Special edition: Before COP30 takes the spotlight, Bonn sets the stage

In less than five months, tens of thousands of people will gather in the Amazonian city of Belém, Brazil, for two weeks of pomp and circumstance. The 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference, aka COP30, is by far the most important climate event of the year.

This week, however, the community will get together for a more modest gathering in Bonn, Germany: the intersessional subsidiary bodies meeting, or Bonn SB 62. While we’re unlikely to see any polar bear mascots or themed pavilions, this is where the groundwork is laid for November’s confab: If COP30 is the show, Bonn is the scriptwriting session. What’s decided — or not decided — here will set the tone for what Belém can actually deliver.

I’ll be on the ground in Bonn for the next week and a half, tracking what makes it onto the agenda, which countries are pushing which priorities, and where things are likely to stall. If you’re around, drop me a line at jesse.chaselubitz@devex.com.

In my spare time, I’ll be nerding out about the fact that this conference is in Germany’s post-war Parliament building — dating from 1949, when Bonn was the capital of West Germany before Berlin took over as part of German reunification. From the outside, the building is surprisingly understated for its historic significance, but just walk through the plenary doors and you’re likely to be at least mildly intimidated by the 30-foot metal eagle above the podium.  

Setting the agenda

Before we can get to the agenda, everyone must first settle on what will be up for discussion. If countries can’t agree on the topics on Day 1, the first few days will be spent debating the agenda itself.

“Before countries can actually delve into the details, they propose new agenda items as a way to put forward issues of their concern,” Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, tells Devex. “We don’t know what will be identified at the beginning of the Bonn session, or to what extent Brazil can handle the situation so that we can actually launch into substantive work. I think that's also very important to watch.”

By June 6, more than 50 potential agenda items had been submitted by countries, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and civil society. But Brazil is eager to make sure Belém isn’t buried in bureaucracy, and therefore wants this meeting to be laser-focused and efficient.

This could make for some friction.

“The Brazilian presidency has announced that they are in the process of reducing agenda items to streamline the process and make it lighter and more implementation-focused,” says Laura Schäfer, co-head of the division for international climate policy at Germanwatch. But, she added, several issues haven’t been fully negotiated, and many groups are still adding items to the agenda. “There could be a potential agenda fight on Day 1,” she says.

Read: COP30 presidency calls for shift from climate pledges to implementation

The topline items

1. Adaptation

Countries are expected to discuss how to slim down a draft of 490 “indicators” on adaptation. These fall under the Global Goal on Adaptation, or GGA, which is a collective commitment under the Paris Agreement to improve resilience and reduce vulnerability to climate change.

Adaptation has always been harder to measure than mitigation, which has a clear numeric goal of limiting temperature rise. But now, the international community wants a clear way to quantify success in adaptation as well.

During COP28 in Dubai in 2023, countries adopted a framework for the GGA, under which they agreed on seven targets: health, food systems, water, ecosystems, infrastructure, poverty eradication, and cultural heritage. The 490 indicators, divided under these targets, include things such as the percentage of population protected by heat-based early warning systems; the area of climate-resilient protected land; and the share of infrastructure that was built or retrofitted to withstand climate impacts.

But now the goal is to cut the list of 490 indicators down to just 100. “This is still a massively long list,” says Debbie Hillier, the head of the Zurich Climate Resilience Alliance Programme at Mercy Corps. “The process to develop them is hard. A lot of technical experts have been asked to develop this, but the process wasn’t funded, so it’s much harder for developing countries to participate.”

Hillier says that this is “going to be a big subject of discussion at Bonn.” Delegates won’t actually trim the list in the next week, but the hope is that they will figure out how that trimming will be done.

Low- and middle-income countries may also push to establish a new adaptation finance goal, since the current one, established in Glasgow in 2021, expires this year.

2. Financing Baku to Belém

On the finance front, negotiators will grapple with how to turn the $300 billion pledge from COP29 into $1.3 trillion, as laid out in the Baku to Belém road map.

The heavy lifting on this likely won’t happen in formal meetings but in the hallway chats and late-night coffees where real deals often start.

