The research, conducted by Davi Madureira Victral of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation’s René Rachou Institute and Bruna Silveira de Oliveira of the Federal University of Minas Gerais, applied a mixed-methods content analysis to 143 news articles retrieved from the Google News RSS feed. Data collection took place on 10 March 2026, roughly four months after the conference concluded, a timing choice that allowed the researchers to capture the complete news cycle surrounding the summit, including both immediate event reporting and later retrospective analyses. The team used Boolean search combinations of the terms COP30, water, and sanitation, configured for Brazilian Portuguese and geographically restricted to Brazil, and employed a Python-based extraction pipeline to compile, deduplicate, and organize the corpus.

What distinguishes the study is its analytical framework. Rather than simply tallying how often water appeared in headlines, the researchers coded each article against the normative dimensions of the Human Rights to Water and Sanitation, a framework that defines state obligations across principles including availability, quality and safety, accessibility, affordability, acceptability and dignity, equity and non-discrimination, participation, access to information, accountability, and sustainability. Both authors coded the articles independently, following a predefined protocol, and reached consensus on every article without requiring third-party adjudication. Importantly, coding decisions relied on substantive content rather than explicit rights terminology, meaning that articles discussing service disruptions or unequal access were classified appropriately even when the phrase human rights never appeared.

The thematic results paint a vivid picture of what Brazilian audiences actually read about water during COP30. The single most frequent theme, covering 37 articles or 26 percent of the corpus, was infrastructure works, macrodrainage, and urban legacy in Belém—stories about the rehabilitation of urban canals such as the Tucunduba, Cipriano Santos, and Una, and the promise of post-event improvements. Public policy, water governance, and climate resilience followed with 25 articles, while the historical sanitation deficit of Belém and Brazil’s Northern region, and water and sanitation as climate adaptation strategies, each accounted for 16 articles. Lower-frequency but revealing categories included environmental racism and socioeconomic impacts, bottled water inflation and organizational expenditures, privatization debates, and operational failures such as water interruptions in the conference’s own media centers and public restrooms.

That last detail—the irony of water scarcity at a climate summit held in the Amazon—proved irresistible to major commercial outlets, and it highlights the study’s most significant finding about media fragmentation. When the researchers classified outlets by institutional profile, they found four distinct narrative regimes. Institutional and governmental media, including Portal Gov.br and Agência Brasil, framed water issues through a pro-event, legacy-focused lens emphasizing multi-billion-real investments and Brazil’s leadership in global water governance. Sponsored and private-sector content, often tied to the sanitation company Aegea, used COP30 as a milestone to validate privatization and market-based concessions as the solution to historical deficits. Major commercial outlets adopted a consumer-oriented, fact-driven posture that pivoted toward logistical failures and cost-of-living complaints.

Investigative and independent media told a fundamentally different story. Outlets such as Agência Pública, Outras Palavras, O Joio e o Trigo, Brasil de Fato, and O Eco denounced what they characterized as environmental racism, forced displacement risks, and the marginalization of peripheral, predominantly Black neighborhoods by infrastructure works that prioritized affluent areas. A fifth category of political and fiscal analytical outlets, including Folha de S.Paulo and Congresso em Foco, interrogated expenditure transparency and the incoherence of spending billions on a mega-event while basic needs went unmet. The same underlying facts, in other words, became narratives of progress, market opportunity, consumer grievance, structural injustice, or fiscal irresponsibility depending on who was telling the story.

The rights-based coding quantified these silences with precision. Availability dominated the corpus with 57 coded occurrences, or 20.5 percent of the total, reflecting relentless attention to sewage network gaps, service interruptions, and infrastructure expansion. Sustainability followed with 49 occurrences, encompassing climate resilience, nature-based solutions, and even the hydrological footprint of artificial intelligence data centers promoted as climate tools. Equity and non-discrimination, and quality and safety, each registered 32 occurrences. But the procedural, governance-oriented dimensions of the rights framework fared poorly: accountability appeared only 18 times, participation 17, accessibility 16, and access to information a mere 11. These are the very principles designed to ensure that communities can shape decisions, monitor power, and demand remedies—dimensions that the researchers argue were systematically marginalized.

