CLIMATE activists slammed the lack of a meaningful deal as the United Nations Cop30 climate talks in Belem, Brazil, came to a close on Saturday.

The negotiators pledged more funding for countries to adapt to extreme weather. But the catch-all agreement doesn’t include explicit details to phase out fossil fuels or strengthen countries’ inadequate emissions-cutting plans, which dozens of nations demanded.

After the deal was approved, Cop30 president Andre Correa do Lago said that the tough discussions will continue under Brazil’s leadership until the next annual conference “even if they are not reflected in this text we just approved.”

UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres said the deal shows “that nations can still come together to confront the defining challenges no country can solve alone.”

He said: “I cannot pretend that Cop30 has delivered everything that is needed. The gap between where we are and what science demands remains dangerously wide.”

Amnesty International slammed the deal, accusing the leaders of placing “profit over people” and saying it lacked “accountability and transparency.”

Amnesty said that “the final document avoided any mention of fossil fuels, the primary driver of climate change, failing to build on or even to reaffirm the commitment to ‘transition away’ from fossil fuels agreed upon in Cop28.

“A record number of fossil fuel lobbyists at Cop30 showed who had the real access, leaving humanity, especially those already the most marginalised, to suffer the deadly consequences of their plans to continue fossil fuel expansion and to be the ones to pump the last barrel of oil,” said Amnesty climate justice adviser Ann Harrison.  

The Elders group of former world leaders said: “Cop30 didn’t deliver the results needed. Major emitters have blocked a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels.”

The group’s chair, former Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos, said: “I’m disappointed by the lack of consensus at Cop30 on roadmaps to phase out fossil fuels and end deforestation.”

He said: “If Belem revealed the limits of the possible, it also revealed the rising power of the determined. We must follow where that determination leads.”

Former US vice-president Al Gore hit out at petrostates and their political allies for “doing everything they can to try to stop the world from making progress on solving the climate crisis.”

But Palau ambassador Ilana Seid, who chaired the coalition of small island nations, said the alternative to the deal was that “we didn’t get a decision and that would have been a worse alternative.”