Where We Failed, Where We Are and Where We’re Going
By Magdalena Styś | News | November 11, 2025
Cover Illustration: Markus Spiske / Unsplash
The COP30 environmental conference is set to be held in Belém, Brazil on November 10. Magdalena Styś reports on the conference’s past and current controversies and what to expect for the future of international climate law.
November 10 marks the beginning of COP30, the largest climate conference in the world. This annual conference, organized by the United Nations, is most well-known for facilitating the negotiations that eventually led to the signing of the Paris Agreement, the legally binding international treaty created with the aim of limiting the global temperature increase to 1.5°C compared to pre-industrial levels. The Netherlands is one of the signatories of the Agreement, both individually and via the joint signature of the European Union.
Despite certainly being the most well-known climate-oriented international event, COP is increasingly shifting from famous to infamous in the public consciousness. Every year, as we get closer to the commencement of the conference, news outlets begin to unravel gross oversights and hypocrisies buried within its organizational structures. COP29, which happened last year in Azerbaijan, was an especially salient example of this: numerous human rights abuses occurred during the organization of the conference and many of the attendees represented oil and gas conglomerates. The circumstances of COP30 don’t paint a brighter picture, either: this year’s edition of the conference is happening in Brazil, where the president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has just given permission to drill for oil in the Amazon.
These issues with COP’s execution are coupled with general disillusionment about the conference’s effectiveness in moving environmental policymaking forward in recent years. Just last week, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres made headlines with his proclamation that the overshoot of the 1.5°C target is now inevitable. Although he suggested that it might be possible to only overshoot the target temporarily and bring temperatures down later, this nevertheless indicates that something has gone horribly wrong since the optimistic days of 2015 Paris. Unfortunately, COP30 doesn’t look like it’s going to be the breeding ground for revolutionary climate policy: the conference is reported to host fewer world leaders than usual, with states such as Latvia and Lithuania publicly questioning whether they will send their representatives to Belém. Moreover, as of early November, only 36% of Paris Agreement signatories have submitted their updated Nationally Determined Contributions (commitments that states make to reduce their emissions), even though they are required to do so by Article 4 of the Agreement.
Even outside of the limited scope of COP, the current political landscape does little to alleviate climate-related fears. Immediately after being sworn into office for his second term, Donald Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, leaving the international community to wonder how to shape meaningful climate policy without the support of the wealthiest country in the world. None of the recent big elections in Europe, be it EU or national ones, had environmental policy play a significant role. While there are some sustainable developments to inspire optimism, in general, the current state of climate politics leaves much to be desired.
With this bleak perspective on politics, we’re bound to look for alternative ways to ensure we don’t burn the planet within the next three to five business days. According to a recent interview with various legal scholars in “Arts of the Working Class,” a promising space in the struggle for environmental justice might be the court, rather than the parliament. While the interviewees point out the various limits of international law—namely, its historical tendencies to take things slow and preserve the status quo rather than overthrow it—they also see the potential in climate litigators to keep polluters accountable.
In July, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion titled “Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change,” which held that climate treaties (including the Paris Agreement) are legally binding. Furthermore, the ICJ found that breaches of obligations imposed by climate treaties are internationally wrongful acts, subject to consequences including their mandatory cessation and provision of reparations to those harmed by those breaches of obligations. Although advisory opinions themselves are not legally binding, the ICJ’s authority in the field of international law makes the opinion more likely to influence courts dealing with environmental law cases.
When interviewed by the Amsterdammer, Matteo Fermeglia, an international and European law lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, said the Advisory Opinion has the potential to move climate litigation in a positive direction – and is, in fact, already doing so:
“The level of [persuasiveness] and normativity [of advisory opinions] of course depends on the authority and, in this case, I would say the ICJ still is a very authoritative court and I think we have examples of this already. There have been two judgments, at least one in a federal court in Canada and, importantly, more importantly for us, there is a judgment by the European Court of Human Rights from two days ago about Norway, where European Court of Human Rights said essentially that a state has an obligation to assess greenhouse gases emissions.”
Indeed, the recent Greenpeace Nordic and Others v. Norway ruling by the ECHR stipulated that when making decisions that concern the environment (such as establishing new oil and gas projects), States are obliged to carry out adequate, timely and comprehensive environmental impact assessments and that failing to do so is a violation of human rights. Frode Pleym, head of Greenpeace Norway, referred to the decision as “a major step forward,” highlighting the importance of categorizing non-environmentally-friendly policy in terms of human rights violations.
One of the shortcomings of international climate law has been that, in general, different branches of international law develop independently of each other, lacking a more common, holistic focus on sustainability as the core of policymaking. For instance, many sustainable policies carry the risk of slowing down economic development, which means that bodies governing trade and investment regulations (such as the WTO) might be less eager to look into the impact of their work on the climate. Fermeglia says that the advisory opinion has the potential to move the needle in a positive direction in that area, too:
“The ICJ advisory opinion said clearly that states have an obligation under international law to assess greenhouse gas emissions impacts of projects, basically across the board of the economy. This is, to me, the most important, the most concrete and powerful part of this advisory opinion, because they really say clearly, look, you have to assess it. If you’re planning a new infrastructure, your new shiny airport or you’re planning your new exploration of hydrocarbons, gas, oil and gas, you have an obligation to assess greenhouse gas emissions – and this is very concrete. This is not just about principles or, you know, very vague rules or the price agreement. This is a clear obligation and the European Court of Human Rights has already said this is an obligation under human rights law.
I believe that the ICJ advisory opinion speaks, of course, to other bodies of international law. They also mentioned this; actually, they mentioned that there are other bodies of international law that are relevant in the context of states’ obligations. […] I can sense that they hinted the fact that you want to be serious about climate when you do your trade policy or when you interpret your trade law obligations. So we will see about that.”
Does this newfound visionary perspective on the judicial branch mean we should let the remaining two pillars of the democratic system abandon environmental concerns completely? Not at all. However, it’s clear that the 2015 momentum is not applicable to the current moment and the top-down approach to environmental politics cannot be considered reliable: given the everpresent geopolitical tensions and the constantly ticking clock of nature, we cannot afford to put all of our faith in multilateral frameworks.
The COP30 presidency chose “Global Mutirão” as the slogan of the conference. The word mutirão, originally from the Tupi-Guarani language, refers to local, collective efforts to improve community wellbeing. Moreover, this edition of COP is significant for its planned focus on the impact of climate change on indigenous communities: the Belém location was deliberately chosen because of its proximity to the Amazon and its importance for the Brazilian indigenous rights movement. This framing should, perhaps, point us in an alternative direction regarding climate action: instead of exclusively looking to large-scale, multilateral solutions, we should embrace collectively pushing for bottom-up change, starting from the level of our communities. After all, what we most want to protect from climate disaster are neither the parliaments nor the courts, but the people.
Magdalena Styś is a university student in Amsterdam. The views expressed here are not necessarily those of The Amsterdammer.