The cross-analysis of media categories and rights dimensions makes the pattern sharper still. Major commercial media concentrated the highest number of availability references at 22, and dominated affordability coverage with 14 occurrences, largely through stories about inflated bottled-water prices. Investigative and independent outlets led on equity and non-discrimination with 11 occurrences and were the strongest voice for participation with 8. Institutional and governmental media emphasized sustainability with 17 occurrences while contributing almost nothing on affordability. Political and fiscal analytical outlets led on accountability with 7 occurrences. The visibility of any given dimension of the human right to water, the study concludes, depended less on the issue itself than on the editorial identity of the outlet reporting it—a fragmented public sphere in which no single narrative integrated the full rights framework.

Why does this framing gap matter? The authors argue that when water and sanitation are portrayed exclusively as technical and infrastructural challenges, public debate loses sight of the governance failures, distributive inequities, and accountability mechanisms that determine who actually benefits from new pipes and treatment plants. In a city like Belém, marked by persistent territorial inequalities and a large riverside population facing geographical barriers to access, the difference between infrastructure as modernization spectacle and infrastructure as rights fulfillment is not academic. The researchers note that mega-events historically privilege narratives of urban transformation while rendering structural inequalities less visible, and their data suggest COP30 followed this familiar script.

Methodologically, the study also offers a replicable template. By fusing a rights-based coding framework with systematic media content analysis, it demonstrates how communication research can serve as a diagnostic instrument for climate governance itself, revealing which dimensions of justice circulate in the public sphere and which are filtered out. The authors are careful to note that their corpus represents Google News-indexed coverage rather than the entirety of Brazilian media production, and that platform limitations such as algorithmic ranking constrain what such samples can capture. Still, the consistency of the patterns across outlet categories lends confidence to the central conclusion: water and sanitation were not absent from COP30 coverage, but they were only partially incorporated as human rights. How the media frame essential services, the study suggests, ultimately shapes whether urban inequalities become visible in climate politics—or quietly disappear beneath the concrete of the legacy narrative.

Subject of Research: Media framing of the human rights to water and sanitation in coverage of the COP30 climate conference in Belém, Brazil

Article Title: Human rights to water and sanitation at COP30: a comparative media analysis from a climate-vulnerable host city

Article References: Victral, D. M., & Oliveira, B. S. D. (2026). Human rights to water and sanitation at COP30: a comparative media analysis from a climate-vulnerable host city. Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, 8, Article 1895638. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsc.2026.1895638

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frsc.2026.1895638

Keywords: COP30, Belém, human rights to water and sanitation, climate communication, media framing, environmental justice, urban sanitation, climate adaptation, Brazil, content analysis, water governance, climate justice

The research team, led by Carlos Hernán Gonzalez Parias of Tecnológico de Antioquia with colleagues from Esumer and Universidad Tecnológica del Perú, examined the period from 2018 to 2026, tracking how the three countries responded to leadership changes of contrasting ideological orientation. Brazil swung from the right-wing government of Jair Bolsonaro to the third administration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Colombia moved from the conservative Iván Duque to its first left-wing president, Gustavo Petro. Mexico transitioned from one variant of the left to another, from Andrés Manuel López Obrador to Claudia Sheinbaum. Each transition produced a measurable shift in what the government contested—and none produced a break with the institutions themselves.

The study’s central conceptual move is to redefine what political scientists call selective contestation as a bounded, observable category rather than an elastic label for any expression of dissatisfaction. Under the framework, a behavior qualifies as selective contestation only when three elements are jointly present: the state continues participating in a multilateral institution and fulfilling its core obligations; it targets an identifiable institutional object—a named norm, a decision-making procedure, a distribution of benefits or representation; and it seeks to modify, resist, or redirect that object rather than merely voice disapproval. Criticism aimed at abstractions such as unipolarity or globalism, the authors argue, is rhetorical criticism, not contestation. When a state seeks to leave, the behavior is exit. When it simply diversifies partnerships without changing an institutional arrangement, it exercises ordinary foreign-policy autonomy.

