Climate Summit Gets Lost in the Amazon Jungle
HAVANA TIMES – “Frustration.” That is the word Chile’s Minister of the Environment, Maisa Rojas, chose to describe the closing day—Friday the 21st—of the climate summit hosted by the Amazonian city of Belem.
The course of the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) in its final hours “leads us to reflect on negotiating with those who have the will to do so and to keep moving forward,” in the face of broken previous agreements, the minister told IPS about the meeting that began on November 10th in the northwestern Brazilian city.
At dawn on the summit’s official last day, draft texts from the COP under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) were released. The summit was officially supposed to end Friday the 21st, but given the deeply divided positions over the drafts presented by the Brazilian presidency, it is already expected to extend at least one more day.
“Weak and useless,” were some of the reactions to certain texts.
To the disappointment of the nations of the Global South and dozens of civil society organizations, the draft final political declaration of Belem (Global Mutirão) does not mention fossil fuels or outline a plan for their gradual phase-out, ignores calls to triple adaptation finance by 2030, and waters down commitments to a just energy transition to less-polluting energy alternatives.
“Climate change and biodiversity loss are two sides of the same coin. And no matter how much money there is for adaptation, without a plan to recognize the causes, it’s insufficient,” Rojas stressed.
With 18 mentions of the word “adaptation,” the draft merely acknowledges the need to increase adaptation resources for developing countries and invites efforts to triple adaptation finance by 2030 compared to 2025 levels.
While presiding over COP, Brazil had proposed achieving a mutirão (joint effort toward a common purpose, in Portuguese) focused on transparency of climate actions, keeping global warming to 1.5°C to prevent irreversible harm to ecosystems and people, establishing a global plan for adapting to climate catastrophe, and tripling adaptation finance by 2035.
But the proposal dilutes the spirit of these aims. In fact, Brazil promoted the summit as “the COP of adaptation,” but the evolution of the talks has not reflected that mission. In the drafts released Friday, Brazil’s diplomatic hand for bridging the differences among the 197 governments present in Belem is nowhere to be seen.
Juan Monterrey, Special Envoy for Climate Change for Panama’s Ministry of Environment, also did not hide his disappointment.
The proposals “go against science, against the needs of climate response, and against the calls of affected communities,” the negotiator told IPS, using words such as “absurd” and “failure” to describe the state of negotiations.
The partial results mark a deviation from the course set at COP28, held in 2023 in Dubai, and cast doubt on the path forward for 2026.
Blockade
Led by the European Union (EU), Japan, Russia, and other wealthy nations—and backed by countries such as Saudi Arabia—the climate villains blocked progress toward a world with lower fossil fuel production and consumption.
On adaptation, the Friday afternoon draft presented a reduced set of 59 monitoring and verification indicators, down from the initial list of 100, all voluntary.
Thus, COP30 accedes to African demands reflected in the Belém–Addis Ababa Process proposal (Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, will host COP32) to harmonize adaptation policies and incorporate safeguards in the application of indicators.
Andreas Sieber, Associate Director of Policy and Campaigns for the NGO 350.org, criticized the EU’s stance of turning its back on adaptation financing.
“This is not an acceptable situation. There has to be an effort to improve the drafts. Things are not getting better,” he told IPS.
Adaptation finance needs amount to 120 billion dollars annually by 2030, flowing from Global North nations to the Global South.
The End-of-the-World Argument
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defended the extensive material, discursive, and logistical efforts of hosting a summit in an Amazonian city in order to reinforce the idea that this should be an ecologically centered COP.
His argument was to showcase the importance of the Amazon—the world’s largest rainforest—and the living conditions of Belem, a city of 1.2 million people with both stark poverty and the richness of a unique biome.
The saga began with the choice of an unsuitable location to host a COP—insufficient infrastructure and complex logistics for receiving more than 40,000 participants—and reached its climax on Thursday the 20th, when an electrical failure caused a fire in one of the Green Zone modules, the area designated for national and NGO stands. Since then, half of the Green Zone has remained closed.
The hallways of the Amazon Convention and Exhibition Center surged with frenetic energy on Friday as negotiations intensified and the climate clock ticked loudly overhead—both the literal countdown of the negotiations and the figurative one represented by the advance of devastating storms, rising temperatures, and deepening droughts, all worsened by human impacts on now-unraveling natural systems.
COP30 has been very revealing of our current reality: continued polluting emissions, irreversible impacts, and the likelihood that Belem is a window into a probable future marked by disasters—and shaped by the passivity of countries, especially those responsible for the climate catastrophe through the poisoning of every inch of the planet, and by corporations that destroy life in all its forms.
In October, intense rains devastated five states in central and southern Mexico, and hurricane Melissa ravaged the Caribbean days later—both events fueled by climate catastrophe and by heat stored in the oceans.
More than 30 years after the first attempts to reach international agreements, failure now wears the face of year-after-year rising emissions, accelerating global warming, and indicators approaching a dangerous point of no return—after which it will no longer be possible to return to the world that once was.
Lula wanted to put Belem on the world map with what he promised would be “the COP of truth.” He may have succeeded (or maybe not), but certainly not for the reasons he intended.
First published in Spanish by IPS and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.