The G20 summit in South Africa – just more hot air, or climate promises kept?

8 December 2025, by Dr. Jan Wilkens

Photo: Alex Ferro/ COP30

COP30 shortly before the G20 summit – no decisive momentum

The G20 summits often go hand-in-hand with the hope of finding concrete solutions to various crises, e.g. of positively shaping international climate policy to strengthen climate protection. This year’s summit in South Africa took place, as has often been the case in previous years, at roughly the same time as the UN Climate Change Conference (COP30).

In the months leading up to the event, diplomats prepared proposals on a number of issues, ones that have become increasingly complex over the past several years. In this year’s summit declaration, the G20 countries reaffirmed their climate policy targets by explicitly stating that they “welcomed” the decisions made at the most recent UN Climate Conferences, especially the Global Stocktake (GST) and the implementation of the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG).

Given the growing pressure on international climate policy – from e.g. the explicit climate-change denial of the US administration or the resistance of oil-producing countries – this alone could be considered a success. Yet, for a variety of reasons, the G20 states did not show any meaningful signs of pursuing effective climate protection, and that’s unlikely to change in the near future.

As an international forum for exchanges between the most economically powerful nations, the G20 summit does not itself produce active climate policy – partly so as to avoid creating parallel structures to the UNFCCC. That being said, the increasingly fragmented field of climate policy could certainly profit from more support in the UNFCCC process – especially since the participating G20 nations have the requisite resources.

Over the past few years, the pressure to provide climate financing has continued to grow, leading to a divide between those countries that can afford climate protection and those that are at risk of falling behind. At the G20, the view of climate policy is limited to the Energy Transformation; Resilience; and Risk Management. But relying on existing structures in these three fields won’t be enough. The incremental progress made in climate adaptation and the massive financing gaps are just two examples where the G20 summit could have sent a clear signal.

But the summit’s questionable efficacy and unclear authority are only part of the problem. The torpedoing of important climate policy by a number of participating states is exacerbated by the overload of topics and their being upstaged by other crises. Consequently, the G20 summit is above all under pressure to demonstrate the value of multilateral cooperation. Paradoxically, the recurring references to “implementation” in a range of areas have devolved into a means of justifying its own existence.

Both the COP30 in Belém and the G20 summit in Johannesburg underscore the ambitions of certain countries in the Global South to establish multilateral collaborations between entrenched fronts. At the same time, the host countries Brazil and South Africa reflect the contradictions of international climate policy, in which a just transformation is predominantly seen as being a technological challenge, and which is also undermined by other issues and the interests of individual parties.

It remains to be seen how the support for climate policy will be influenced by the host government for the next summit. The end of the summit declaration reads: “We welcome Saudi Arabia’s ambition to advance its turn for hosting the G20 Presidency in the next cycle.” Yet we shouldn’t expect to see a substantially more positive climate policy impulse from the oil-exporting country, which once again undermined all ambitions in Belém this year, when and if it is the G20 host. In fact, even a minimal reference to the climate could be in jeopardy next year, when the US hosts the summit. As such, making headway will require not just individual nations with ambitious climate policy goals, but also tenable alliances with civil society.

This article first appeared in the German Climate Consortium (in German).