Within that category, the researchers distinguish four dimensions by their object. Normative contestation targets a rule of the order itself, such as democratic conditionality or the prohibitionist drug regime. Procedural contestation targets decision rules and claims to authority, including the composition of the UN Security Council and the distribution of IMF quotas. Distributive contestation targets allocations of benefits and costs, from climate finance to vaccine access. Institutional contestation targets the forum itself, through selective participation, forum shifting, or the construction of parallel institutions. The instruments used to contest these objects form a gradation of intensity: reform advocacy from within is least costly, selective non-compliance more so, and forum construction most intense because it threatens an institution’s centrality.

The empirical technique is as revealing as the findings. The team applied dictionary-based, computer-assisted content analysis to twenty-two official national statements delivered to the UN General Assembly between September 2018 and September 2025, using Python with natural language processing libraries to preprocess, tokenize, and lemmatize the texts. Each passage was coded against a four-dimensional dictionary, with explicit rules for what counts and what does not—generic sovereignty rhetoric with no institutional object, for instance, was coded as rhetorical criticism and excluded from contestation profiles. Two researchers coded the corpus independently, resolving discrepancies against the coding rules. The discourse analysis was then paired with coding of observable institutional behavior—membership records, UN voting alignment, financial obligations, and participation in alternative forums—tracked through a cut-off of 31 January 2026.

Brazil’s trajectory produces the study’s most striking contrast. Under Bolsonaro, the coding shows high normative contestation—national sovereignty terms averaged 8.5 mentions per statement—paired with almost no procedural contestation and low institutional loyalty rhetoric. Yet the institutional record tells a different story: Brazil withdrew from no major institution, its UN voting alignment with the United States rose from 45 percent in 2018 to a 62 percent average across 2019 to 2022, and it retained its self-declared developing-country status even after a joint statement with President Trump in March 2019 committed it to forgoing special and differential treatment in current and future WTO negotiations. Under Lula, the profile inverted. Multilateral cooperation terms jumped to 12.5 mentions per statement, institutional reform references to 7.0, and climate justice to 11.0. Brazil cleared accumulated arrears to the UN, WTO, and ILO, regaining suspended voting rights; used its 2024 G20 presidency to secure a Call to Action on Global Governance Reform; and leveraged its 2025 BRICS presidency and COP30 in Belém to press distributive demands on climate finance and dollar dependence.

Colombia moved from the comparison’s low-contestation pole to one of its most active cases. Under Duque, statements averaged 10.2 mentions of multilateral cooperation with only 0.8 references to institutional reform, and the government’s instrumental use of multilateral forums to pressure Venezuela did not qualify as contestation under the inclusion rule because it targeted no part of the arrangement itself. Under Petro, the coding reveals the highest-frequency theme in the entire corpus—climate crisis at 18.5 mentions per statement—combined with 7.5 references to critique of capitalism and 8.0 to institutional reform. His September 2025 address to the General Assembly challenged U.S. drug policy and called for collective UN action on Gaza, prompting the U.S. delegation to leave the chamber. The administration’s most consequential move, however, was institutional: Colombia secured a non-permanent Security Council seat for 2026 to 2027 with 180 votes on 3 June 2025, entering the system’s principal decision-making body to advance a reform agenda from within.

Mexico presents the study’s most consistent pattern, and its most codified constraints. The constitutional principles of Article 89, Section X—self-determination, non-intervention, peaceful settlement of disputes—and the Estrada Doctrine of 1930 anchor a defensive repertoire that persisted across both administrations. Under López Obrador, statements averaged 14.3 mentions of non-intervention and sovereignty, with 4.2 references criticizing unilateral sanctions; the government withdrew from the Lima Group in 2020 and proposed vaccines as global public goods. Under Sheinbaum, the same doctrine now operates with greater multilateral presence: attendance at the G20 in Rio, the CELAC summit in Tegucigalpa, and the G7 in Kananaskis, where she criticized what she termed the economy of destruction produced by rising military spending. On 3 January 2026, following the U.S. military operation in Caracas, Mexico condemned the intervention as a violation of Article 2 of the UN Charter. The authors note that this case rests on sixteen months of conduct and no presidential general-debate statement, making it the most provisional of the three findings.

