The forest COP that never turned into the cities’ COP
A special guest op-ed by Philip Yang, Special Envoy of the COP30 Presidency for Urban Solutions. Originally published in Portuguese by Folha de S.Paulo
Belém brought COP30 to a close with a paradox that is hard to ignore. On a planet where almost 60% of the population lives in cities – places that concentrate emissions, vulnerabilities, but also a large share of the possible solutions – the urban agenda did not register a single advance in the set of formal decisions adopted by the conference. During the so-called “implementation COP”, the absence of commitments on issues related to urbanization is not a mere technical detail – it is a symptom of a structural gridlock in climate multilateralism. Is the game, then, already lost?
From the outset, the COP30 Presidency and the Brazilian government insisted that this COP in the forest was also to be the COP of cities. In this spirit, they worked with UN-Habitat to convene the 4th Ministerial Meeting on Urbanization and Climate Change, bringing together ministers of cities and urban development from several countries.
On the non-governmental side, the effort was just as intense. Subnational networks – such as ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, C40 Cities, the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy (GCoM), United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) and FMDV (Global Fund for Cities Development) – mobilized mayors, governors and civil society throughout 2025, with an intentional focus on Belém. Together, under the political coordination of the Local Governments and Municipal Authorities Constituency (LGMA), a coalition of organizations representing cities and local governments in the official process of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), these entities also sent a letter to the UN Secretary-General calling for ways to embed more effective integration of the climate and urban agendas within the multilateral system, in the context of the ongoing reform of the organization.
On top of this came the Local Leaders Forum, held in Rio de Janeiro the week preceding COP30, co-hosted by the COP30 Presidency and Bloomberg Philanthropies, guided by the idea that an “implementation COP” would only make sense if it was also a COP of cities. In Belém, a letter signed by all Brazilian state governors and handed to the Conference President and to the President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, warned that excluding urban and subnational agendas from the final decisions would be “an adverse signal”. In parallel, the Higher Education Network of Networks, a global coalition co-led by the Universities of Cambridge and Toronto, stated that implementation is not possible without cities.
At the same time, UN-Habitat, the UN body responsible for the sustainable urbanization agenda and custodian of the New Urban Agenda, had been steadfastly bridging the gap between climate science and urban policy. The Cities IPCC conference pushed the IPCC – the leading international body for assessing climate science – to approve the preparation of a Special Report on Climate Change and Cities, comprising themes such as informality, housing, urban services and multilevel governance.
By the time COP30 had started in Belém, the political and technical grounds for disseminating this climate portrait of the urban status quo, due to be published in 2027, were already reasonably established. The next, natural step would have been to give that report normative consequence in the COP decision-making process. Unfortunately, this aggregation of political and technical knowledge did not translate into new mandates, nor into operational paragraphs that would recognize multilevel governance and urbanization as pillars of the climate regime.
The “Belém Package” exposes these shortcomings. The list of core decisions – from the so-called “Mutirão Decision” to the just transition mechanism, along with climate finance, loss and damage and technology – does not contain a single article dedicated to multilevel governance or to the urban localisation of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Cities promptly appear in generic preambles and only in the voluntary action agenda and in parallel declarations are they more prominent. They do not gain the status of an explicit axis of the regime, nor an institutionalized space for dialogue between different levels of government. The “forest and cities COP” slogan never truly crossed the line that separates political rhetoric from the binding decisions text.
This normative void is not due to a lack of awareness of the cardinal role of cities. Ministers, negotiators and delegation heads repeatedly stated in public that “most emissions come from cities,” that “NDCs will only be delivered if they reach the municipal level,” and that implementation “happens on the ground”. The importance of the urban agenda is now almost consensual, behind the scenes. The problem lies elsewhere: In the system’s inability to make thematic shifts when the negotiations table is already crowded with an accumulation of documents – from funding to the perpetually postponed confrontation with fossil fuels. In Belém, the weight of the inherited agenda left very little political oxygen to incorporate a new structural pillar.
