultural finance institutions, finding that most view climate risk as a financial risk that needs to be managed, and offer sustainability-related products and services to farmers.
From COP30 to 2030
COP30 in Belém wasn’t the breakthrough many hoped for, but it wasn’t a failure either. It revealed gaps in emissions, finance, and justice, even as communities worldwide already face the consequences of delayed action.
One key takeaway: mutirão—a Tupi-Guarani word for “community work”—must continue to guide us beyond COP30. With that operating principle, and a coordinated Action Agenda in place, we can turn momentum into real-world impact.
Hosting COP30 on the edge of the Amazon reminded us what’s at stake—and what we can still protect. Our task now is to lock in lasting solutions between Belém and 2030.