Brazil hands world its first fossil fuel exit roadmap, deadlines not included

Brazil's government dropped the world's first global roadmap for breaking free of fossil fuels on Tuesday, pitching it as proof that countries don't need to wait for miracle technology or economic upheaval to start. The plan says nations can boost growth and pull people out of poverty while cutting the cord on coal, oil and gas. There's one big catch: nothing in it is binding, and it sets no deadlines or milestones.

Joeri Rogelj, a professor of climate science and policy at Imperial College London, called the roadmaps a step forward but a limited one. He said the documents carry no timeline or key benchmarks, so they leave plenty to the imagination on how the world reaches the Paris agreement's target of limiting warming to well below 2C, and preferably 1.5C.

André Corrêa do Lago, Brazil's president of the Cop30 summit, said the point was to push the annual UN climate talks past endless negotiation and into actual delivery. "They are documents of implementation," he told the Guardian, arguing the people who negotiate aren't the same people who execute. Finance, transport, energy and infrastructure ministries should pick them up, he said, with every country moving at its own rhythm after diagnosing its own fossil fuel dependence.

The roadmaps were born as a compromise. Brazil hosted Cop30 in the Amazon city of Belém last November, where a bitter fight erupted over whether the final resolutions should include fossil fuel pledges. The presidency agreed to produce two documents instead — one on transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly and equitable way, the other on halting and reversing deforestation.

They're separate from a parallel push. Nearly 60 countries met in Santa Marta, Colombia, in April and formed a "coalition of the willing" outside the Cop process, each writing its own national phase-out plan. Germany, France and the Netherlands have already published theirs, and those are far more specific and prescriptive than Brazil's, since the governments writing them are the ones who have to implement the policies.

Brazil's suggested steps include oil and gas producers urgently slashing the flaring and venting of gas at extraction sites — methane traps 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide, so the payoff would be immediate. It also points to cutting fossil fuel subsidies and scaling up renewables. On forests, the roadmap cites UN figures showing about $300bn a year will be needed by 2030, rising to $500bn a year by 2050, against roughly $85bn available now. Brazil set up the tropical forests forever facility at Cop30, with the UK contributing £400m and other countries about $7bn combined. The plan also flags trade checks between forested and consumer countries, and notes Indonesia is being sued by civil society groups for "gross negligence" over record-breaking fires that cleared swathes of forest, likely for palm oil plantations. The roadmaps landed after President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a fourth term just over a week ago, following four years in which deforestation fell by about 70%. His defeated rival, Flávio Bolsonaro, was expected to revive his jailed father's policies of rampant Amazon exploitation. Cop31 opens in Antalya, Turkey, this month.