Ten years after the Paris climate agreement was adopted, the global effort to limit warming is facing a basic question: are the annual UN climate talks still producing results? The treaty's key temperature goal has already been missed, and a row at last year's summit in Belém has exposed a fundamental disagreement about how countries should be held to their pledges.
At the heart of the Paris framework are national emissions-cut plans, the commitments each country makes about how much it will reduce its greenhouse gas output. Those plans are the foundation of the agreement, which was built on voluntary national pledges rather than binding targets imposed from above. The dispute that surfaced in Belém centres on whether those plans are open to negotiation at the summit itself, and it has become the most visible sign of how far the process has drifted from its original purpose.
The 2025 summit was held in the Amazonian port city of Belém, in Brazil. The Brazilian hosts removed national emissions plans from the negotiating agenda, treating them as a domestic matter rather than something that could be bargained over among governments. That decision left negotiators from poorer nations uneasy. Some of them warned before the summit opened that it would be short, with little left to negotiate, a concern that cut to the core of what they had hoped the meeting would deliver.
The episode highlights a tension that has run through the process since 2015. For many developing countries, the ability to discuss and press for stronger national plans is one of the few levers they hold in talks shaped by larger economies. Removing those plans from the table is seen as weakening that leverage. For hosts and some large emitters, national plans are sovereign decisions that should not be subject to collective negotiation, and the Brazilian position reflects that view.
The stakes are considerable because the Paris goal of holding global temperature rise to well below two degrees Celsius, and ideally to 1.5 degrees, has already slipped out of reach. Experts quoted in the reporting still regard the agreement as a moral guide, even as its central ambition falls behind the pace needed to meet it. The anniversary has therefore prompted a wider question about whether the annual summit format can still deliver the ambition the treaty was meant to inspire, or whether the focus has shifted from raising ambition to managing the process itself.
For readers following the talks, the practical consequence is that the mechanism meant to drive emissions cuts now sits at the centre of a procedural argument. If national plans are treated as off-limits for negotiation, the summits may struggle to generate the collective pressure that Paris relied upon, leaving the gap between pledges and the temperature goal to widen without a shared forum in which to address it.