Laurence Tubiana
CEO, European Climate Fountation (ECF)
No, but it is being tested.
Reaching consensus among EU member states and keeping the union’s climate framework intact is no small feat in today’s political and economic climate. Europe will arrive in Belém (the Brazilian city where COP30 is hosted) with an agreed Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) aligned with its 2050 net-zero goal. That’s later than ideal, but still a clear signal of continued commitment to the Paris Agreement.
The task now is to put in place the policies, investments, and partnerships needed to deliver. Reaching the upper end of the 2035 emission reduction target range will be essential not only for Europe’s international credibility but also for its competitiveness, energy security, and strategic autonomy. The EU must hold its nerve and lean into a global transition that is already gathering pace—with or without the union.
European climate leadership will now depend on building and driving coalitions of the willing to tackle specific barriers to the global transition—from climate finance and carbon pricing to trade, clean technology, and reducing methane emissions. One example is the premium flyers solidarity coalition, launching in Belém, through which countries including France, Spain, and Kenya will introduce levies on business class and private jet travel to fund adaptation in vulnerable nations. It shows how determined cooperation can deliver concrete progress.
Julian Joswig
Member of the German Bundestag, Alliance 90/The Greens
Leadership depends on credibility, not concessions. As COP30 opens in Brazil, global ambition is fading and Europe’s once-confident climate leadership is faltering. The EU once led by setting clear, credible rules from carbon pricing to clean-tech regulation. That clarity made it a global benchmark. But credibility erodes when ambition becomes negotiable.
Brussels has already missed two deadlines to submit its updated climate plan to the UN. Now, on the eve of COP30, member states have agreed only on a vague plan to cut emissions by 66.25–72.5 percent below 1990 levels. This last minute compromise signals hesitation, not leadership.
Other outcomes from the latest meeting of the environment configuration of the Council of the EU, which took place on November 4, are equally discouraging. Ministers approved a 90 percent emission reduction goal for 2040, but up to 5 percent can be met through international carbon credits—effectively reducing the real effort to 85 percent. The one year delay of the new emissions trading system—ETS2—for buildings and transport is another setback.
True leadership means leading by example—investing in carbon removal, clean industries, and innovation—not outsourcing responsibility. The EU’s Green Deal was meant to define a new model of prosperity, proving that climate ambition and economic strength can go hand in hand. But if flexibility keeps replacing ambition, Europe won’t just lose its leadership role, it will weaken the world’s fight against climate change.
Gabriella Seiler
Strategic Advisor, Serrapilheira Institute
COP30 opens in Brazil with a difficult geopolitical landscape: a climate leadership vacuum left by the United States, while Europe faces short-term economic and defense priorities, making its climate commitments uncertain.
In this context, the EU risks missing an opportunity to redefine its leadership role.
Climate disruptions already pose tangible threats to Europe’s economic order and security. Scientific evidence increasingly shows how the planet's stability depends on complex environmental relationships that are not yet reflected in global policy or governance.
As resource-rich nations gain renewed power, Europe could benefit from building new alliances with countries in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa to strengthen the climate agenda. These collaborations can determine new power dynamics around natural resources, including water and food security, and critical minerals, which are essential for the technological transition underway.
Taking a bold stance on climate change is not just the responsible choice—it can also be the most strategic economic decision for the EU. There is space for new powerful alliances to emerge based more on mutual exchange and collaboration than on extraction. But this will require more ambitious and globally resonant commitments from Europe, including support for climate adaptation, scientific research, technology transfers, and innovative financial mechanisms—such as backing the Tropical Forest Forever Facility proposed by the Brazilian COP presidency.
Noah Gordon
Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
No, Europe has not given up its leadership on combatting climate change. The recent move by EU environment ministers to slightly weaken the 2040 climate target still leaves the union with a more ambitious goal than comparable rich countries.
But a leader needs followers, and these are scarce. The United States—which until the second Trump administration cooperated with Europe and sought to emulate some of its regulations—has become a proud petrostate and climate saboteur, even threatening countries that considered supporting a global carbon levy on ships at the International Maritime Organization. Other rich countries are going their own way too. Canada wants to remain a major fossil fuel producer, and Japan evidently feels no pressure to raise its weak climate targets to align with Europe.
More significant is how emerging economies are looking to Beijing rather than Brussels. These countries do not have high hopes for traditional climate finance, which is supposed to come in grants or loans. They’re more interested in what China can offer, whether that’s some of the 220 billion dollars (190 billion euros) of Chinese green technology investment between 2022 and 2025 or simply the chance to import cheap, effective solar panels and batteries to power their economies.