From the comparison, three analytical types of selective contestation emerge. Asymmetric selective contestation, present in Brazil under Bolsonaro, pairs radical rhetorical challenge to norms with cosmopolitan content—environmental obligations, WHO authority, human-rights conditionality—with accommodation of the economic architecture. The proposed mechanism is coalitional: where a governing coalition is organized around sovereignty and identity claims but depends on internationally integrated economic sectors, contesting cosmopolitan norms is cheap and contesting economic arrangements is costly. Constructive selective contestation, present in Brazil under Lula and Colombia under Petro, combines institutional loyalty with procedural and distributive contestation, operating as a voice strategy in Hirschman’s sense: governments that regard the order as unequal but reformable press for change from within. Defensive selective contestation, present in Mexico across both governments, is doctrinally anchored, narrow in object, and triggered reactively by external events.

The explanation the authors propose locates selective contestation at the intersection of three levels, each doing distinct causal work. The systemic level—eroding U.S. hegemony, rising China, high exit costs—explains why all three states remain inside institutions and gain room to diversify, but it cannot explain why Brazil’s contestation profile reversed between 2022 and 2023 from an unchanged systemic position. The domestic level—ideology, coalition composition, leadership perceptions—explains the direction of variation: right-wing governments contested norms while accommodating economic arrangements; left-wing governments contested distributions and procedures while affirming institutional loyalty. The institutional level explains the bounds: Itamaraty’s career structure and examination-based recruitment, Mexico’s constitutionally codified doctrine, and Colombia’s inherited repertoire of alignment-with-invitation each supplied intermediate options while raising the cost of departing from them. The authors are careful about what the design can establish: with three cases selected because they display the phenomenon and no negative case examined, the four proposed conditions—exit costs, institutional flexibility, asymmetric bargaining power, domestic constraints—cannot be shown to be necessary, and the mechanisms are plausible rather than demonstrated.

What the analysis ultimately reveals is a middle-power strategy that is neither loyalty nor revisionism but recalibration. Contestation concentrates where formal equality diverges most from effective distribution—Security Council composition, climate finance, differential treatment in trade, and the drug-control regime—while trade and financial sub-orders were the least contested across all six governments, and in two were sites of active accommodation. The longer-term stakes are considerable. If institutions fail to incorporate the reform demands of their own members, the study suggests, the plausible outcome is not mass withdrawal but a gradual erosion of legitimacy from within, with incentives for alternative forums—the BRICS New Development Bank, local-currency payment mechanisms, CELAC alongside the OAS—that compete without replacing. And if middle powers conclude that selective contestation yields no substantive reform, pressure may build for more disruptive strategies, from exit coalitions to selective boycotts. Whether the institutions of the post-1945 order prove flexible enough to convert this opposition into renewal, the authors conclude, will depend on their capacity to adapt—much will hinge on that capacity, and the evidence from Latin America suggests the clock is running.

Subject of Research: Selective contestation of the liberal international order by Latin American middle powers

Article Title: Selective contestation of the liberal international order: institutional adaptation strategies in Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico (2018–2026)

Article References: Gonzalez Parias, C. H., Londoño Ossa, G. A., Velásquez Ochoa, J. A., Acosta Strobel, J. A., & Castilla Cabezudo, J. L. (2026). Selective contestation of the liberal international order: institutional adaptation strategies in Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico (2018–2026). Frontiers in Political Science, 8, Article 1957231. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2026.1957231

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2026.1957231

Keywords: Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, liberal international order, selective contestation, contested multilateralism, middle powers, UN General Assembly, UN Security Council, BRICS, G20, COP30

The technical core of the argument rests on a systematic comparison of public financial flows. Between 2013 and 2025, the authors report, more than 90 percent of Brazilian rural credit went to medium- and large-scale producers, while less than 10 percent reached smallholders through programs such as the National Program for Strengthening Family Farming, known as PRONAF. In the 2024/2025 agricultural year alone, roughly US$148.75 billion was allocated to large-scale producers, compared with just US$15.32 billion for family farming. The disparity becomes even sharper when the analysis narrows to socio-environmental credit lines covering agroecology, bioeconomy, and forestry: in the 2023/2024 agricultural year, these lines accounted for a mere 4.3 percent of PRONAF’s total credit volume and only 0.4 percent of all agricultural credit in the country.

