Why COP30 must confront the widening climate reality gap

There is a reality gap at the core of the climate crisis: a widening space between what people are already living at the edge of 1.5°C and what leaders are willing to do about it.

That gap shows up everywhere. Communities are adapting to escalating impacts in real time, often with little support, while emissions keep climbing. Fossil fuel exploration expands, and subsidies to carbon-intensive sectors grow, locking in dependence on the very fuels driving disaster. Yet political decision-making remains stuck in the 1990s, a time when the climate threat felt distant and delay seemed politically safe.

The test for COP30 climate change conference in Belém is clear: confront the gap between climate reality and climate response. That means setting out roadmaps to scale up adaptation, accelerate the fossil fuel transition and mobilize capital at speed and scale. In a year of global uncertainty, these roadmaps to resilience are the only way to bring us closer to the reality we need.

Adaptation to escalating climate disasters is where the reality gap is already being lived and it’s where efforts to close it must begin.

COP30 can be the moment resilience is reframed, not as failure to prevent but as readiness to lead. The real question is no longer “how much damage can we absorb,” but “who has the capacity to rebuild, to protect and to lead in the face of constant disruption.”

For governments and the private sector alike, financing resilience must be treated with the same seriousness as financing growth. Food systems, infrastructure and public health all rest on this backbone. Without it, even the clean energy transition falters.

And communities themselves must be resilient enough to participate in that transition. A household cannot install solar panels without a secure roof. A farmer cannot shift to climate-smart practices if every flood resets them to zero. Adaptation is not an alternative to mitigation, but what makes the transition possible and just. COP30 can be the moment leaders take a collective decision to support their communities’ resilience and to scale finance to enable it.

That brings us to the second face of the reality gap: the growing distance between global emissions and the 1.5°C goal.

When countries signed the climate convention in 1992, the aim was to stabilize greenhouse gases to avoid “dangerous” warming. Thirty years later, the world is tracking closer to 3°C than to safety. Emissions rise despite a parade of net-zero pledges.

Some whisper that 1.5°C is already lost. But there is no cliff where catastrophe begins, only escalating consequences. Letting the target drift into silence only invites more drift.

Facing this reality starts before COP, with Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) due this year. The February deadline has passed, yet only 30 have been submitted. Among the G20 – responsible for 80% of global emissions – just five have delivered. It’s time for the rest to step up and for COP30 diplomats to bring them to the table.

In this case, they must reckon with the fact that today’s pledges are far off track for 1.5°C, as acknowledged by the COP30 Presidency. The challenge is to build consensus around the need to do more.

And that means facing what once was the elephant in the room: fossil fuels. Today, they are the walls of the room itself. COP28 endorsed a transition away from fossil fuels, a tripling of renewable energy and a doubling of efficiency. In practice, trillions still flow into exploration, subsidies and pipelines. The wall stands, but it is riddled with cracks.

And the cracks are spreading. China adds record-scale renewables yearly and dominates clean-tech supply chains. India is scaling solar at speed. The US had legislated its largest climate-industry package ever, though its future hangs in the balance. Europe doubled down on clean energy despite war-related shocks, even as incumbents lobby for change.

Beyond governments, the fossil industry’s social licence is challenged in courts, parliaments and the streets. Majorities of citizens are rejecting delay. The cracks are widening.

Belém COP decisions could signal the way out of the fossil fuel trap. It’s time we embrace fossil transition roadmaps with credible plans to exit fossil fuels while scaling up clean alternatives.

Here is the brutal truth: the multilateral climate system was not designed for the speed of today’s crisis. Built in the 1990s, in the long afterglow of the Cold War, it assumed the problem was distant and incremental progress was sufficient. But the climate crisis does not unfold in increments.

The Paris Agreement’s architecture remains vital, but the world has shifted. New sectors like AI-driven data centres are emerging as major emissions drivers. And the global financial system – built in an even older era – is similarly insufficiently up to the task of mobilizing the scale of investment needed to close our reality gap.

This too is part of the reality gap: we are confronting tomorrow’s challenges with yesterday’s instruments. Implementation of existing commitments is essential, but governance innovation is equally urgent. The regime must adapt and be made fit for these times, by expanding scope to new sectors, setting clearer rules for financial flows and ensuring accountability where it matters most. The Baku to Belém roadmap to 1.3 trillion by 2035, together with the Brazilian presidency’s plans to reform the process of mobilising action by nonstate actors (Action Agenda) could become the practical levers to drive these reforms.

COP30 is the stage for a stress test of the entire system. Can global climate politics prove resilient not only to rising temperatures, but to its own moment of reckoning?

That begins with adaptation, where the crisis is already lived. It continues with ambition, in the willingness to confront the fossil wall and back the transition with real choices. And it extends to reform, making the system itself responsive to the world it governs.

If this doesn’t happen, the reality gap will continue to widen. And eventually, it will close on its own terms, through disruption none of us can manage.