This eight-part podcast series examines the Paris Agreement ten years on, featuring global climate leaders discussing progress, challenges, and the dramatic shift in power towards emerging economies. The series explores how multilateral cooperation has evolved despite geopolitical fractures, from industrial transformation and innovative financing to the changing rules of climate leadership. This episode focuses what happens in wake of COP 30 and how countries can cooperate on climate issues despite geopolitical turbulance. The podcast is based on 28 interviews carried out globally by journalist Sophie Larmoyer on behalf of IDDRI, the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations.
The final episode opens where the series began: with the question of whether global cooperation on climate is still possible. The answer, from every voice heard here, is yes. But not in the same way, and not with the same players.
Donald Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement in January 2025 is the unavoidable backdrop. But rather than a death knell, contributors treat it as a reorganizing force.
Episode Seven: civil society, a driving force for change?
Ana Toni, director of COP30, put it plainly: "One federal government has decided to leave the Paris Agreement. But we have 197 other countries that stayed and are committed to climate change. Carbon molecules don't have passports."
For Sonja Klinsky of the University of Arizona, the withdrawal may even create unexpected opportunities. "Sometimes maybe it's even useful having the United States out of the room for a while," she argued, "because maybe we'll start to pay attention to the diversity of countries." Her warning against premature conclusions was equally direct: "We need to be very careful that we don't start declaring the death of multilateralism because of one country being really difficult."
The coalition that showed up in Belém
COP30 itself demonstrated the point. Trump had no coalition. The real coalition was the one that gathered in Belém.
Episode Six: finance, the heart of the matter
The episode moves through the economic conditions of the transition, with Maria Mendiluce of We Mean Business making the case for mandated green procurement as the fastest route to scale. The hardest work, as Antoine Oger of the Institute for European Environmental Policy noted, lies ahead: the heavy industries, steel, aluminium, energy-intensive manufacturing, that have no affordable alternative to gas and whose decarbonization will define whether the transition is real or merely partial.
On trade, the picture is shifting. With three-quarters of global commerce still conducted under common rules despite American tariffs, Daniel Buira of Tempus Analytica sketched what a genuinely useful green trade deal might look like: Europe securing green iron from Mexico, South Africa, and Brazil, saving its steel industry while fulfilling climate obligations through the supply chain rather than solely through domestic production.
Episode Five: how to face climate challenges in a fragmented world
Brazil emerges from the episode as a credible host and bridge builder. Laurence Tubiana of the European Climate Foundation identified what set it apart: "Brazil is a deeply multilateral country, which has the ability to speak to everyone."
An incredibly dynamic civil society, a government that has demonstrably reduced Amazon deforestation since Lula's return, and a business community that increasingly sees decarbonization as a development model rather than a constraint: these combined to give COP30 a different character from its predecessor in Azerbaijan.
Episode Four: climate crises - the urgency to adapt
Out of Belém came a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels, with Colombia mobilising a coalition of more than 80 countries and hosting a follow-up conference in April 2026.
The Tropical Forests Forever fund, proposed by Brazil and detailed here by Emilio Lebre La Rovere of the University of Rio, represents one of the episode's most concrete ideas. It would reward countries across Amazonia, Indonesia, and the Congo basin not through emissions calculations but on the basis of area successfully protected from deforestation, with 20% of resources ring-fenced for the indigenous communities who are the forests' most effective guardians.
Episode Three: energy, the key to success
Leadership is moving south
On leadership, the episode is unambiguous: it is shifting. Sébastien Treyer, director of IDDRI, offered the clearest account of what 2025 revealed. "It's better to have common rules and the broadest possible multilateral cooperation than to do nothing," he said, summarising the consensus of countries that chose to stay.
But he did not flinch from the implication. "Perhaps we'll find ourselves in an evolution of multilateralism where a certain number of things will be defined more by China, India, South Africa, and Brazil than by Europe. We will have to accept that there will be definitions that come from elsewhere, otherwise we will not get out of it."
Episode Two: the decarbonisation quest
For the countries of the Global South, the demand is no longer simply for more finance. It is for a different relationship altogether. As Nisreen Elsaim, the young Sudanese activist who runs through this series like a thread, put it: "The global South is something you hear in every conversation. You hear the impact. But when you talk about power share, you talk about the US, you talk about China, you talk about Europe. So why are we always the impact, not the proactive?"
Sonja Klinsky framed the same challenge from a different angle, calling it the most exciting and most difficult task in the global transition. Developing countries must meet persistently unmet development needs while simultaneously pursuing green industrialization, something the Global North never had to do. "Countries who can figure that out," she said, "that's where the real leadership is going to come from."
Episode One: behind the scenes of a historic agreement
Hope is not enough
The final word belongs to Elsaim, and it is the right choice. Asked about hope, she refused the easy answer. Hope without benchmarks, she said, was illusion. "But if you're talking about the ability to envision a better future and work for this future, and you call it hope, then I am definitely hopeful."