The asymmetry extends well beyond credit markets. Public investment in research and development has consistently prioritized commodity supply chains, with Brazil’s public research institutions concentrating on productivity gains for large-scale agricultural value chains rather than on the diverse products of the standing forest. Infrastructure spending follows the same logic, focused on export logistics such as railways, ports, and waterways that move soy, beef, and grain to international markets. Under the New Growth Acceleration Program launched in 2023, the authors calculate that US$13.29 billion has been directed toward transport infrastructure oriented to commodity flows, with no provisions for supporting traditional territories or sociobiodiversity value chains.

Research funding tells a parallel story. The Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, EMBRAPA, which primarily serves commodity production, received US$951.85 million in 2024. By contrast, the National Agency for Technical Assistance and Rural Extension, ANATER, which supports family farmers, received just US$14.22 million in the same period, equivalent to only 1.5 percent of EMBRAPA’s budget. For the authors, these figures reveal a political economy in which the institutions and sectors with the greatest capacity to shape land use are those most heavily subsidized, while the forest-compatible alternatives that could anchor a low-carbon rural economy are left to rely on international cooperation and civil society organizations.

The environmental consequences of this configuration are quantifiable and severe. According to the Brazilian Greenhouse Gas Emission Estimation System, agribusiness directly accounted for 27.5 percent of Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2023, while land-use change driven by agricultural expansion contributed an additional 46.2 percent. Together, that means more than 70 percent of the country’s national emissions trace back to the sectors that receive the bulk of public support. The authors describe this as the central contradiction of Brazilian development policy: the activities most heavily financed by the state are also those most responsible for environmental degradation, creating a feedback loop in which public money reinforces the very pathway the country’s climate commitments require it to abandon.

Against this model, which the authors label a high-carbon configuration in their schematic analysis, they contrast an alternative built on what they call sociobiodiversity: economies rooted in low-carbon production, traditional knowledge, community governance, and the sustainable use of biodiversity. Across the Amazon, community-led initiatives ranging from agroforestry systems to managed fisheries have demonstrated the capacity to reconcile conservation with income generation. Previous research cited in the article, including studies of sustainable-use protected areas and community-based fisheries management, has shown that these arrangements can catalyze enhanced livelihoods while exerting a substantial protective footprint over forested landscapes. The authors argue that these models combine conservation, regeneration, and governance in ways that commodity production cannot.

Yet the sociobioeconomy remains what the authors describe as potential without scale. Its expansion is constrained by a familiar set of structural barriers: limited access to credit, inadequate infrastructure, weak market integration, the absence of payments for ecosystem services, and insufficient policy support. Even targeted programs for family farming allocate only a small fraction of resources to biodiversity-based production. As a result, sociobioeconomy initiatives often operate under conditions of financial precarity, depending on underpaid labor or the support of nonprofit organizations. This precariousness, the authors warn, undermines long-term viability, discourages the engagement of younger generations, and generates what they term social and ecological fatigue in the communities that sustain the forest. The problem, they emphasize, is not the absence of viable alternatives but the lack of sustained investment and institutional support to enable their growth.

The timing of the analysis is significant. The United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP30, held in Belém in November 2025, elevated forests, adaptation, and climate finance on the global agenda, and the approval of the Tropical Forest Forever Facility reflected growing international recognition that standing forests require long-term economic incentives. The facility, with projected returns of US$3 to 4 billion per year, could provide modest but stable support to forest-dependent communities. However, the authors caution that COP30’s outcomes were largely political statements rather than structural changes, and that the projected TFFF returns remain small compared with the domestic subsidies that continue to expand agricultural frontiers. They conclude that the facility should be understood as complementary to, rather than a substitute for, a fundamental rebalancing of national priorities.

