With COP30 convening in Brazil on November 6-21, the world faces a very different geopolitical landscape than 10 years ago when the Paris Agreement was concluded. The solidarity prominently displayed by Chinese President Xi, Russian President Putin, and India’s Prime Minister Modi at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting, together with China’s massive September 3, 2025, military Victory Day celebration, attended by leaders from Russia, North Korea, Iran, and other US adversaries, were a clear indication of the ongoing global power realignment and growing rivalry with the West. US President Trump has again withdrawn the United States from the Paris process and other countries, including the EU, have been slow in putting forward their new pledges for emission reduction. Although President Trump’s meeting with President Xi in South Korea on October 30 seemed to mark a truce in the US-China trade confrontation, Trump’s extensive global tariff regime continues to upend international commerce and supply chains.
In this context, the countries of the Global South will play an important role in COP30. This year’s host Brazil, one of the world’s largest renewable energy producers in the world, also convened in July the BRICS Summit of major emerging and developing countries. Following the Summit’s Declaration opposing “unilateral coercive tariffs”, US President Trump threatened an additional 10 percent tariff on countries that align with BRICS. Trump followed through with relatively higher tariffs on Brazil (50 percent); India (50 percent); and South Africa (30 percent), And the new US tariffs on China are estimated to be about 47%.
BRICS development has been championed by China and Russia who hosted the previous two Summits in 2023 and 2024. Although Presidents’ Xi and Putin did not attend the Brazil Summit in person, Brazilian President Lula de Sliva continued the expansion and commitment of this group of five core and five new members to advancing changes in the global trade, financial, and political order. In the lead-up to COP30, he has focused the BRICS agenda on energy and climate change and championed the preparation with BRICS Ministers of Energy of a Roadmap for BRICS Energy Cooperation 2025-30, which outlines a framework for increased cooperation. The BRICS role in the global energy economy is significant, accounting for over 45 percent of global energy supply in 2024, 80 percent of the world’s coal production, 50 percent of global CO2 emissions, 47 percent of global renewable supply and 28 percent of nuclear generation.
Although the Roadmap does not highlight nuclear, Russia, at the Kazan Summit in 2024, led by its state nuclear company Rosatom, established a BRICS Nuclear Energy Platform to promote cooperation. All the five BRICS core members generate electricity from nuclear power and among the new members UAE, Iran, and Egypt are either producers or are building new reactors. BRICS countries accounted for 80 percent of non-OECD nuclear electricity generation in 2024; and many BRICS members and partners are looking to cooperate with and obtain financing from Russia and China for new nuclear technology projects.
The Abu Dhabi and Baku COP 28 and 29 meetings, major countries, including the United States, pledged to triple their nuclear generation capacity by 2050. Except for Ghana and Morocco, most of the original group did not include countries from the Global South and no core BRICS countries signed the declaration. At Baku, several more developing countries joined, including BRICS’s partner countries Kazakhstan and Nigeria.
With renewed concerns over energy security, the growing global demand for electricity and rising GHG emissions, which saw their biggest increase on record between 2023 and 2024, nuclear power development has been increasingly recognized as a vital component of a global energy development strategy. Although China has the largest number of nuclear reactors under construction domestically at year-end 2024 ( total of (29), Russia dominates the nuclear power export market in the Global South with new Russian-designed reactors under construction in Egypt, India, China, Iran, and Bangladesh. And despite the demands of the Ukraine war, Russia has continued to pursue nuclear export expansion. Nuclear was highlighted as a key area of Brazilian-Russian cooperation during President Lula da Silva visit with Putin in Moscow in May 2025 and a working group is developing plans for a specific project. South Africa has long been a target of Russian nuclear export interest; and Russia, despite the cancellation of the 2014 agreement with President Zuma, continues to eye this market. Reports indicate that South Africa has again decided to proceed with new nuclear development and that ESKOM has signed a training agreement with Rosatom. Indonesia joined as a full BRICS member in January 2025 and is looking to build its first nuclear plant by 2029 with potential use of Russian and/or Chinese technology. Russia in early 2025 extended its nuclear cooperation agreement with Ethiopia, a BRICS member, including the planning of Ethiopia’s first nuclear power plant.
