Ugly final hours of talks highlight just how difficult Chris Bowen’s new gig will be

The final hours of the COP climate talks that finally ended a day late in Brazil on Saturday were even more brutal than usual, foreshadowing a tough year ahead for Australian Climate Change and Energy Minster Chris Bowen, who will preside over next year’s talks in Turkey.

Things got particularly ugly when Russian diplomats turned their guns on a handful of Latin American countries, which in turn had delayed proceedings with a series of objections to the way the Brazilian COP president André Corrêa do Lago was managing the contentious negotiation over adaptation plans.

André Corrêa do Lago, COP30 president, sits as Simon Stiell, UN climate chief (left) speaks with other UN officials during a plenary session at the COP30 meeting.Credit: AP

“Don’t behave like children who want to get their hands on all the sweets and stuff them down their throats,” said a Russian diplomat to his American colleagues on the floor of the plenary session at one point, before demanding that they behave more cordially. India chimed in to agree.

As the dispute went on the session was stalled. The talks came close to collapsing entirely, says one observer.

Tempers are often frayed in the final hours of COP talks, and each year the gathering of nations signed up to the United Nations climate treaty get tougher, in part because the climate situation is becoming more dire, in part because the talks are now more focused on concrete and immediate action rather than the declarations of future good intention.

Enter Chris Bowen, who in the past week lost the right to host next year’s talks in Australia, but negotiated a new role for himself – president of negotiations – to preside over next year’s talks, to be hosted by Turkey.

Economist and climate commentator Nicki Hutley, who was in Belem and is a veteran of several COPs, says the new role Bowen has carved out for himself could be particularly difficult.

“It could be the worst of both worlds. If he succeeds Turkey gets the benefit; if he fails Australia gets the blame,” Hutley said.

This year’s COP will be judged at best as an ugly compromise. Brazil had chosen to host in Belem, its gateway to the Amazon, and will be bitterly disappointed it did not manage to secure a formal agreement on halting global deforestation. That effort will now be hived off out of the COP process.

Negotiators from 80 nations including Australia, Brazil, the United Kingdon and Germany failed to secure agreement on a “road map” to transition the global economy away from fossil fuels. The group included many developing nations hit hard by climate change, along with the United Kingdom, Germany, and oil producers such as Mexico and Brazil.

Climate and Energy Minister Chris Bowen in Brazil for COP30 earlier this week.Credit: AP

Russia and Saudi Arabia led the opposition.

COP presidents, appointed by host nations, are not diplomatic figureheads. In the months leading up to the annual talks they and their teams set and drive the negotiating tracks, and in the talks themselves they wrangle 190-plus nations to have them agree upon a set of costly initiatives that might drive the world’s efforts to stabilise the climate.

Tennant Reed, the head of Climate Change and Energy at Australian Industry Group who was also in Belem and at the last eight COPs, said the process is becoming harder as the decisions facing the world become tougher.

The COP has already failed to arrest warming at 1.5 degrees, as was one of the Paris goals, at least without significant and prolonged overshoot. It is confronting the loss of support from the United States, whose State Department was once one of the world’s largest engines of climate diplomacy. It has not lived up to agreements to channel sufficient funds from developed to developing nations for adaptation, and it has not yet worked out an economically practicable pathway from fossil fuels, as it agreed to in Dubai two years ago.

The world is not going to get any easier either, particularly as climate-driven extreme weather inflames international tensions and batters economies more over coming years.

“There are no easy choices left [to the COP]. Soon it is going to have to start making horrible choices. It might not be next year, but it is coming,” says Reed.

Matt Kean, the former NSW Liberal treasurer who now serves as chair of the federal Climate Change Authority, who was also in Belem, strikes an optimistic tone.

The climate talks have already bent the warming pathway down from over 5 degrees to 2.5 degrees, should all nations live up to commitments, he notes.

“It is not enough, but it proves that co-operation can work,” he says.

And what about Chris Bowen?

“Well, there’s no one better qualified or more respected on that stage,” said Kean.

The UN’s chief climate official, Simon Stiell, struggled to find a positive spin on past fortnight.

“I’m not saying we’re winning the climate fight,” he said as the talks concluded. “But we are undeniably still in it.”

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