What would that rebalancing look like in practice? The authors argue that a transition toward a low-carbon sociobioeconomy requires political and financial commitments comparable to those enjoyed by agribusiness. This includes redirecting public credit toward biodiversity-based production, investing in infrastructure adapted to forest territories rather than export corridors, expanding technical assistance for small producers and extractive communities, and strengthening community-based governance. Equally important, they stress, is the question of political representation. Decision-making power in Brazil’s Congress, which approves the federal budget and enacts and amends the laws governing land use, remains skewed toward sectors with strong economic influence. Currently, 63 percent of federal deputies, 324 of 513 members, are affiliated with the Agribusiness Parliamentary Front, while only four representatives are Indigenous.

The authors close with a pointed reframing of the Amazon debate. Sociobioeconomy initiatives, they argue, are already delivering evidence on the ground that it is possible to combine biodiversity conservation, climate mitigation and adaptation, Indigenous rights, and local socioeconomic development. The region does not lack solutions; it lacks the political conditions and policy support to scale them up. The future of the Amazon, they contend, will be shaped not by global discourse but by national and local choices, and transforming the region’s development model requires moving beyond the symbolic recognition of forest-based economies toward their effective material support. Only when benefits, decision-making power, and opportunities are equitably distributed among the Indigenous Peoples, traditional communities, and local populations who sustain these territories, they conclude, can Brazil reconcile economic development with social justice, the protection of sociobiodiversity, and climate stability, positioning the sociobioeconomy as a central pillar of an inclusive, low-carbon national development strategy.

Subject of Research: Rebalancing public investment from Amazon commodity agribusiness toward community-based sociobiodiversity economies

Article Title: From Commodities to Communities: Rebalancing public investment in the Amazon sociobiodiversity

Article References: Paes, M. X., Campos-Silva, J., Vieira, L. M., & Puppim de Oliveira, J. A. (2026). From Commodities to Communities: Rebalancing public investment in the Amazon sociobiodiversity. PLOS Climate, 5(8), e0001029. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0001029

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pclm.0001029

Keywords: Amazon, sociobiodiversity, bioeconomy, Brazil, rural credit, deforestation, agribusiness, climate finance, COP30, Indigenous peoples, community governance, tropical forests

The study, authored by Yixian Sun and Yitong Ye of the University of Bath, examines how Trump’s second-term anti-climate agenda is reconfiguring global climate governance and how different actors around the world are responding. Their central claim is that the architecture of global climate action has become polycentric, meaning that authority is distributed across many overlapping centers, including national governments, subnational states, cities, businesses, and transnational networks. Because no single actor, not even the world’s largest economy, dominates the system, the withdrawal of one major player cannot collapse the whole regime. The researchers compare this to a safety net: when one strand fails, the others hold the structure together.

The scale of the American retreat is nonetheless unprecedented. Unlike the first Trump administration, whose rollbacks were largely regulatory and reversible, the 2025 agenda targets structural foundations. Beyond the Paris exit, the administration suspended disbursement of tax credits and funds authorized under the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest public investment program in US history, which had mobilized roughly 370 billion dollars for renewable and zero-emission technologies. Federal policy has been reoriented toward expanding domestic oil, gas, and coal production under banners of energy dominance and economic security, deepening what the authors call the structural lock-in of a high-carbon economy.

The rollback has even extended to pressuring private climate action. In August 2025, 23 Republican state attorneys general sent a letter to the Science Based Targets initiative, a global standard-setter for corporate net zero commitments, demanding disclosures about its governance and membership on antitrust and consumer protection grounds. The researchers note that such threats from subnational governments to non-state climate initiatives are unprecedented and could deter US-based companies from pursuing decarbonization. Meanwhile, a 90-day freeze on foreign assistance and the closure of USAID terminated more than 150 climate-related contracts and grants worth roughly 1.2 billion dollars, while the administration rescinded 4 billion dollars previously pledged to the Green Climate Fund and withdrew from the Loss and Damage Fund.