expansion. Nuclear was highlighted as a key area of Brazilian-Russian cooperation during President Lula da Silva visit with Putin in Moscow in May 2025 and a wo
A big question mark is India, which Trump, despite its central role in the Indo-Pacific Quad, has targeted with higher tariffs in part due to India’s import of Russian oil. India has stepped up its commitment to developing nuclear power, which now provides only 2.7 percent of India’s electricity. In 2025, the Modi government launched the Nuclear Energy Mission to achieve 100GW of nuclear generation by 2047, compared with 8GW at present and to develop 6 SMR sites by 2033. The new policy also indicates an openness to private sector participation, which has not been the case in the past. Russia will play an important role in Modi’s Nuclear Mission with four reactors under construction, in addition to two operating VVER units. Modi’s attendance at the SCO meeting in China may signal an openness to nuclear cooperation with China.
BRICS “partner” countries are also important nuclear power markets for Russia and increasingly China. Uzbekistan has started a project to build six Russian SMRs and Kazakhstan recently announced a decision to work with Rosatom on their first reactor and with China on its second and third reactors, thus shutting out the two other bidders from France and South Korea. Other BRICS’ partner countries, i.e. Nigeria, Thailand, and Vietnam, are exploring nuclear power development and Belarus already has operating Russian reactors. Turkey, where Russia is building four reactors, and Saudi Arabia, which is moving towards a decision on nuclear power, have been invited to participate in BRICS.
Although the United States was the largest generator of nuclear power in 2024 and Trump has embraced a vision of quadrupling U.S. nuclear capacity to 400 GW by 2050 to meet surging electricity demand from AI and new industrialization, the United States as well as other Western nuclear energy suppliers are clearly behind in their nuclear energy engagement with countries of the Global South. The only recent Western reactors built in the EMDE were the four South Korean plants in UAE. The main focus of the G7 nuclear suppliers has been in Europe, especially in Eastern and Central Europe; and these efforts have successfully pushed out Russian and Chinese companies, except in Hungary, where Russia is building two units at the Paks site, and potentially in Slovakia and Serbia.
With the rapid development and demonstration of new SMR designs in the US, Canada, UK, and Western Europe, the potential clearly exists for expanded efforts by Western companies in the EMDE. But financing will be a key constraint as well as the nascent state of initial SMR projects in the home countries and uncertain costs and scale-up timetables. Western companies generally do not have the same access to state resources as the Russian and Chinese companies. It is therefore critically important for Western governments to work together and ensure planning, project development and institutional and regulatory support to EMDE countries as well as capital project financing. The recent decision by the World Bank to approve financing for nuclear power projects is encouraging in terms of opening new Western export possibilities but it will take time for the Bank to develop its capacity and funding strategies, procedures and methodologies.
Trump’s Executive Orders of May 23, 2025, laid out an aggressive program to accelerate US domestic nuclear development and provide the foundation for expanded exports and increased US international competitiveness. He set a target of concluding over 20 new 123 Nuclear Cooperation Agreements by 2029. Senator James Risch and others in Congress have advanced the International Nuclear Energy Act of 2025 (S1801) to provide a more effective institutional framework for expanding US international efforts and competing with Russia and China. The legislation was voted out of committee in the Senate. Congressional action to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank and the Development Finance Corporation will also be key to improving US international nuclear engagement. These agencies have taken steps to provide funding for US company nuclear projects in Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania with possible financing of $4 billion in Poland (GE-Hitachi); $8.6 billion in Bulgaria (Westinghouse), and $99 million in Romania (NuScale). Proposals to increase their equity authorities as well as change Ex-Im’s 2 percent default cap limit are under consideration, which might help it expand its nascent role in nuclear projects. But a much stronger commitment by President Trump and the National Energy Dominance Council to US global nuclear leadership, and a well-funded “Atoms for Peace” type program, is essential to deal with the aggressive moves by Russia and China in the Global South and ensure the safe, secure, and responsible development of the new generation of nuclear energy technologies.