James Dyke
Associate Professor, University of Exeter
December 12, 2025 will mark the tenth anniversary of the Paris Agreement adopted at COP21. Rather than celebrating the birth of this landmark climate treaty, COP30 risks serving as its wake. It has become abundantly clear that the agreement’s highest ambition will be missed.
For a while, some dared to dream that 2015 would mark a watershed moment when the international community would finally agree to do whatever it takes to avoid dangerous climate change. This has come to be understood as limiting the global average temperature rise to 1.5°C. Ten years ago, that was a huge undertaking because there was already little remaining in the so-called global carbon budget. A decade of rising emissions—2024 saw emissions at an all-time high—means that this budget is practically gone.
The truth is that no nation made any serious attempt at limiting the temperature rise because it would have required accelerating the phaseout of fossil fuels. This includes the EU and its member states: they claim to be leaders in climate action but continue to float vague promises about net-zero. Now, we are heading beyond the 1.5°C target where the consequences of climate change risk impeding our ability to deal with its drivers, entirely derailing the sustainability transition.
Olivia Lazard
Nonresident scholar, Carnegie Europe & Fellow, Berggruen Insitute
While the EU focused on legal and normative climate leadership, China was investing in the green transition as a power transition. It spent twenty years building the techno-industrial ecosystems capable of delivering energy and infrastructure projects to re-create the global stage. Now, China is planting a climate security flag to supplant the United States’ and Europe’s liberal democracy flag. The writing has been on the wall for a long time and now, despite warnings, the EU is panicking over the resulting geostrategic shifts.
As it heads into COP30, Europe must accept its new role as a middle power and seek alliances with others, starting with Brazil. The current COP presidency could mark a paradigm shift toward integrated resource transitions—recognizing that industrial energy solutions often clash with nature-based approaches and that mitigation must align with adaptation, biodiversity, and ecological goals.
The EU should back Brazil’s ecologically sensitive transition and invest in aligning nature and the economy. Most importantly, it should design a transregional industrial policy that strengthens mineral supply chains, recycling, and innovation beyond European borders. Climate policy is industrial policy. Only in recognizing this can Brussels regain credibility and influence. But the penny still needs to drop: Europe’s future as a climate leader now depends on partnership with other middle powers.
Caspar Hobhouse
Research Analyst, European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS)
No, but it’s complicated.
There has undoubtedly been a change in the politics of climate action in the EU and its member states. The consensus on coordinated action is fraying with anti-climate policies proving a vote winner in Europe and beyond.
However, the fundamentals for leadership on climate mitigation are still in place. It remains firmly in the union’s strategic interest to continue with broad-based climate action. The energy transition was always about more than carbon emissions and offers the EU a permanent way out of the trap of energy dependence. The Russians can cut of the gas supply, but they cannot make the sun disappear.
As a happy byproduct, the easiest way of reducing energy prices and increasing European competitiveness is largescale additions of cheap electricity to the grid. Equally, European defense will only be enhanced by a domestic supply of synthetic fuels while harnessing new battery technologies to power drones and electronic weaponry. All of this demands leadership on climate action , but under another name.
As the European delegations head to Belém, therefore, they will demonstrate a new form of leadership: climate mitigation without saying the word “climate.”
Heather Grabbe
Senior Fellow, Breugel
Prevarication is not a good look amid geopolitical rivalry. Yet, European leaders are still arguing about the 2040 target that is essential to ensure that emissions reductions stay on track, and they failed to agree an NDC for the EU just when China upped its game on emissions commitments ahead of COP30. Brussels risks squandering its climate leadership, which was built over decades.
A slowdown in the transition to renewable energy and a circular economy would be shortsighted. Incumbent industries want to continue the previous model, and their employees are politically significant constituencies. But Europe has to face the reality of being resource-poor. Imports of fossil fuels will remain expensive and geopolitically vulnerable, so renewables are the only way to achieve the permanently lower energy prices that are vital for competitiveness. Moreover, the continent is warming at twice the global rate, so mitigation is not charity for the rest of the world. Climate leadership is essential both to keep the effort going internationally, despite U.S. sabotage, and to meet the expectations of the European public, which still overwhelmingly supports climate action.
Milo McBride
Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Caught between great power competition and war to the East, Europe’s weakening climate resolve is not a retreat from leadership. It is a recalibration of priorities that may help the durability of the climate project amid shifting geopolitical realities. Beneath the headlines of diluted regulations, the European Commission continues to expand its green industrial strategy and an emission reduction agenda.
Globally, Europe is a success story in phasing down hydrocarbons and a top contributor to global climate finance—modest emission pledges or weakened sustainability regulations do not negate such feats. Despite lukewarm ambition in Brussels, the unilateral withdrawal of the United States and China’s underwhelming pledges alongside massive new coal generation mean no other power is stepping in to the leadership role. The union is still the de-facto global climate leader.
