United Nations climate summit (COP30) President-designate André Aranha Corrêa do Lago has urged the international community to deliver on the old commitments before making new ones. 

In his fourth open letter this year, Corrêa do Lago said that as this year’s climate summit host, Brazil is committed to its global mutirão against climate change, which seeks all stakeholders to act decisively in the face of climate urgency through an ambitious and integrated Action Agenda at COP30.  

The global mutirão, which means coming together to work on a shared task and support one another, will focus on a process of global mobilisation, the Action Agenda, formal UN Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations in Bonn, Germany, in June and November in Belém, Brazil and the Leaders’ Summit. 

He hopes mutirão will connect the climate regime to people’s real lives and accelerate the implementation of the Paris Agreement on climate change by stimulating action and structural adjustments. 

Referring to the old commitments, the COP30 Presidency wants to focus on implementing the agreed response at COP28 in Dubai, UAE, to the 2023 Global Stocktake, including transitioning away from fossil fuels. 

Brazilian diplomats who will preside over the COP30 climate summit say they are focused on ensuring the hundreds of climate pledges already made by governments, corporations and others at previous COP meetings are met, rather than making them to make fresh promises. 

Key goals 

Speaking to journalists on Thursday, June 19, 2025, in Bonn during the ongoing mid-year UN climate conference in Bonn, to lay the groundwork for this year’s climate summit in Brazil, COP30’s High Level Champion Dan Ioschope said that, while they are not against new initiatives, his team are “very much focused on what has already been drawn (up) and solutions that are already coming up over time”.  

For example, before COP29 last year in Baku, the Azerbaijani presidency announced a plan to get fossil fuel producers to put money into a climate fund – but an event where it was due to be unveiled in Baku was quietly dropped, and nothing further has been announced since. Another Azerbaijani idea for a COP29 truce was criticised as a “PR exercise” and failed to bring temporary global peace as hoped. 

In his latest open letter released on Friday, June 20, 2025, Corrêa do Lago said he wanted organisations around the world – including businesses, civil society and national and local governments – to help implement the key goals set in response to the Global Stocktake under the UN climate process. 

The stocktake is a 45-page document produced after months of research and consultation by the United Nations in September 2023, which summarises how far governments are falling short of their collective climate goals under the 2015 Paris Agreement that seeks to keep global average temperatures below the key threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius (°C) above pre-industrial levels. 

A few months later, at COP28 in Dubai, all governments agreed to respond to the stocktake by calling on each other to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems and triple renewable energy capacity and double energy-efficient improvements by 2030 – among other measures. 

Some oil-dependent governments like Saudi Arabia have downplayed the commitment to transition away from fossil fuels, and government negotiations on implementing it have floundered as a result, struggling to find consensus even to repeat the same language in documents. 

Ever since it was finalised, countries have been at odds on how to implement the first Global Stocktake. It was an outcome of a multi-year negotiated process, including both technical and political output. The question for now is how to give effect to the 196-paragraph, highly detailed first stocktake from two years ago. 

But in his open letters, Corrêa do Lago emphasises the Global Stocktake’s importance, calling it our “compass for Mission 1.5,” referring to efforts to meet the Paris agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. 

Scientists have noted that it is not too late to limit the damage of the climate and weather extremes by phasing out fossil fuels and doing more to protect communities from the dangers of worsening heatwaves, droughts, floods and storms. 

‘Global NDC’ 

World Weather Attribution’s lead and senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London, Friederike Otto, says the unrelenting suffering could be alleviated if we stop burning coal, oil and gas, use renewable energy to power our economies instead, and adapt climate impacts. 

“The top resolution for 2025 must be transitioning away from fossil fuels, which will make the world a safer and more stable place,” said Otto. 

Corrêa do Lago says the COP30 Presidency’s aim is to bring “a new dynamic to global climate action”, aligning everybody’s efforts in a global mobilisation (mutirão) to achieve the Global Stocktake goals as a “global NDC”- globally determined contribution.  

NDCs (nationally determined contributions) are the climate plans each government is expected to submit to the UN every five years. 

He announced a list of 30 “thematic areas” under six “axes” that will be pursued, including ensuring universal access to energy, improving solid waste management and tackling disinformation about climate change. 

COP30 CEO Ana Toni said that each axis – for exampl,e transitioning energy, industry and transport – would have its own physical pavilion at COP30 in Bel,ém where it can be discussed by delegates. 

Centre for Climate and Energy Solutions vice-president for international strategies, who followed the stocktake discussions closely, told Climate Home News, an award-winning independent digital publication reporting on the international politics of the climate crisis that the Brazilian proposal was a really good idea and praised the COP30 host nation for “thinking outside the box”. 

It will help governments, businesses and other organisations interested in particular parts of the Global Stocktake response – like doubling energy efficiency – to pursue those goals, he said. 

Greenpeace has called on Brazil to get all countries to agree to a joint political statement – known as a cover decision – at COP30 that would include setting out how they will meet a global goal to halt and reverse forest destruction by 2030. 

Since governments committed to that goal in 2023, the loss of tropical primary forests has increased. Toni said Brazil had not yet decided if there would be a cover decision in Belém.  

Climate campaign group 350.org told Climate Home the new approach presented on Friday by the COP30 Presidency offers a “useful streamlining” by addressing the proliferation of initiatives and lack of overall coherence. 

But Andreas Sieber, the group’s associate director of policy and campaigns, said the presidency should not assume that this alone will be sufficient to respond to the glaring crisis to be addressed at the negotiations.  

“Reforms are not enough to meet the moment,” he added, calling for commitments to phase out fossil fuels and accelerate renewable energy to be reflected in the formal outcome at COP30 and urged leaders to offer concrete steps to “advance a just transition”.