Another year, another UN climate summit ending in widespread disappointment. It was hoped COP30 in Brazil’s Amazonian city of Belém would offer a correction to strained multilateralism but the event was marked by tense talks and delayed action.

The stakes have never been starker: The past three years are the hottest on record, and 2025 has seen major disasters from flash flooding in Kashmir and drought in the Sahel to one of the most powerful and destructive storms ever seen.

For the first time, the final COP agreement referenced the prospect of “overshoot” of 1.5C of global warming. Governments agreed in the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement to try to limit warming to 1.5C above preindustrial levels to avoid the most dangerous effects of hotter climate change, although any increase is harmful.

Finance – or the lack of it – was once again a major sticking point in talks. Among many disagreements, COP30 followed a familiar pattern of demands for more climate finance for lower-income countries, resistance from donors, and a final hurried compromise, which saw critical targets delayed for years.

“Let’s be blunt: If we imagine developing countries can fund their own transition while drowning in debt and climate disasters, we are facing collective collapse,” Harjeet Singh, a veteran climate campaigner, said in a statement. “Finance is the essential enabler of climate action.”

A lack of money also affected the humanitarian presence at COP30, with fewer numbers attending than previous recent summits, a consequence of the deep cuts that have rocked the aid sector this year.

But the impacts of aid cuts on climate change policy go far beyond which aid workers turn up to a conference. Low-income countries are “the ones who are going to suffer the most,” Mauricio Vazquez, head of policy at the Global Risks and Resilience programme at the London-based ODI think-tank, said.

“Because these countries have high levels of humanitarian needs and they’re in protracted crises, they are considered ‘high risk’ for loans and other sources of climate finance – which makes them reliant on vertical climate funds and bilateral ODA related to climate, both of which are being squeezed,” he continued. “If you are a country reliant on these sources of finance, the outlook is grim.”

As the dust settles on another lacklustre COP, widely panned for failing to rise to the urgency of the moment, here are some key takeaways for humanitarians.

High hopes for increasing adaptation finance were scuppered in Belém. Adaptation finance – money to help lower-income countries prepare for and live with climate change impacts – has lagged for years, with just $26 billion provided in 2023 (when hundreds of billions are needed annually). Adaptation has a broad meaning, but this funding stream is sometimes looked to by humanitarians working to pre-empt disasters and build resilience.

Brazil’s COP30 President André Aranha Corrêa do Lago said the summit had to mark a “turning point on adaptation”, and campaigners hoped the event would see the world change course to increase adaptation finance, with lower-income countries calling for a commitment for it to be tripled. But the final decision was widely derided as weak: It merely “calls for efforts to at least triple adaptation finance by 2035”.

Singh said it was a “timeline that ignores the urgency of the climate disasters striking us today” and described it as “an insult to every community currently under water or on fire”.

“The refusal to commit to scaling up finance to the necessary $300 billion annually for adaptation leaves the unprepared defenceless against inevitable ruin,” he added.

Experts fear the failure to deliver on adaptation finance is also likely to lead to more climate-related loss and damage. “Adaptation was never a nice to have, but it is becoming increasingly clear that it is a matter of resilience or ruin for many millions of people,” said Vazquez. “And we cannot afford to ignore ‘tricky’ places, because the impacts of abandoning them to climate change are not isolated.”

The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) officially opened for business at COP30. But while the Fund has been set up and is preparing to start accepting funding proposals, it remains greatly underfunded, and big questions remain over its future.

Over the two-week summit in Belém, very little money found its way into the FRLD’s coffers, which currently hold $431.52 million. The actual costs the Fund should be addressing are estimated by the Loss and Damage Collaboration campaign group at $724.43 billion a year.

According to Singh, the COP30 final agreement should “have sent a clear instruction to the historical polluters to put hundreds of billions into the new Loss and Damage Fund in grants, not loans, to survive the wreckage caused by two centuries of their reckless emissions”.

“A system cannot rebuild a home without money,” Singh stressed. “Bureaucratic pledges cannot feed a family whose crops have failed.”

There was an effort in Belém to link the Fund to a favourable June advisory opinion made by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on climate change, but that was reportedly blocked and the ICJ was not mentioned in the COP30 agreement. The ICJ case – brought by Vanuatu, a small Pacific island highly at risk from rising sea levels – sought legal clarity on what obligations states have in responding to climate change.

There were never high hopes about further progress on the intersection of climate impacts, conflict and fragility at COP30.

Nazanine Moshiri, who leads efforts to integrate climate considerations across the Berghof Foundation’s conflict transformation and peacebuilding work, said the presence of humanitarians and finance networks working on this in Belém was “important to keeping the issue alive”. But others were clear about the cost of Brazil not making the issue a priority.

“COP30 did not do enough to further discussions on how we make the climate finance architecture more suitable for the most under-served. It shied away from tough topics, like how to help people living in conflict-affected places, displaced people and refugees and people living in areas under non-state armed groups,” said Vazquez.

“The tough truth is that many of the most climate-vulnerable people often live in the most difficult, intractable settings, often affected by conflict and crisis, which inevitably means that you will be dealing with fragile or contested governments and non-state armed actors. But climate funds aren’t set up for investing in these areas, and climate projects are rarely dealing with these complex, highly political on-the-ground dynamics,” he added.

For many in Belém and beyond, there is a sense that the current malaise of multilateralism is disastrous timing for climate action.

“The climate crisis won’t pause for geopolitics,” said a telling statement from Sol Oyuela, Executive Director of Global Policy and Campaigns at WaterAid. “The floods, droughts and cyclones intensified by a warming world demand to be confronted now, not passed on to future generations.”

• A Tell Media report / By Will Worley / Adapted from The New Humanitarian