Overcoming Obstruction and Reimagining the Planetary Climate System at COP30

As delegates gather in Belém, Brazil, for COP30 (Conference of the Parties) this November, the meeting carries particular historical weight. The summit marks the thirtieth conference since the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) entered into force and a decade since the Paris Agreement was signed. The Brazilian host presidency has framed COP30 as a pivotal moment to accelerate implementation, restore trust, and reset the multilateral climate process. Yet history suggests that ambition alone will not be enough. Persistent forms of obstruction, institutional complexity, and a negotiation system designed for another era threaten to mark Belém as just another iteration of a process struggling to deliver on its promises.

Obstruction as Legacy, Not Accident

Obstruction—the strategic delay, dilution, or deflection of climate action—has long shaped outcomes under the UNFCCC. Typically defined by overt denial and rejection, obstruction can also take more subtle forms: reframing agenda items, narrowing definitions, shifting issues into less consequential forums, or insisting on “perfect” solutions before acting. These tactics can appear procedural or technocratic, but their cumulative effect is political: slowing progress, watering down ambition, and shifting responsibility away from those most capable of acting.

To understand why obstruction persists, however, we need to look beyond behavioral tactics to the institutional architecture that enables it. The UNFCCC was born out of contradictions: climate change was framed as a planetary crisis that transcends borders, yet its solution was built on the narrow logics of bounded states and idealized sovereignty, eliding the vast transnational actors and processes beyond the clean territorial grasp. Transformative proposals from the Global South, including per capita emissions convergence, compensation for historical emissions, binding non-conditional finance, non-commercial technology transfer, and a “Law of the Atmosphere,” were sidelined during the negotiations of the early 1990s. In their place emerged a Framework Convention based on consensus decision-making and non-binding commitments. Those founding compromises built obstruction into the system itself: decision-making paralysis, asymmetrical capacity, and the continual deferral of responsibility.

The consequences are clearly visible today. Consensus rule enables a handful of states to block language and finance supported by a majority of others. Voluntary pledges under the Paris Agreement have replaced the Kyoto Protocol’s binding obligations. Deep asymmetries in financial resources, negotiating capacity, and geopolitical power enable wealthier and fossil fuel-producing countries to shape agendas and outcomes disproportionately. Even the United States federal government, which will not be present at COP30 and is in the process of withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, has threatened additional tariffs on certain states committed to climate action. Obstruction at COP30 will continue a pattern set in motion three decades ago.

Structural Obstruction: Ecologically Unequal Exchange and Carbon Leakage

Obstruction is not confined to negotiation rooms. It is embedded in the planetary climate governance system itself. Long ago, the Kyoto Protocol adopted a territorial accounting system that allocates greenhouse-gas emissions to the geographical location where they are produced, rather than where the resulting goods or services are ultimately consumed. This model, inherited from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and national economic statistics and later territorialized into municipal inventories, treats emissions as if they are spatially bounded and administratively controllable. It enables governments to practically measure progress within their borders while ignoring carbon embodied in trade, global supply chains, and financial flows that sustain production elsewhere. The system embeds a spatial blind spot, and with it, a form of structural obstruction.

The territorial accounting model allows relatively wealthier nations and non-state actors—those that possess the greatest capacity to effect meaningful planetary change—to appear as climate leaders while outsourcing high-carbon production and resource extraction to the periphery. This dynamic of ecologically unequal exchange (EUE)—the structural transfer of materials, energy, and ecological degradation from the periphery to the core—is concealed by territorial accounting, enabling affluent states and cities to register declining emissions even as they import carbon-intensive goods and export environmental harm. These patterns are not new but rather extend the extractive geographies forged through imperial and colonial expansion, now refracted through the circuits of globalization that continue to organize production, trade, and climate responsibility along historically unequal lines. This is also the logic behind carbon leakage, the process by which climate regulations in one jurisdiction push polluting industries to relocate to areas with weaker rules, effectively shifting emissions rather than reducing them.

Institutional Strain and Overextension

The institution meant to govern these questions has become a labyrinth. The UNFCCC system consists of numerous overlapping governing, subsidiary, and constituted bodies—the COP, CMP, CMA, Subsidiary Body for Implementation, Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice, and joint Subsidiary Body meetings, among others—each with its own agenda and reporting process. Negotiations sprawl across hundreds of agenda items, diluting focus and diffusing accountability. The procedural maze mirrors the very fragmentation of greenhouse gasses it is meant to manage.

This expansion has come at a cost. The carbon footprints of COP have grown, while diplomatic returns have diminished. Planetary emissions continue to rise, as the UN Environment Programme’s annual Emissions Gap Report recently highlights: Updated Nationally Determined Contributions, detailing actions through 2035, will yield between 2.3–2.8°C warming since the preindustrial baseline by the end of the century. The arbitrary 1.5°C refrain has become a broken record of proverbial affirmation, repeated in plenary halls even as the material conditions for achieving it have slipped away.

The proliferation of parallel meetings and pavilions has also turned COP into a global spectacle whose carbon footprint and symbolic weight outstrip its policy impact. The performative expansion of side events and Green Zone trade shows rarely addresses the structural obstacles embedded in the system’s foundations.

Belém As a Reckoning

Despite its dysfunction, wholly abandoning the UNFCCC would be a grave mistake. Planetary coordination remains indispensable: without it, the risk of fragmented regulation, trade retaliation, and carbon leakage will only grow. Certain regions might deepen domestic decarbonization but export emissions abroad, intensifying ecologically unequal exchange. With the current trend of fortress eco-nationalism, from California to the EU, the world faces the illusion of progress without actual planetary benefit.

Reform must therefore focus on repurposing the institution, not replacing it. Streamlined agendas and governing/subsidiary bodies, greater use of qualified-majority voting to overcome vetoes, limited conference size, integration of non-state actors (especially municipalities) into substantive negotiations and legal commitments, unrestricted rights to protest against geopolitical events like genocide, and stronger integration between trade, labor, and climate institutions could help the UNFCCC system evolve from a performative diplomatic ritual into a genuine coordinating framework.

COP30 can be a reckoning with procedural, structural, and economic obstruction that have defined three decades of inequitable climate governance. Addressing obstruction means confronting the deeper circuits of power and technologies that sustain it: the narrow territorial trap of the UNFCCC, the ecologically unequal exchange that drives trade, decarbonization, and technological apartheid, and the institutional overgrowth that has churned consecutive climate coordination into a spectacle.

Belém will not resolve these contradictions, but it can mark the beginning of a more honest conversation about them. The choice before delegates is whether to allow obstruction to continue evolving within the system, or to reimagine a UN climate system capable of confronting inequality and planetary risk together, not as competing priorities but as two sides of the same coin.

Benjamin Weinger is a 2025-26 IGCC dissertation fellow and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at UC Los Angeles.

Thumbnail credit: UN Climate Change (Flickr)