The SB62 round of Earth Diplomacy Leadership workshops explored complexities and leverage points in The Process, while asking detailed questions about ways to bring climate policy and action into everyday experience. For this, we reviewed the important connections between climate and food systems—a theme that will be followed up by the Climate Action and Food Systems Alliance (CAFSA.net)—and ways in which climate-related banking innovation can transform mainstream banking and open new opportunities across economies large and small.
In the fourth session, we asked the question What is at stake in 2025? This question is meant to address not only what is at stake in the U.N. Climate Change negotiation process, but also what is at stake in terms of the wider project to securing a future in which cooperative climate rescue is an everyday reality. To get there, we need incentives and investments to recognize and reward the value of actions that reduce risk and build climate-related resilience for everyone—even when the most immediate beneficiaries of a given action are not local.
Ocean health is a climate imperative.
We also noted in today’s session that stewardship and protection of ocean ecosystems and biodiversity is crucial to successfully addressing the worsening crisis in industrial climate disruption. As noted in a 2018 report on The Ocean’s Role in Climate:
The large size of Earth’s ocean is the essential reason that humanity enjoys a stable, life-sustaining climate. Our planet is 71% covered in water to an average depth of 3.8 km. Water’s very high heat capacity and fluidity render it the central player in our climate system, able to absorb, store, and transport the heat supplied by the Sun. In contrast, the other fluid in our climate system, the atmosphere, has little intrinsic heat capacity, and relies on ocean-supplied moisture for a substantial fraction of its heat transport.
The ocean comprises the majority of the volume of Earth’s climate and biosphere. As the United Nations Ocean Conference opens in Nice, France, it is crucial that we understand teleconnections between ocean health and resilience and the vulnerability of human societies to climate shocks and related costs and impacts.
Business activities that reduce harm to watersheds and marine ecosystems can reduce loss of biomass and biodiversity, support planetary health, and stabilize carbon sinks. Such a summit-to-seabed approach can reduce climate vulnerability and create new economic opportunity, including upstream in places far from coastlines.
Emerging Insights
Below, we share a few preliminary takeaways from our June 2025 workshops. We will expand on and refine these, informing future reporting with new directions and opportunities emerging from the SB62 round of UNFCCC negotiations, which open next week in Bonn.
We need to mainstream climate action across the whole economy.
- Brazil’s COP30 Presidency has highlighted this need, calling for the negotiations to identify tools and levers for activating climate policy in people’s real-life everyday experience.
- This is not something any one national government does on its own; multilateral cooperation is key. The Paris Agreement calls for cooperation that accelerates overall climate action, both on mitigation and adaptation.
- We need specific tools that all actors can put to use, not just national governments.
- Fine-tuned incentives and structural adjustment to key institutions can unlock more finance, including through realignment of existing budget allocations to perform better by including climate value considerations.
Integrated, holistic, and balanced cooperative problem-solving applies across government, across sectors, between scales of operation and levels of authority, and internationally.
- This means we don’t just agree to spread solar panels or to enhance one country’s adaptation capacity; we need to expand the overall potential and action of our collective climate crisis response.
- Vulnerability interdependence is a critical core concern: even the wealthiest nations will face devastating cost, impact, disruption, and degraded conditions, if our collective climate-related problem-solving is inadequate.
- We need to consider how climate impacts like heat, aridity, watershed depletion, and wildfire, cause devastating impacts to everyday human health and wellbeing.
- Those jurisdictions, whether local, regional, or national, that lead on climate—through risk reduction, resilience-building, industrial transformation, and sustainable development—will do better economically, while establishing a more solid foundation for future security and prosperity, and securing stronger economic an political positions.
Everyday climate action calls for activation of far more climate crisis response agents, outside of national governments.
- Cities and regions have important roles to play in setting ambition, managing civic engagement, and designing the most appropriate, actionable, and scalable, locally rooted climate crisis response actions built into everyday local experience.
- A quick review of top-line categories of Adaptation indicators (see below for highlighted list) points to numerous areas of action already allocated to local and regional governments, communities, and the private sector.
- Stakeholder engagement is key to adding actionable insight to all areas of climate-related policy and resource mobilization.
- As we noted in our briefing note to participants in the SB62 negotiations: “Governments can address climate change, implement national plans for decarbonization (NDCs) and adaptation (NAPs), grow their economies, and improve lives and livelihoods, by welcoming the Capital to Communities approach.”
The COP30 Presidency is calling for a move “beyond negotiation” to real-world implementation.
- “The Brazilian culture inherited from Brazilian native indigenous peoples the concept of ‘mutirão’ (‘Motirõ’ in Tupi-Guarani language). It refers to a community coming together to work on a shared task, whether harvesting, building, or supporting one another.”
- “As the nation of football, Brazil believes we can win by ‘virada.’ This means fighting back to turn the game around when defeat seems almost certain.”
- “To leaders and stakeholders beyond the UNFCCC – in finance, subnational governments, private sector, civil society, academia, and technology – the incoming COP30 presidency invites you to join our global ‘mutirão.’ Humanity needs you.”
- Read the COP30 Presidency letters here.
Post-negotiations Debrief
- Wednesday, July 2, 2025
- 9:00 am EDT / 13:00 UTC / 15:00 CEST (Bonn time)
- 90-minute review of Bonn outcomes and the Road to Belém
- Event page
A few days after the close of mid-year negotiations in Bonn, we will convene a Post-negotiations Debrief, with discussion of outcomes, emerging areas of difficulty, and next steps on the way to the crucial COP30 round of negotiations in Belém, at the edge of the Brazilian Amazon region. Some of the issues we expect to explore in detail, with key participants and observers, include:
- Progress on activating financial and policy support for climate-resilient agriculture and land use;
- Updates on international cooperative measures in line with Article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement;
- Outcomes related to implementation of Article 2.1(c) of the Paris Agreement, which calls for the alignment of all financial flows with global climate goals;
- Related progress toward unlocking significantly more finance from the public and private sectors, and from multilateral institutions;
- Identified tools and levers of action that can be put to work right away, by actors outside of national governments;
- Progress on multidimensional metrics, including across the vital Adaptation indicators, which are becoming more integrated, specific, and scalable;
- Items emerging as core areas of focus for the COP30 negotiations in Belém, Brazil, later this year.
Work to refine and deploy Adaptation indicators, to support scaling up of adaptation actions at local, regional, and national levels, and to expand opportunity for new investments in risk reduction and calibrated adaptation and resilience measures, holds important promise to tie together each of the above areas. A quick review of the proposed top-line categories of Adaptation indicators (with the number of indicators under each heading in parentheses):
- Water supply and sanitation (33)
- Food and agriculture (66)
- Health impacts and health services (62)
- Ecosystems and Biodiversity (40)
- Infrastructure and human settlements (99)
- Poverty eradication and livelihoods (24)
- Cultural heritage and knowledge (63)
- Impact, vulnerability, risk assessment (18)
- Planning (26)
- Implementation (39)
- Monitoring, evaluation, and learning (20)
Work on design, funding, and operational capacity of the Tropical Forests Forever Facility—which will be mostly external to the UNFCCC process, but which was initiated by Brazil as part of its leadership of the COP30—may signal where important opportunities are for making progress on finance across the wider landscape of economic activity and conservation and resilience imperatives. There are important questions about the potential for forest finance to support agroecological land use in ways that go beyond conservation and nature-based carbon sequestration.
The event page for the Post-negotiations Debrief will track the process and link to useful dispatches and other resources.
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