Reclaiming Purpose in a Procedural Climate Regime

In the late 19th century, Swami Dayanand Saraswati, founder of the Arya Samaj, issued a clarion call to go "back to the Vedas" through his seminal work Satyarth Prakash (The Light of Truth). Written in 1875, it responded to a period when Hindu society had become entangled in ritualism, superstition, and rigid orthodoxy, far removed from the ethical and philosophical essence of the Vedas. Dayanand's intervention was reformist in spirit-a return to original moral, rational, and spiritual foundations.

As Brazil hosted COP30, the country where the UNFCCC was born at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, this moment invites reflection on how closely climate governance remains aligned with the Convention's core aim of curbing emissions and addressing climate change. Dayanand's call to return to first principles resonates powerfully today. Much like religious practices at that time, the climate regime has now accumulated layers of mechanisms and jargon, often losing sight of its foundational purpose.

The Foundational Framework: UNFCCC and Its Principles

The UNFCCC provides the basic wireframe of global climate governance and underpins subsequent instruments, including the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. Its objective-to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations at a safe level-is grounded in equity, precaution, and sustainable development. Crucially, it established the Conference of the Parties (COP) as the supreme decision-making body to negotiate rules, review implementation, and mobilise resources. At its core, the Convention recognises differentiated responsibilities and unequal capacities, explicitly linking mitigation and adaptation to financial and technological support as the ethical basis of cooperative climate governance.

From Kyoto to Paris: The Rise of Procedural Climate Governance

The Kyoto Protocol, adopted in 1997 and implemented from 2005, was the first legally binding instrument under the UNFCCC, intended to operationalise equity through quantified emission reduction targets for developed countries. Its flexible mechanisms - the Clean Development Mechanism, Joint Implementation, and International Emissions Trading - were designed to enable cost-effective mitigation. In practice, however, they prioritised procedural sophistication over real emission reductions. The CDM evolved into a credit-generating marketplace with weak scrutiny of additionality; JI suffered verification gaps; and IET enabled the trading of surplus "hot air, often protecting fossil asset value through offsets and market instruments. As Jessica F. Green argues in Existential Politics (2025), the system evolved to preserve carbon-intensive structures rather than challenge them.

The Paris Agreement, adopted in 2015 and implemented from 2021, inherits this logic while deepening complexity. Articles 6.2 and 6.4 replicate Kyoto-era market mechanisms through expanded accounting, verification, and registry systems. Although framed as tools for cooperation, they have entrenched technocratic, market-driven governance, where process overshadows purpose and carbon metrics eclipse climate morality.

Procedural Drift and the Limits of Implementation at COP30

Procedural drift has deepened across successive COPs-from Glasgow to Sharm el-Sheikh, Dubai, and now Belém-where negotiations have focused on registries, methodologies, and reporting templates, with limited progress on implementation. The Loss and Damage Fund illustrates this drift: politically celebrated at Sharm el-Sheikh, delayed by governance disputes until Dubai, and still lacking meaningful disbursement. The Global Stocktake has similarly become an exercise in data aggregation rather than course correction. Climate finance mirrors this pattern, with the NCQG mired in definitional debates, lagging transfers, and reported finance dominated by relabelled aid, loans, and inflated valuations. Even adaptation has prioritised indicators over delivery.

COP30 in Belém, despite its strong historical symbolism and the Brazilian Presidency's framing of a "Global Mutirão, largely reinforced these trends. On adaptation, the adoption of the Belém Adaptation Indicators under the Global Goal on Adaptation marked a formal milestone, but their voluntary, non-prescriptive, and non-comparative nature-while safeguarding developing-country interests-also reflected a reluctance to confront delivery. Absent timelines, sectoral baselines, or binding finance links, they risk becoming another layer of measurement. Finance negotiations revealed a sharper gap between rhetoric and substance. The two-year work programme to operationalise the Baku-to-Belém Roadmap on the NCQG clarified sequencing and legal relationships but deferred decisions on scale, timelines, grant shares, and predictability. Mitigation outcomes were similarly ambiguous, with facilitative platforms postponing accountability, while progress on Loss and Damage remained constrained by unresolved debates over scale and replenishment.

Returning to the Moral Core of Climate Action

The UNFCCC, in its original conception, was simple and morally clear. Article 3 enshrined common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, while Article 4 translated these into obligations on finance and technology transfer, making climate action inseparable from equity and support. Over time, an expanding web of mechanisms, frameworks, and work programmes has diluted this clarity. Market instruments, reporting regimes, and technical dialogues now dominate, often without demonstrable impact on emissions or vulnerability. It is imperative to ask whether procedural innovation advances the Convention's objective, or merely refines how failure is measured. As Swami Dayanand Saraswati cautioned in Satyarth Prakash, "When the means overshadow the end, both truth and purpose are lost." With India proposing to host COP33 in 2028, it stands at a critical juncture to lead a back-to-basics return to the UNFCCC's original moral purpose.

The writer is working as a Research Associate at Chintan Research Foundation; the views expressed by the author are personal.; views are personal