The UN Climate Summit in Belem, Brazil, COP 30 has gone into overtime, having missed its Friday evening deadline.
The summit officially began on Monday 10 November, and was originally scheduled to end on Friday, 21 November at 6.00 p.m.
Organisers had initially expressed confidence that discussions would end only “five to ten minutes” late, with key decisions expected by Wednesday evening.
However, these plans fell through, not helped by a fire on Thursday that interrupted negotiations for over six hours.
Early Friday morning, a bundle of draft texts was released, but it omitted a concrete plan to phase out fossil fuels, which sparked criticism from many delegations.
EU Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra said that the European Union would “under no circumstances” accept the proposal without such a roadmap.
Since Friday morning, negotiators have been working in separate groups in an effort to resolve disagreements. Any final document at COP30 must be approved through consensus, leaving room for any country to block adoption.
Delays at climate summits are increasingly common. The last timely conclusion was recorded at COP9 in Milan in 2003.
The longest extension took place at COP25 in Madrid in 2019, which ran 44 hours over schedule, while COP29 in Baku last year also exceeded its timeline - by 36 hours.