One particularly thorny issue will be the showdown between Article 2.1(c) and Article 9 of the Paris Agreement and how they are structured in the text. Both relate to climate finance — but from very different perspectives. Article 2.1(c) aims to shift all financial flows (public and private) toward low-carbon development. Article 9, by contrast, calls on high-income countries to pony up public funds for developing nations. Wealthy countries sit behind 2.1(c). Low-income countries — not so much.

“[Given] the slashing of all the aid budgets, the retreat of the private financial institutions … that’s where the ambition of both processes might be extremely, extremely low,” says Federico Sibaja, IMF campaign manager at Recourse, a civil society organization. “At the same time, I think 2.1(c) is a way to get everyone inside the conversation.”

Both will be in the text, so the big debate will come down to wording: Should 2.1(c) be on equal footing with Article 9, or take a backseat? Either way, don’t expect closure anytime soon.

“I think we won't have any kind of definition of what to expect out of 2.1(c),” Sibaja says. “I think everything will continue to be up in the air even after Bonn.”

Opinion: The public-private key to unlocking $1.3T in climate finance

3. Global stocktake

Launched at COP28 in Dubai, the global stocktake, or GST, is the mechanism meant to assess how the world is doing on long-term climate goals.

Dubai established some big language on transitioning away from fossil fuels and tripling renewables — but COP29 didn’t move the ball forward. Instead, it kicked the can down the road to Bonn.

“The process is finalized, but there’s just no progress in tripling renewable energy capacities,” Schäfer says. “What we need to see from SB is clear direction for the implementation of the stock take.”

Countries will hash out how to incorporate GST guidance into their nationally determined climate goals, which are due this year. We will also likely see low- and middle-income countries call for follow-up assessment mechanisms to see if GST leads to enhanced ambition.

4. Loss and damage fund

The loss and damage fund — one of the biggest wins from COP27 — is now operational, with development banker Ibrahima Cheikh Diong as its new executive director. The fund is housed at the World Bank, and 24 countries have pledged around $800 million.

Sounds like a lot, but it’s far off the desired amount of $400 billion per year.

Vanuatu is leading the charge to revamp the Warsaw International Mechanism, or WIM, which is the formal UNFCCC process that established the fund over a decade ago. For them, the time for patience is over.

“WIM has been in existence since 2013, and the idea was to throw us a bone and say, ‘OK well, you now have this institution,’” says Christopher Bartlett, special climate adviser to the government of Vanuatu. “For us, that's just not what an international mechanism needs to be. It needs to be very reactive, very responsive, very available, as we are collectively now experiencing loss and damage in worsening and worsening ways. And so what we’re trying to do in Bonn is to convince our partners that we’ve had enough of the talk.”

Bartlett says that they are hoping to see the creation of a loss and damage status report, ensure that the fund is able to deliver funds quickly, and shift talk into action.

Related reading: What climate finance is flowing to the most vulnerable countries? (Pro)

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Likely leaders

Bonn will be an early test of Brazil’s leadership chops as the president of COP30. One thing to watch: a new initiative called the Tropical Forests Forever Facility, or TFFF, which Brazil hopes to launch in November. It’s designed to reward countries for preserving or expanding their forests.  

“This seems so far to be one of their most important COP30 priorities,” Shuo says. “As we get closer to the COP itself, it will be interesting to see who will be paying into it. I think this will tell us something about the diplomatic influence of Brazil.”

We could also see leadership from BRICS, a coalition that started with Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa and has recently expanded. The group recently issued a climate finance recommendation ahead of COP30, and they have a summit planned just before that event, which could give Brazil a chance to deliver a strong unified message from a group of large emerging economies.

Bonn is also the place to figure out which countries might take more convincing. At the end of COP29, India made no secret of its dissatisfaction with the final outcome. Don’t be surprised if it stirs the pot again in Bonn. The U.S. State Department announced that it would not be sending a delegation to the conference — which doesn’t come as a huge surprise as the U.S. has not attended any of the climate talks leading up to this week, and the Trump administration decided to leave the Paris Agreement back in January.

“Bonn is a chance to find out who the problem countries are,” Hillier said. “As well as how much they are prepared to push and be difficult around these issues.”

Read: The US is a no-show at Bonn climate negotiations

Related reading:

• Brazil hammers out details of forest fund ahead of COP30

• The growing relevance of BRICS to climate finance

• As the US retreats from climate finance, can philanthropy fill the gap?