Hence the feeling of inertia. The way the UNFCCC process is designed – with multi-year mandates, rigid agendas and sedimented legal language – makes it difficult for issues that have not received a “stamp of approval” in previous conferences to get in.
Even when the host country tries to make space for new topics, it is the Parties that decide whether the text will breathe new life into the negotiations or not. In Belém, the Parties acknowledged the centrality of cities in speeches and in the Action Agenda, but proved unable to translate this recognition into operational paragraphs. They chose to preserve a fragile balance around the usual themes, rather than reopen the package to anchor the urban agenda.
In short, the climate regime continued to treat cities as objects and a mere context– something to be observed and celebrated – but not as a normative subject in their own right.
Nevertheless, the failure of the urban agenda in Belém does not render the cycle of mobilization that led to COP30 useless. On the contrary: It lays bare the mismatch between where climate action actually takes place and where global rules are written. And it forces those who work at the interface between cities and climate to rethink their strategies.
It has become illusory to wait for a single “big moment” of recognition in COP decisions. Perhaps it is time to shift part of the bet and efforts to other channels: The robust inclusion of urban components in NDCs and in national adaptation plans; the reform of multilateral development banks so they can finance subnational governments directly – which today receive less than 15% of vertical funds; and the adoption of clear national mandates requiring states and municipalities to update their regulatory frameworks in light of the energy transition, from distributed solar generation to green hydrogen at the local scale.
One key example comes from São Paulo. A survey by the ZeroCem initiative identified around 440 km² of rooftop surfaces, including roughly 100 km² of flat roofs – a stock of unused space capable of producing several terawatt-hours of electricity per year or growing tens of thousands of tons of food in urban agriculture. Just a few kilometres away, the Billings reservoir offers 100 km² of water, currently underused from an energy perspective, but which could host extensive floating solar generation without compromising its role as a water source, provided it is governed by adequate environmental and social safeguards.
In both cases, the potential is anchored in essentially urban and regional decisions: Building codes, zoning rules, environmental licensing, grid connection standards. None of this depends solely on international treaties. Yet, explicit multilateral guidance, encouraging the removal of regulatory barriers to distributed renewables generation and to the productive use of rooftops, façades and urban water bodies, could significantly accelerate this kind of transformation worldwide.
The ultimate irony is that, by refusing to innovate itself institutionally, the multilateral system risks becoming less relevant to those who most need it. Cities and regions will continue to act, with or without being mentioned in decisions, but will tend to look for byways: Thematic coalitions, dedicated funds, bilateral agreements and hybrid arrangements that bypass, in part, the slowness of consensus among the 194 states.
Belém will rightfully be remembered as the forest COP and as the COP that launched new financing instruments and transition mechanisms. But for those looking from the ground level of cities, another image will remain: That of a missed opportunity to turn the cities’ COP slogan into an institutional framework– a chance that, for now, remains suspended in the thin air of interstate diplomacy.
In this incongruity, there may be both consolation and discomfort. The consolation lies in recognizing that it is hardly reasonable to expect a multilateral system that works by consensus among almost 200 governments to deliver major changes at a time when the very democracies that sustain it are in crisis – eroded by inequalities, authoritarian populisms and industrial-scale disinformation.
The discomfort lies in realizing that, precisely for this reason, these missed opportunities weigh even more heavily: Every time that we postpone bringing the climate regime closer to the real life of cities, we push further to a later date the chance to prove that democracy is still capable of producing responses commensurate with the climate emergency.
This major paradox does not extinguish hopes of seeing cities at the heart of global climate policy. On the contrary, it reinforces the importance of the role the Brazilian COP30 Presidency can still play over its one-year mandate. It is in this window that the message left by President Lula in Belém – harsh but ultimately positive – gains importance: To use the ongoing UN reform to propose the creation of a Climate Council, a body devoted exclusively to implementation and capable of aligning targets, finance and territories.
If this idea moves forward, the spirit of a cities’ COP could finally find a more permanent place in the multilateral architecture.
