At this year's COP30, 195 parties approved the Belém package, which includes 29 decisions covering just transition, adaptation finance, trade, gender, and technology. SOURCE: COP30
As the curtains fell on COP30 in Belém on November 21, negotiators hailed what they insist is a triumph for multilateralism. At least 195 parties approved the Belém package, which includes 29 decisions covering just transition, adaptation finance, trade, gender, and technology. The message from the podium is clear: global cooperation is alive, consensus has been restored, and climate action is set to accelerate in ways that benefit people.
However, without enforceable finance and political will, the Gender Action Plan (GAP) adopted in Belém risks becoming another trophy text—celebrated at signing ceremonies, sidelined in national budgets, and powerless to shift the patriarchal structures that still shape climate governance.
Parties are committed to tripling adaptation finance by 2035, with developed countries expected to significantly boost support for the developing nations, withstanding the worst of climate impacts. The Baku Adaptation Roadmap now sets work until 2028, leading into the next global stocktake, the fundamental component of the Paris Agreement. Negotiators also finalised 59 voluntary, non-prescriptive indicators to track progress under the global goal on adaptation across water, food, health, ecosystems, infrastructure, and livelihoods, integrating finance, technology, and capacity-building.
Belém also delivered a Just Transition Mechanism that explicitly places people and equity at the centre of climate responses, aiming to enhance cooperation, technical assistance, capacity building, and knowledge sharing. Meanwhile, the Belém Health Action Plan, endorsed by more than 30 countries and 50 organisations, mobilised $300 million to strengthen climate-resilient health systems and disease prevention in the Global South.
Taken together, the Belém package appears comprehensive. It demonstrates that the machinery of multilateralism can still produce agreement. Yet, consensus is not the same as justice. For gender advocates, celebration is tempered by a familiar structural problem: ambition without resources.
The revised GAP, secured through years of feminist advocacy, includes real advances. It enhances support for national gender and climate focal points, promotes gender-responsive budgeting, and recognises structurally excluded groups, including Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and rural women. It mandates guidelines to protect women environmental defenders, opens space to address care work, health, and violence against women, includes gender- and age-disaggregated data, and strengthens coherence with the Rio Conventions and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). With 27 activities, it provides multiple pathways for implementation, including nationally.
These gains were not gifted; they were fought for. They reflect feminist expertise shaping climate policy.
Yet, they sit alongside stark regressions. Foundational human rights language, central to the Lima Work Programme on Gender, has been removed from the GAP. The intersectional framing activists demanded appears only as a diluted reference to "multidimensional factors," revealing the enduring discomfort with naming systems of oppression. This retreat signals whose experiences are permitted in global climate narratives and whose are erased.
Most critically, the GAP lacks binding indicators and financial guarantees. Without mandatory gender budgeting and enforceable accountability, implementation becomes optional.
This weakness becomes glaring when set against the finance discussions. The much-hyped Baku-to-Belém Roadmap proposes mobilising $1.3 trillion annually for climate action. Yet, nowhere in the final texts is there a commitment that any meaningful share will reach gender-responsive initiatives or women-led organisations.
The Fund for responding to Loss and Damage has been celebrated for issuing its first call for proposals totalling $250 million for 2025-26, with grants of $5-20 million and approvals expected from mid-2026. But $250 million is symbolic in a landscape where climate-induced losses reach tens of billions annually. For women, Indigenous peoples, and marginalised communities already losing land, livelihoods, and cultural heritage, symbolism does not rebuild homes or secure futures.
Without mechanisms guaranteeing direct access for women-led and grassroots organisations, the Loss and Damage Fund risks reproducing the same inequalities it claims to address. The feminist critique is clear: climate finance continues to flow through institutions dominated by the same power structures that marginalise those most affected.
This is the central contradiction of Belém. Leaders endorsed a GAP that recognises care systems, environmental defenders, and community leadership, while refusing to anchor those commitments in finance and enforcement. Feminist policy cannot run on rhetorical support and volunteer labour. It demands a redistribution of resources and power.
If COP30 is to be remembered as a turning point, dedicated gender-responsive finance windows must be created for adaptation, loss and damage. Gender indicators must become mandatory within funding decisions. Direct access for women-led and Indigenous organisations must become a standard practice.
Ultimately, the strength of the Belém GAP will depend not on the text agreed upon in Brazil, but on the political decisions that follow. The world has endured too many cycles of declarations followed by underfunded implementation.
Belém promised justice. Without money and courage, it delivers only recognition without power—a feminist victory stripped of the resources needed to transform systems. The question is not whether COP30 secured an agreement, but whether governments will fund the change it promised.
Farah Kabir is country director at ActionAid Bangladesh.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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