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Much of the global climate agenda in 2025 is focused on November’s COP30 summit, which has the potential to be the most important climate event since the Paris summit in 2015. However, before then, a series of stepping-stone events are being held, including Monday’s Heat Action Day.
Coinciding with this event, a study was released by World Weather Attribution, Climate Central and the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre that asserts human-caused climate change has added an average of 30 days of extreme heat for about half of the world’s population over the past 12 months. That amounts to 4 billion people exposed to prolonged, dangerous temperatures. The report singles out emissions from the burning of fossil fuel as the cause of the blistering heat.
The report examined temperature data from almost 250 countries and territories between May 2024 and May 2025. It found that, in 195 of them, climate change at least doubled the number of days classified as “extreme heat,” which are defined as days when temperatures exceeded the 90th percentile of the averages between 1991 and 2020.
The climate change diplomacy agenda has been firmly on the back foot since at least last November’s US election
Andrew Hammond
Heat Action Day is a global event aimed at raising awareness and promoting actions that protect communities from heat-related illnesses. One of the goals is to reboot the climate change diplomacy agenda that has been firmly on the back foot since at least last November’s US presidential ballot, which saw the reelection of Donald Trump.
It is not just developments on the political right, including the reelection of Trump, that are helping shatter the previous political consensus on tackling climate change. There is wider alarm, as highlighted by a recent report by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Diplomacy. As much as ex-UK Prime Minister Blair was a champion of climate diplomacy when he was in office as leader of the left-of-center Labour Party from 1997 to 2007, he warned in the study that today’s policy strategies have become disconnected from political, public and economic reality, and that the debate is “riven with irrationality.”
While climate activism has succeeded in raising awareness, Blair argues that the result is a widening credibility gap between policy and delivery. He highlights that global trends that undermine today’s Western climate approach include the fact fossil fuel use is set to rise further up to 2030, airline travel is to double over the next 20 years and, by 2030, almost two-thirds of emissions will come from China, India and Southeast Asia.
Add to this the setback of last year’s COP29 in Azerbaijan, which is widely seen as the least successful annual climate conference since Copenhagen in 2009. The event largely kicked the can down the road, if not going backwards, with the summit threatening to collapse several times.
So, with the entire Conference of the Parties process now in growing jeopardy, Brazil has the diplomatic challenge of a lifetime as it seeks to make its event one that helps ensure long-lasting and transformative climate outcomes.
With Trump having already started the clock on a four-year US withdrawal process from the 2015 Paris Agreement, as he did during his first presidency from 2017 to 2021, other major nations will probably dust off the playbook they used during that period. This saw other powers, including Europe, Japan and China, seek to advance climate diplomacy in the hope that the next US president would recommit to the Paris process.
Fortunately, this happened upon the election of Joe Biden. However, whether it happens a second time will depend on whether a Democrat can win the 2028 election against Trump’s successor as the Republican standard-bearer.
Brazil seeks to make its summit one that helps ensure long-lasting and transformative climate outcomes
Andrew Hammond
At the same time, world powers will be aware that American corporations, states and cities will continue with the clean energy revolution that has been underway for many years across the world’s largest national economy. Trump’s policies may blunt this tide of investment in the short to medium term, but it is likely to prove unstoppable in the longer term.
It is not just America’s liberal and centrist politicians who favor remaining in Paris, but also much of the nation’s business community. Many US multinationals — including in the energy sector — argue that it is better for Washington to keep a seat at the table and influence an accord that big US-headquartered businesses may ultimately have to abide by anyway.
The business community is aware that the Paris deal retains significant support across the world. In addition, it intentionally has a flexible “bottom-up” approach and this greater decentralization and suppleness provides resilience, as was shown from 2017 to 2021.
So, as deeply damaging as Trump’s presidency will be to the climate agenda, the Paris framework could still provide a resilient, flexible framework for action that remains a lasting foundation for future sustainable development across the world. The best way to tackle climate change will continue to be a flexible approach to meeting targets in innovative ways.
- Andrew Hammond is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics