World governments agreed on Saturday to a compromise climate deal at the COP30 conference in Brazil that would boost finance for poor nations coping with global warming but omit any mention of the fossil fuels driving it.

In securing the accord, countries attempted to demonstrate global unity in addressing climate change impacts even after the world’s biggest historic emitter, the United States, declined to send an official delegation.

“We should support it because at least it is going in the right direction,” the European Union’s climate commissioner, Wopke Hoekstra, told reporters before the deal was gaveled through.

The Belem deal launches a voluntary initiative to speed up climate action to help nations meet their existing pledges to reduce emissions, and calls for rich nations to at least triple the amount of money they provide to help developing countries adapt to a warming world by 2035.

Scientists have said existing national commitments to cut emissions have cut projected warming significantly, but are not enough to keep world temperatures from breaching 1.5 degrees Celsius above industrial levels, a threshold that could unleash the worst impacts of climate change.

Developing countries have argued in the meantime that they urgently need funds to adapt to impacts that are already hitting, such as rising sea levels and worsening heat waves, droughts, floods and storms.

The agreement also launches a process for climate bodies to review how to align international trade with climate action, according to the deal text, amid concerns that rising trade barriers are limiting the adoption of clean technology.

Avinash Persaud, special adviser to the president of the Inter-American Development Bank, a multilateral lender focused on Latin America and the Caribbean, said the accord’s focus on finance was important as climate impacts mount.

“But I fear the world still fell short on more rapid-release grants for developing countries responding to loss and damage. That goal is as urgent as it is hard,” he said.

The European Union had been pressing for language in the official deal on the move away from fossil fuels, but had come up against stiff resistance from the Arab Group of nations, including top oil exporter Saudi Arabia.

That impasse was resolved after all-night negotiations on Friday led to an agreement that the issue could be left out of the accord and included in a side text put forward by COP30 host Brazil.

G20 summit in South Africa adopts declaration despite US boycott, opposition

Separately, a Group of 20 leaders’ summit in South Africa adopted a declaration addressing the climate crisis and other global challenges after it was drafted without US input in a move a White House official called “shameful”.

The declaration, using language to which Washington has been opposed, “can’t be renegotiated”, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s spokesperson told reporters, reflecting strains between Pretoria and the Trump administration over the event.

“We had the entire year of working towards this adoption and the past week has been quite intense,” spokesperson Vincent Magwenya said.

Ramaphosa, host of this weekend’s gathering of Group of 20 leaders in Johannesburg, had earlier said there was “overwhelming consensus” for a summit declaration.

But at the last minute, Argentina, whose far-right President Javier Milei is a close ally of US President Donald Trump, quit the negotiations right before the envoys were about to adopt the draft text, South African officials said.

“Argentina, although it cannot endorse the declaration … remains fully committed to the spirit of cooperation that has defined the G20 since its conception,” its foreign minister, Pablo Quirno, said at the summit. Ramaphosa noted this, but went ahead with it anyway.

In explanation, Quirno said Argentina was concerned about how the document referred to geopolitical issues.

“Specifically, it addresses the longstanding Middle East conflict in a manner that fails to capture its full complexity,” he said. The document mentions the conflict once, saying that “members agree to work for a just, comprehensive and lasting peace in … the Occupied Palestinian Territory”.

Envoys from the G20 — which brings together the world’s major economies — drew up a draft leaders’ declaration on Friday without US involvement, four sources familiar with the matter said.

“It is a longstanding G20 tradition to issue only consensus deliverables, and it is shameful that the South African government is now trying to depart from this standard practice,“ a senior Trump administration official said on Friday.

The declaration used the kind of language long disliked by the US administration: stressing the seriousness of climate change and the need to better adapt to it, praising ambitious targets to boost renewable energy and noting the punishing levels of debt service suffered by poor countries.

The mention of climate change was a snub to Trump, who doubts the scientific consensus that global warming is caused by human activities. US officials had indicated they would oppose any reference to it in the declaration.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In opening remarks to the summit, Ramaphosa said: “We should not allow anything to diminish the value, the stature and the impact of the first African G20 presidency”.

His bold tone was a striking contrast to his subdued decorum during his visit to the White House in May, in which he endured Trump repeating a false claim that there was a genocide of white farmers in South Africa, brushing aside Ramaphosa’s efforts to correct his facts.

Trump said US officials would not attend the summit because of widely discredited allegations that the host country’s black majority government persecutes its white minority.

The summit came at a time of heightened tensions between world powers over Russia’s war in Ukraine and fraught climate negotiations at the COP30 in Brazil.

“While the G20 diversity sometimes presents challenges, it also underscores the importance of finding common ground,” Japan Cabinet Public Affairs Secretary Maki Kobayashi told Reuters.

Commenting on Argentina’s absence from the final envoy meeting to agree on the text, Magwenya said: “Argentina [had] been participating quite meaningfully … in all the deliberations,” then never showed up to endorse the declaration on Friday. He added: “We have what we call sufficient consensus.”

The US president had also rejected the host nation’s agenda of promoting solidarity and helping developing nations adapt to weather disasters, transition to clean energy and cut their excessive debt costs.

“This G20 is not about the US,” South African Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola told public broadcaster SABC. “We are all equal members of the G20. What it means is that we need to take a decision. Those of us who are here have decided this is where the world must go.”

But in a sign of the many geopolitical fissures underlying the agreed text, EU Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen warned in a speech about “the weaponisation of dependencies”, which she said “only creates losers”.

This was an apparent veiled reference to China’s export curbs on rare earths vital for the world’s energy transition, as well as defence and digital technology.

The US will host the G20 in 2026 and Ramaphosa said he would have to hand over the rotating presidency to an “empty chair”.

The South African presidency on Saturday reiterated its rejection of a US offer to send the US charge d’affaires for the G20 handover.

“The president will not hand over to a junior embassy official the presidency of the G20. It’s a breach of protocol that is not going to be accommodated,” Magwenya said.

Lamola later said that South Africa would assign a diplomat of the same rank as a charge d’affaires to hand over the G20 presidency at the foreign affairs department.