“It’s like making a board game,” Natalie Jones at the International Institute for Sustainable Development says of the failed roadmap. “We’re playing the game, but some people are still arguing about what the rules should be.”

Yet the final decision — called the “global mutirão” after an Indigenous Brazilian word for “collective efforts” — did at least demonstrate that international cooperation on climate has survived “some heavy blows this year,” UN climate secretary Simon Stiell said in his closing speech.

Donald Trump again pulled the US, the world’s second-largest emitter, out of the COP process, and Argentina threatened to leave as well, raising fears the annual negotiations would begin to fracture. At other global meetings this year, Washington torpedoed talks to limit shipping emissions and plastic pollution.

Companies, industry groups and philanthropic foundations have rowed back climate commitments, with Bill Gates calling on COP30 to focus on poverty and disease rather than emissions.

Ten years after the Paris Agreement at COP21 to limit warming to well below 2°C, the world is on track for 2.6°C — though it was heading for almost 4°C before the agreement.

Last year, top scientists and diplomats wrote to the UN that the COP process “is no longer fit for purpose”. But former Ireland president Mary Robinson, one of the letter’s authors, said COP30 showed that most countries are moving forward “at a time when multilateralism is being tested”.

Nations stressed in the main text that they remained united behind the Paris Agreement and UN climate science. Taken together with the climate pledges in a declaration by the G20 summit of large economies the same day, which the US also boycotted, it’s a “really powerful pushback and rebuke to Trump,” according to Joanna Depledge, a COP historian at the University of Cambridge.

It also sends a strong signal to businesses, investors and subnational governments, she says.

As foreign aid budgets shrink — the US has shuttered its aid agency entirely — low-income countries have complained that big historic emitters aren’t supporting them in adapting to climate threats. COP30 agreed to develop a “just transition mechanism” to help this. It also pledged to triple adaptation finance, but it remains unclear how much money that should be, and the initial deadline of 2030 was delayed to 2035.

“Apart from the just transition mechanism… I don’t have anything to celebrate,” says Harjeet Singh of the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation, which advocates for people who are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. “We should have done much better.”

Although COP30 took place in Belém on the edge of the Amazon, it failed to agree a roadmap to halt and reverse deforestation pushed by more than 90 countries. Before the summit started, however, Brazil launched the Tropical Forests Forever Facility, an investment fund that will pay its returns to countries for each hectare of forest they leave standing.

Brazil and donor countries have committed $6.6 billion, far less than the $25 billion goal. The rules under which the fund will operate need to be tightened, says Kate Dooley at the University of Melbourne, but “it’s a welcome step away from carbon offsetting that fails to protect the climate at all”.

“Brazil itself taking a bit of leadership on deforestation is one of the best outcomes we could hope for COP30,” says Marco Duso, a sustainability consultant at Ernst and Young. “And it’s taking that leadership also internationally.”