167 - COP30’s First Week: A ‘Truth Moment’ for 1.5°C

UN warnings in Belém show how narrow the path has become – and what must shift next.

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The Climate Mentor
November 17th, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

1.5°C moves from ambition to overshoot ♻️

The first week of COP30 in Belém, Brazil, has made something brutally clear: 1.5°C is no longer just a political aspiration, it’s becoming an overshoot scenario.

In his opening speech, UN climate chief Simon Stiell warned that governments will “never be forgiven” if they fail to act now, linking inaction directly to famine, conflict, economic decline and mass displacement.

Fresh UN assessments show that even if all current national climate pledges are fully met, we are still heading for roughly 2.3–2.5°C of warming; with today’s actual policies, the trajectory is closer to 2.8°C. In parallel, UNEP now expects the 1.5°C threshold to be crossed in the 2030s unless global emissions fall by about 55% by 2035 compared with 2019 – a gap that current commitments simply do not close.

Conceptual chart showing different global warming pathways over time. The x-axis goes from a “pre net-zero warming phase” to a “long-term state”; the y-axis shows global temperature increase with a dashed horizontal line marking the 1.5°C limit. Several shaded curves illustrate: (1) “peak and decline” pathways (PD) where strong near-term mitigation keeps warming near or below 1.5°C; (2) “overshoot” pathways (PD-OS) where temperatures rise above 1.5°C and are later reduced using carbon dioxide removal (CDR); and (3) “enhanced protection” pathways (PD-EP) with lower peak warming and earlier stabilisation. Light grey shading at the top shows pathways with high warming, abrupt local impacts, reinforcing Earth system feedbacks and continued long-term warming even after net-zero CO₂, while darker green shading at the bottom represents gradual warming reversal and stabilisation at the target level with sustainable CDR.

Climate Futures: Avoiding, Overshooting, or Exceeding the 1.5°C Limit

The numbers behind the ‘COP of Truth’ 

This is why Brazil’s president Lula has framed Belém as the “COP of Truth”: a summit where the mismatch between promises and reality is too large to ignore.

The latest Climate Action Tracker update confirms that the global outlook has barely improved in four years. Existing 2030 and new 2035 targets still point to around 2.6°C of warming, with almost no major economy significantly strengthening its 2030 ambition.

Infographic titled “Global climate action is falling short: No indicator is on track for 2030.” At the top is a legend with colored squares: green (On Track), yellow (Off Track), orange (Well Off Track), red (Wrong Direction), and purple/grey (Insufficient Data). Below is a grid of dozens of small squares, almost all yellow, orange, red or purple/grey, showing that none of the tracked climate indicators are fully on track for 2030. Text on the left notes that private climate finance reached a record $1.3 trillion in 2023 but must grow 1.8 times faster. Text on the right highlights that solar and wind power have more than tripled since 2015 but must more than double again by 2030, deforestation is equivalent to losing about 22 football fields of forest every minute, most passenger-car travel is still gasoline-powered, and degrading peatlands are releasing large stores of carbon.

No Indicator on Track for 2030: Global Climate Action Scorecard

At the same time, a new Climate Risk Index presented during the talks quantifies the human cost of delay: hundreds of thousands of deaths from extreme weather since the mid-1990s, with the heaviest toll borne by vulnerable countries that have contributed least to the problem.

Why this week matters beyond Belém

Outside the venue, thousands of Indigenous communities, youth and civil society groups marched in the “Great People’s March”, demanding a firm fossil fuel phase-out and far more climate finance. Inside, negotiators are wrestling with how to turn this pressure and the scientific warnings into concrete outcomes on mitigation, adaptation and finance.

This first week at COP30 is therefore more than diplomatic theatre.

It’s a pivot point: either governments start aligning short-term policies and capital flows with a 1.5°C-compatible pathway – accepting that overshoot must be minimised and reversed – or they lock in a world of escalating loss, damage and instability.

What happens in the next days in Belém won’t decide everything. But it will tell us whether the “COP of Truth” is just a slogan – or the start of a course correction.

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