Bonn climate meetings: a stepping stone to COP30

Climate negotiations do not only happen at COPs. Every year, in May or June, national delegations convene in the quiet town of Bonn in Germany, where the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) secretariat is located. The UNFCCC is the primary UN agency for addressing climate change. 

Alongside observer organisations such as NGOs and international agencies, negotiators meet for ten days for technical discussions. The mid-year conference is an important milestone in the negotiation calendar to touch based on where countries and negotiating blocks stand on a wide range of issues (adaptation, finance, mitigation programme, transparency etc.) and make progress on contentious issues to lay the ground for political decisions at COP a few months later. 

The Bonn climate talks are a smaller affair than COPs, with less delegates and also less pressure and media scrutiny, which allows more informal discussions between countries.

When are the Bonn climate meetings this year? 

From June 16-26, 2025, delegates from nearly 200 countries will come together in Bonn, Germany. With 2025 marking the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, these interim negotiations are a crucial opportunity for nations to accelerate climate action in the run up to COP30 in Bélem, Brazil, next November. On June 17, Simon Stiell, the UNFCCC executive secretary, skipped his formal statement of welcome out of frustration with delayed start because of disagreement over the two-week agenda. Calling on countries to deliver concrete progress, he kept it short: “Time is short, so let’s get to work.”

You will find here his formal statement and his actual shortened speech.

Key topics at the June 2025 climate meetings

• Climate adaptation: the COP30 presidency, Brazil, has put adaptation at the top of the agenda in Bonn. While the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) is a key element of the Paris Agreement, it is complex to assess collective progress on adaptation as no single metric can be used, unlike greenhouse gas emissions for mitigation. So since COP28, countries have been discussing a set of indicators to help countries track progress and plan accordingly. These indicators cover a wide range of topics such as water supply and sanitation (percentage of population living in flood prone areas for instance), food and agricultural production (proportion of farmers adjusting planting and harvesting dates) and health impacts (heat-related mortality broken down by age group and gender. 

• Climate finance: at COP29, countries agreed to scale up climate finance to $1.3 trillion a year by 2035 (from both public and private sources). The Baku to Bélem Roadmap will be officially launched at COP30. The Bonn conference must make progress on the details of the roadmap - from addressing the vast adaptation finance gap to the quality of climate finance (loans vs. grants), from agreeing accounting rules to recommendations on financial support to fossil fuels. 

⇒ The Sharm el-Sheikh Dialogue is meant to make progress on how to align financial flows with low-emission, climate-resilient development (article 2.1.c, Paris Agreement) with a first workshop in Bonn. 

• Global stocktake (GST): conducted every five years, the GST is a periodic review to evaluate how countries are collectively making progress towards meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement. The process is also meant to inform countries in enhancing their climate action, through their nationally-determined contributions (NDCs). The first global stocktake ended in 2023 at COP28 : it recognized that the world is off track to limit average temperature rise to 1.5°C and called for tripling renewable energy capacity, doubling the global rate of energy efficiency improvements, and transitioning away from fossil fuels. While COP29 ended without agreement to implement these targets, the Bonn conference must make up for the lost time and start planning for the second global stocktake due to happen from 2026 to 2028. So far, only 22 countries have submitted their new NDCs, including Singapore.

• Just transition work programme (JTWP): at COP29, countries failed to reach an agreement on how to support workers and communities affected by the energy transition. Contentious issues included human and labour rights and the lack of finance. 

• Gender action plan: at COP29, countries agreed to extend for 10 years the gender work programme - called the enhanced Lima work programme - but negotiators need to define concrete objectives and activities. A draft decision should emerge in Bonn in June to be then considered and adopted at COP30.

Role and Expectations from Singapore and Asian countries

For the past two years, Singapore has been boosting cooperation with Brazil on climate change. The country is focusing on implementing its climate targets and will be involved in the climate finance negotiations to facilitate investments, especially in South-East Asia. For the G77 and China negotiating block (i.e. all developing countries), the issue of climate finance is critical to accelerate climate action and developed countries should take the lead given their historical responsibility in climate change. 

What are the expected outcomes of the Bonn climate meetings? 

At the end of the Bonn Summit, there will be no final statement or decisions but depending on the topic potential draft decisions to be considered and adopted at COP30 in Brazil. 

Please stay tuned, we will share more about those outcomes here when Bonn climate meetings are over.