COP30 and the Art of Climate-Policy Neglect

This November, delegates from nearly 200 countries convened in Brazil for COP30 – where COP stands for "Conference of Parties," and the number 30 reflects the number of such events since the very first one in Berlin in 1995. Stemming from a UN statute adopted in 1992 and bearing the acronym UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), reaching the 30th edition of COP would be a triumph if its success was measured on diplomatic endurance. But it’s not, and the conference’s takeaways could have seemingly been predicted before the final gavel – prioritization of the optics of…