These cuts strike hardest at developing countries, which have long relied on American finance to access clean technologies, build institutional capacity, and manage climate-induced losses. The authors frame this as a philosophical shift in US foreign policy, away from cooperative leadership based on providing global public goods and toward coercive influence exercised through punitive measures such as tariffs. In the Trumpist worldview, international commitments are constraints on American sovereignty, and climate finance is a zero-sum transaction that benefits other countries at America’s expense. The resulting trade tensions, particularly with China, the principal supplier of clean technologies, have raised costs for solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles in the US market.

Yet the multilateral system has refused to buckle. No other member state has followed the United States out of the Paris Agreement. Instead, most countries have continued updating their Nationally Determined Contributions, the five-yearly pledges that form the treaty’s ratcheting mechanism. By early November 2025, 108 parties excluding the US had officially submitted their 2035 targets, together accounting for 65.3 percent of global emissions and 55.3 percent of the world’s population. In July 2025, China and the European Union jointly committed to submit enhanced 2035 pledges before the COP30 summit and to demonstrate shared leadership in advancing net zero transitions.

China’s announcement on 24 September 2025 was particularly consequential. President Xi Jinping pledged emission reductions of 7 to 10 percent below peak levels by 2035, an increase in non-fossil fuels to more than 30 percent of energy consumption, and an expansion of wind and solar capacity to over six times 2020 levels. Although analysts debate the ambition of these targets, it marks the first time China has promised an absolute cap on its greenhouse gas emissions, and the country may overperform given its current pace of clean energy deployment. Brazil, meanwhile, has pledged to cut emissions 59 to 67 percent below 2005 levels by 2035 and intends to use its COP30 presidency to keep global ambition aligned with the Paris goals.

Within the United States itself, subnational and non-state actors are sustaining momentum. Twenty-four states and territories have formed the US Climate Alliance, representing nearly 60 percent of the national economy, and have collectively reaffirmed a net zero target of reducing emissions 50 to 52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. States such as California, Washington, and Massachusetts continue to operate renewable portfolio standards, cap-and-trade systems, and electric vehicle mandates. Even Republican-leaning Texas, the largest oil and gas producing state, has become a renewable powerhouse, holding more than 26 percent of US wind capacity in 2022 and attracting over 21 billion dollars in solar investment by early 2023. City networks like C40, which includes 14 major American cities, have pledged to remain bastions of climate progress, and the share of large US companies adopting net zero targets has continued to rise even during Trump’s second term.

Perhaps the most striking evidence of resilience comes from the Global South, where cheap solar technology is driving a consumer-led energy revolution. In Nigeria, savings from reduced diesel imports allow solar panels to pay for themselves within six months. In Sierra Leone, imported panels could generate electricity equivalent to 61 percent of the country’s 2023 output if fully installed. Pakistan recorded one of the fastest solar expansions in history by importing 16 gigawatts of panels during 2024 alone. With American climate finance gone, new funding sources are filling the gap, most notably China, which provided an estimated 3 billion dollars annually for developing country climate action between 2015 and 2021 and has pledged overseas green investments of up to 71.6 billion dollars, particularly through the Belt and Road Initiative since 2022.

The Bath researchers conclude that Trumpism has limited purchase on a polycentric system in which many actors have strong, increasingly economic incentives to decarbonize. Climate politics, they argue, is no longer primarily a collective action problem but a distributional one, with countries and firms competing for the benefits of clean energy markets. As climate impacts intensify and green technology costs fall, the actors positioned to gain from transition are strengthening their commitments rather than abandoning them. The long-term consequences of America’s retreat remain uncertain, and the damage to US decarbonization and to vulnerable countries is real. But the evidence assembled suggests that the global net zero machine, powered by major emitters, American states and cities, corporations, and Chinese capital, will keep turning regardless of what happens in Washington.

Subject of Research: The resilience of polycentric global climate governance under the second Trump administration's climate policy rollback

Article Title: Global climate governance remains resilient under Trump 2.0

Article References: Sun, Y., & Ye, Y. (2025). Global climate governance remains resilient under Trump 2.0. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 353-366. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00131-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00131-x

Keywords: climate governance, Paris Agreement, Trump administration, net zero, polycentricity, climate finance, China, Nationally Determined Contributions, US Climate Alliance, renewable energy, Global South, COP30