COP30: Trade measures in focus at climate summit, elevating long-held concern of developing countries

“Unilateral, trade-restrictive climate measures are not about ambition — they are about giving competitive advantage to industries in the Global North at the cost of development in the Global South,” India told a room full of negotiators in the Just Transition Work Programme (JTWP) on the fourth day of the 30th Conference of Parties (COP30) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Belem, Brazil.

This intervention captured a sentiment that had simmered through last week and has carried into the second week of the conference. Various blocs, including the like-minded developing countries (LMDC), the Arab Group, China and several African countries have closed ranks on unilateral trade measures, an issue that was a source of an agenda fight at COP29 and is now spread across multiple negotiating rooms at COP30.

At the heart of the debate is the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (EU CBAM) and a wave of similar border carbon adjustment measures now under development in other developed countries.

Developing countries have been arguing that such measures increase the cost of global climate action, put an undue burden of decarbonisation onto developing countries, contradict the principles and provisions of the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement as well as undermine the basis of multilateral cooperation.

The UNFCCC was, in fact, quite forward-looking on the link between climate and trade. Long before CBAMs were conceptualised or before ‘carbon leakage’ entered policy debates, the Convention recognised that climate measures could spill into trade. Article 3.5 states that “measures taken to combat climate change, including unilateral ones, should not constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on international trade.”

Developing countries are now pointing back to that line with urgency. For them, Article 3.5 describes what such policies could do: Dictate market access, shift costs onto poorer economies, and narrow their space for growth, all through measures introduced outside the multilateral process, regardless of their effects on other countries.

On the demand made by developing countries at the mid-year UNFCCC climate talks at Bonn to have unilateral trade measures (UTM) as a separate agenda item for negotiations, countries managed to reach a compromise that the issue would not be taken up as a standalone agenda item but would instead be discussed under JTWP.

At Belem, the issue of the agenda item was raised once again, but the COP Presidency reached an agreement with Parties early in the process that the matter would be dealt with under direct consultations facilitated by the Presidency, one among the four issues on which the Presidency would engage Parties.

In both forums — the Just Transition Work Programme as well as the Presidency consultations — developing countries have voiced their concerns over climate-linked trade-restrictive measures in sharp terms.

Arab nations have been among the most forceful. In the Presidency consultations, Syria described EU CBAM as an “extraterritorial climate policy”; the Arab Group argued that UTMs are “threatening the policy cycle and structure of the Paris Agreement”; Egypt said they undermine the nationally determined nature of the regime; and Qatar warned that such measures “shift resources away from national priorities without delivering real climate benefits”.

The pushback was similar inside JTWP. Pointing directly to CBAM, Saudi Arabia called it a measure that “strips away opportunity to achieve ambition, and deepens poverty”. It cited estimates showing that CBAM could increase revenues for developed countries by $2.5 billion while reducing incomes in developing countries by $5.9 billion — “for only a minor reduction in CO2”.

The intervention concluded: “This is not climate transition; this is an economic transfer from developing to developed.” Fiji, speaking for Alliance of Small Island States, echoed the concern, noting that “CBAM is entrenching inequality unless revenues are recycled to support developing countries”.

Developed countries, for their part, have focused on defending these measures and explaining why they should not be discussed here at all. EU complained that its policies were being “named extensively”, saying this “feels like finger-pointing” and contradicts the Presidency’s “safe space” guardrail. It also insisted that CBAM is simply a climate instrument designed to prevent carbon leakage, “not a unilateral measure” and reminded delegations that the UNFCCC “has no mandate to assess national policies”.

Japan warned against “duplication”, pointing out that WTO already handles such matters. UK called for a “balanced” discussion, arguing that green trade creates opportunities and that its CBAM-related policies are “not arbitrary” and “not a disguised restriction on trade”.

Australia, meanwhile, cautioned that giving UTMs too much attention would “divert” the JTWP from its practical purpose and reaffirmed its commitment to free trade and WTO rules.

In short, developed countries would much rather relegate discussions on these issues to a different venue where equity and historical responsibility are politely absent from the agenda.

Against this backdrop, the COP Presidency tabled several options for how Parties might move forward: Operationalising Article 3.5 through an annual dialogue; continuing discussions in existing platforms such as the Response Measures forum; holding dedicated roundtables over 2026–27, feeding into the second Global Stocktake; or creating a technical platform to examine cross-border impacts of climate-related trade measures. 

A fresh set of options tabled later, widen the menu. One proposal simply “takes note” of the work already happening under the Response Measures forum and calls for a series of technical workshops on trade-climate linkages, co-organised with institutions like the WTO, UNCTAD and ITC. 

Another option goes back to the Convention’s own language, reaffirming that climate measures, including unilateral ones, must not become arbitrary discrimination or disguised restrictions on trade, and proposes dialogues at future meetings of subsidiary bodies in 2026, 2027 and 2028. 

A third option is more ambitious: The creation of a dedicated Platform on Unilateral Trade-Restrictive Measures in conjunction with the Bonn sessions, mandated to examine the nature, scope and impacts of such measures, with developing countries able to submit information on how they are affected. 

And then there is a fourth, broader pathway, which invites the UN Secretary-General to convene a high-level summit on maintaining an open international economic system and launches an annual dialogue on trade, development and climate under the COP.

With just a few days left in Belem, more interventions, defences and proposals on the issue will almost certainly surface. But regardless of how the decision finally lands, COP30 may well be starting something important, that is, prying open a political space that many countries have been asking for — a space to discuss the expanding nexus between trade and climate.

If the conversation continues, it may soon have to contend with a wider set of asymmetries — tariff barriers on green goods, industrial policy tools that carve out domestic advantages and technology-market restrictions that indirectly shape who gets to manufacture the clean economy of the future.

For developed countries, this widening arc may feel inconvenient, even unwelcome, after insisting that these matters belong elsewhere. But if COP30 has opened a new front in the climate debate, it is because many developing countries are refusing to let climate ambition become a new vocabulary for old hierarchies in trade.