UK Urges World to Stay on Climate Goals Despite US Withdrawal: Will It Affect COP30?

Britain’s climate envoy urged the world to prepare to tackle global warming without the US, as the Trump administration withdraws from billions of dollars pledged to initiatives funding the green transition.

On March 6, the US withdrew from the Just Energy Transition Parnership, a coal transition pact between richer nations to assist developing countries including Indonesia, Vietnam and South Africa transition from coal to cleaner energy, to which it had committed $1 billion. According to Bloomberg, US had also cancelled $4 billion of pledges to the Green Climate Fund. This puts the fate of billions of dollars pledged by the US to green shifts in Indonesia and Vietnam in jeopardy.

"Around the world people are noting that the US has pulled out of Paris, but we've got to carry on," Rachel Kyte told Reuters in an interview on a visit to South Africa's capital Pretoria. "The science hasn't changed, no other country has changed its position,” Kyte said emphasising that the direction of progress remains unchanged.

In January, the US President Donald Trump pulled the country out of the Paris Agreement, an international climate treaty, on the very first day of his swearing in. This move comes after developed countries, responsible for most of the greenhouse-gas emissions causing climate change, failed to deliver adequate financial package to support climate action in the developing world at the UN climate conference, COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan last year.

Reports indicated that the developed countries offered only $300 billion by 2035, a fraction of the at least $1.3 trillion needed annually from 2025, leaving many developing countries deeply disappointed.

Impact of US Withdrawal

When asked whether the US decision to leave the Paris Agreement would affect COP30, Brazil's Environment and Climate Minister Marina Silva, told journalists, "We cannot be denialists to not acknowledge that." Silva was in India on March 6 to attend TERI's World Sustainable Development Summit.

She said that the US, being the world's second-largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter and a major economic and technological power, "does influence" Brazil's COP30 goals "to some extent".

However, she stressed that this would not deter Brazil's climate efforts. "On the contrary, we will strengthen climate action and fight inequality while pushing for stronger means of implementation."