Europe’s more disciplined maneuvers may help fend off climate skepticism at home by ensuring greater buy-in across electorates and the private sector. The urgent domestic priorities of security, affordability, and competitiveness should not come at the expense of reducing emissions and climate cooperation writ large. But a more cohesive balance of these factors will help solidify decarbonization as a pillar that Brussels can continue pushing forward both at home and abroad.
Laurie Laybourn
Associate Fellow, Chatham House
In some ways, Europe’s leadership remains consistent. A 90 percent cut to emissions by 2040 conforms with previous climate goals, which have been ambitious relative to the rest of the world—though within a global context that is failing to stay below an average temperature increase of 1.5°C. So, leadership in goal setting largely remains.
The problem has always been whether European leadership can extend to meeting those goals. When the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, borrowing costs were low and the world order seemed stable. Ten years later, much progress has been made in emission reductions. But the querulous negotiations behind the 2040 goal show how a more chaotic world can be used as an excuse to lower ambition.
Yet, the world will only get more chaotic as it shoots past the 1.5°C limit. This will require a different type of leadership. Europe must also contemplate the worst, like the passing of a tipping point in Atlantic Ocean circulations. The continent would be pushed into deep freeze while African monsoons would be disrupted. Risks like these demand new collaborative leadership drawn along lines that recognize the shared vulnerability of the future, not the old alliances of the past.
Shana Tabak
Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Although Europe may demonstrate signs of climate backsliding, the EU will maintain its climate leadership in the long term.
Two factors that appear to be incongruous shed light on Europe’s position.
As it navigates the current geopolitical landscape—recalibrating trade, security, and energy relationships with the United States, China, and Russia—Brussels’s climate engagement seems to be faltering. The tension between keeping economies afloat and defense coffers stocked has led to a lapse in mitigation commitments.
Yet, Europeans can already feel the impacts of a warming planet.
Climate-induced floods in Spain in 2024 caused the deaths of 237 people. In the sweltering summer of 2025, two thirds of European heat deaths were attributed to global warming. Rising sea levels in the Netherlands threaten existing infrastructure. While headlines may not link these disasters to human-made global warming, they cause massive disruptions to life across the continent. Millions will be displaced, health impacted, food security challenged.
The cascading impacts of climate change are causing extreme disruption in how—and where—people live their lives. This not only exacerbates current geopolitical challenges, but also increases domestic pressures, ultimately forcing Europe to recalibrate and recommit to climate leadership.
Emil Sondaj Hansen
Climate and Development Finance Analyst, Institute for Climate Economics (I4CE)
Not entirely. But European leadership on climate change looks very different in this new international context of globally inadequate NDCs, cuts to development aid, and geopolitical complexity.
A gap is emerging between self-perception and delivery. Members of the European Parliament recently reaffirmed their ambition for the EU to “remain a leader in international climate negotiations” and the commission has released a new vision for global climate diplomacy. Yet, the Europeans famously failed to meet the UN deadline for a new 2035 climate target in September and risk showing up empty-handed to COP30, where they will ask large emerging economies to step up their ambition.
Fiscal realities are biting. Budget pressure in France and increased defense spending across the union are crowding out climate spending. Leaders—whether justified or not—argue their hands are tied.
Still, leadership can emerge in this difficult context. Look to France’s role as cochair of the Global Solidarity Levies Task Force—together with Barbados and Kenya—looking to develop new innovative sources of financing. Spain has also joined the coalition to tax premium flyers and use proceeds for climate. Ambitious announcements in this space at COP30 would show that Europe has not completely abandoned its leadership.
Emma Hakala
Leading Researcher, Finnish Institute of International Affairs
Climate leadership is still Europe’s to lose—but it just might do that unless it steps up its game.
China has the material and technological upper hand in renewable energy, but Europe has a historical advantage through its ambitious climate targets and a strong policy backbone in the Green Deal. However, voices are rising across the union, calling for weaker regulation and targets on climate. This not only shakes investor confidence but also undermines Brussels’s political credibility as a climate leader. This internal turmoil is reflected in the international arena, with the EU’s inability to submit its NDC well ahead of COP30.
Certainly, Europe cannot secure its role as a climate leader just by showing up in Belém and claiming to be one. Yet, all is not lost. Despite pressure, most of the union’s environmental regulations and directives have held up—albeit after compromises and narrow votes. These policies must ultimately push for much-needed innovation if the EU hopes to maintain its global competitiveness. The alternative is following the United States in a fossil fuel race to the bottom.
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