COP30: Your Guide to the 2025 UN Climate Conference

The next UN climate conference will be COP30, and it will take place from November 10-21, 2025 in Belém, the capital of the Brazilian state of Pará.

This guide covers background info about climate COPs, summarizes what happened at COP29 and shares lessons to apply for upcoming COP30.

COP, standing for the Conference of the Parties, is an annual high-level meeting organized by the United Nations, and the Climate COP is organized by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). 

Climate COPs are important because they bring together delegates from nearly every country on Earth to negotiate global goals for tackling climate change, present their individual countries’ plans for contributing to those goals and report on their progress.

The climate COP meets in a different country every year to demonstrate the importance of collaboration between the world’s nations. COP30 will take place this year in Belém, Brazil. This follows COP29, which brought nearly 200 countries together to coordinate global climate action during November 2024 in Baku, Azerbaijan.

With slow negotiations and difficult consensus-building, COP29 fell short of the major breakthroughs many had hoped for.

In its final hours, countries agreed to mobilize US $300 billion per year in climate finance by 2035—a figure well below the US $1 trillion that experts view as the minimum needed to protect vulnerable communities and deliver on global mitigation and adaptation goals.

However, the outcome did include a broader call for all public and private actors to “scale up and secure efforts” toward mobilizing an additional US $1 trillion annually by 2035 for developing countries.

In practical terms, the US $300 billion is a defined, government-led commitment, while the additional US $1 trillion represents a collective, aspirational target spanning all sources of finance.

Closing the finance gap will depend on how governments, development banks, investors and civil society turn ambition into implementation. We all have a lot of work to do to make sure this happens.

Despite the obstacles, there were bright spots, including an agreement that promises to unleash the power of well-regulated carbon markets. There were also positive developments outside the formal negotiations, like refreshed commitments from Brazil and other countries.

In response to the need for an economic blueprint to address the climate crisis, TNC created the Playbook for Climate Finance: a roadmap for unlocking the flow of finance to the solutions our planet urgently needs. It gathers a decade of breakthroughs into one guide and includes 10 bold approaches that prove we can tackle climate change, protect nature and strengthen communities at scale.

Here is what we think is in the cards for this year’s negotiations

Finance Roadmap: Finalizing the Baku-to-Belém Roadmap to operationalize the new US $1.3 trillion climate finance goal, including who pays, how it’s tracked and how private capital is mobilized.

Stronger NDCs: Pushing countries to submit enhanced 2035 climate plans aligned with the 1.5 °C target and linked to the Global Stocktake outcomes.

Adaptation Metrics: Agreeing on a workable set of Global Goal on Adaptation indicators and financing mechanisms that balance rigor with feasibility for developing nations.

Just Transition & Loss & Damage: Defining financing and equity frameworks that ensure fair transitions for workers and vulnerable countries and scale up loss & damage funding.

Implementation & Accountability: Shifting focus from pledges to delivery and oversight, strengthening reporting, institutional coordination and real-world project pipelines.

We're advocating for a swifter transition to renewable energy sources, greater use of natural climate solutions and more investment from both the public and private sectors, especially to help those countries that have been most affected by the impacts of climate change.

We're also working to ensure there is increased inclusivity and equity in climate policy processes since the leadership of marginalized groups, like Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs), are essential to protecting cultural and biological diversity.

As a global society, we must:

1. Phase out fossil fuels. We must accelerate the equitable phase-out of fossil fuels to achieve net zero by 2050 or sooner and transition to renewable energy.
2. Invest financial flows toward people, climate and nature. We must mobilize US $1.3 trillion for nature-positive projects, policies and practices.
3. Build climate-resilient societies. We must empower groups who steward nature to secure their homes, livelihoods and futures.

Every action matters. Every ounce of carbon, every fraction of a degree, every day matters. Our leaders’ climate actions matter, and your climate actions matter too.