Description
The global energy transition is advancing—technologically, financially, and socially—despite the turbulence of contemporary geopolitics. This paradox defines the post-COP30 moment. Even as populist and nationalist movements weaponise climate policy as an external constraint, decarbonisation proceeds across regions through market forces, innovation, and domestic imperatives of resilience, security and competitiveness. Yet this momentum risks isolating climate politics from wider political agendas, narrowing it to a technocratic process rather than a geopolitical project. I suggest that COP30’s mutirão—the idea of collective mobilisation—offers a means to reconnect the transition to the fractured world it seeks to transform. As a universal metaphor, it captures the cooperative spirit required to align divergent national interests around shared outcomes of justice and stability. The challenge for climate diplomacy after Belém is to embed this ethos within a multipolar order, linking energy transformation to global priorities of development, finance, and security, and turning an inevitable transition into a consciously shared project of international renewal.
