COP30 delivers hope and homework for global climate finance

In a summary of the COP30 conference held in November 2025, the directorate-general for climate action’s assessment was that the 55,000 delegates “leave Belém with hope, but also with homework”.

The lack of any official US participation following the Trump administration’s exit from the Paris Agreement meant the world’s largest economy was not represented, but according to Anna Hancock, other countries took a leadership role and kept the multilateral process moving.

“It was always presented as a more humble COP, with fewer corporate announcements,” says Hancock, who attended the event as executive director of Pollination Group, a global climate investment and advisory firm.

Hancock says that while progress may have been less than in past years, the event was still significant in the current geopolitical context, and commitments made in the final two days of the conference were profound.

COP30 was dubbed the “COP of implementation” and the action agenda recognised international standards as key tools for climate action.

Featured across many of the action plans was the harmonisation of ISO standards around global carbon accounting and transition plans for financial institutions. This will be relevant for accountants who are already preparing for new ethical standards on greenwashing, which come into effect in January 2026.

The COP process continued the global momentum for integrated reporting, climate risk management, data integration and assurance, which are already part of the accounting and auditing remit. 

Key takeaways from COP30

There were some disappointments at COP30. A road map for the phasing out of fossil fuels was dropped from the final text, and demands for scaled-up grants to fund climate adaptation projects in lower-income nations received a less than hoped for response.

While participating countries, including Australia, reported their Nationally Determined Contributions to efforts to limit global warming with 2035 targets, the world still faces challenges in limiting global warming to 1.5 per cent, with current paths suggesting an outcome of over 2 per cent.

Despite this, Hancock points to progress in a number of areas, particularly in climate adaptation and finance, which built on new global climate finance goals agreed at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, and focused on pragmatic implementation.

For example, the final COP30 text included calls to triple adaptation finance to around US$120 billion (A$178 billion) by 2030, even though questions remain around the baseline for calculating this.

“It references 2025 as the base year, but whether it is the tripling of a previous target or the tripling of the 2025 actuals remains to be seen,” Hancock says.

COP30 also gavelled through more than 50 indicators intended to establish consensus on judging how nations are adapting to climate change. These will need to be refined, she says, but they are relevant for the corporate sector in that they are an evolution in the taxonomy of adaptation with implications for the finance “which needs to come in behind it”.

The result is the beginning of a process of codification for economic action that can measure and drive progress, and also direct finance.

Feeling the impact of the global warming target

For Heechung Sung, head of natural capital investments at Clean Energy Finance Corporation, COP30 was a success, as she met with investors and technology companies working in her area of expertise: bioenergy.

“We walked away having learned about some new pieces of technology that we are excited about, but we also spoke with global investors,” she says.

Those discussions were around new capital structures and the creation of financing facilities that would help develop new projects in Australia.

At CPA Australia, ESG lead Patrick Viljoen’s view is that COP30 delivered incremental change. However, he questions if that was enough when the 1.5-degree global warming target has already been breached, demanding more urgent action.

It does not make sense, he says, to be having conversations about the 1.5-degree target while at the same time there is a “reticence to acknowledge that this is no longer achievable”.

The COP process, although ambitious, was complicated by vested interests, the stronger voice of larger economies and a lack of real enforceability.

Viljoen says the conversation about climate change should shift focus from abatement to adaptation, but this also means challenges and global inequities.

He points to unilateral European Union mechanisms around maritime transport, which include stringent regulations around low-carbon fuels and the integration of shipping into the EU’s Emission Trading System, as issues of concern to CPA members in South-East Asia.

“When we speak to our members there, this is the key thing they keep coming back to from a trade perspective, because this is hampering their economic viability,” Viljoen says.

Smaller countries are being forced to comply with these unilateral regulations even though their emissions are disproportionately lower and, in many cases, they are feeling the direct impact of climate change through flooding and extreme weather. 

COP30 outcomes for finance professionals

Accountants know that to achieve results, budgeting and performance measures need to be in place, Viljoen says, but he questioned if the measures gavelled at COP could achieve this.

“The Australian Government has a 2035 target of 62 per cent to 70 per cent emissions reduction, but what does that mean for the private sector, for reporting entities and decision-makers in the corporate space?” he says. “What is the reasonable ask in terms of what they should be doing to make that target happen?”

Viljoen calls out “lazy carbon offsetting”, and points to an example of a speaker at CPA’s recent Sustainability Conference who was discussing energy efficiency. The speaker gave the example of a production plant in Tasmania that wanted to purchase solar panels as part of a carbon reduction program.

On further analysis, it was shown that if the company improved their production processes and reduced waste and inefficiency, they would be able to reduce the number of solar panels they had budgeted for by more than half and get the same result in terms of carbon reduction.

This example had implications for accountants, as it illustrated the need for them to step out of their own profession and engage with others, such as engineers and climate-change specialists.

As professionals who carry much of the responsibility for the reporting of sustainability performance, accountants need to better understand the linkages that create the outcomes.

“The market is growing increasingly sophisticated in wading through the words and getting to the crux of the matter,” Viljoen says. “If that does not stack up, I can guarantee capital is going to flow to other participants in the market.”