“It’s a wrap … Don’t forget to buy an ‘i survived Belém’ shirt,” reads the opening line of an email I got Saturday, the final day of highly anticipated United Nations climate negotiations in Belém, Brazil. The email was sent from Shravya Jain-Conti, the US climate diplomacy lead at the Global Strategic Communications Council (GSCC), who’s been following these events for years. While she sometimes has tips on where to snag a cup of coffee along with her email updates to reporters, the T-shirt tip was a first as far as I’ve seen.
I’ve been mulling over these negotiations since last year, mapping out potential funding opportunities to make a trip to Belém to report on the ground. I resigned myself to covering the news remotely from the US rather than trekking into the Amazon pregnant during a federal government shutdown. My fear of missing out dissipated last week when the UN event venue caught fire, just before a lackluster end to what some had hoped might be the most consequential round of international talks on climate change since the 2015 Paris agreement.
The two-week-long talks wrapped up over the weekend with a lot of hemming and hawing about transitioning away from the fossil fuels responsible for climate change. Organizers of the event, called COP30 (the 30th “Conference of the Parties” encompassing delegates from more than 190 nations that ratified the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) billed this as the “Implementation COP.” It was supposed to be a conference about how to achieve previous commitments to stop global warming and switch to cleaner energy.
For an event all about “implementation,” quite a bit went awry
Sure, that was wishful thinking — particularly as waves of inward-looking nationalist sentiment around the world threaten global cooperation on issues like climate change. The conference ultimately closed with another round of promises to do something about it later, and pleas for countries not to turn their backs on the process.
On Saturday, I got a WhatsApp message shortly after the talks wrapped up with a statement from former president of Ireland and staunch climate action advocate Mary Robinson via GSCC. “This deal isn’t perfect and is far from what science requires,” Robinson’s statement said. “But at a time when multilateralism is being tested, it is significant that countries continue to move forward together.”
For an event all about “implementation,” quite a bit of planning went awry. Belém is considered a gateway city to the Amazon, and holding the conference there was initially expected to highlight the important role forests like the Amazon play in fighting climate change by trapping planet-heating carbon. But to host some 50,000 attendees, officials bulldozed forest to pave a new highway and brought in massive diesel-burning cruise ships as temporary accommodations for visitors.
Indigenous demonstrators that rely on those forests and protect them led protests to call out some of the hypocrisy and demand a stop to resource extraction and deforestation that destroys their lands. At one point, protesters clashed with security to gain access to the venue, some carrying signs that read “our forests are not for sale.” A few days later, members of the Munduruku people from the Amazon Basin and their allies formed a human blockade outside the COP entrance to demand stronger protections for forests and their territories.
There was a record number of Indigenous participants at this year’s COP. But that was also true for fossil fuel lobbyists, who outnumbered every country’s delegation at the event except for Brazil.
Maybe it was some kind of poetic justice (but probably caused by an electrical issue) — on Thursday, a day before the conference was scheduled to come to a close, a brief blaze broke out in the venue and burned through the roof. The evacuation stalled negotiations for hours. And while COP meetings often run into overtime, there was added pressure this year to wrap things up before those cruise ships were scheduled to set sail Saturday.
The conference indeed closed up shop on Saturday, and two major initiatives that started to take shape at COP had fallen by the wayside. More than 80 countries had shown support to formalize a “roadmap” for transitioning away from fossil fuels. And 90 nations came together to call for another roadmap to ending deforestation. The formal agreement that came out of this year’s conference doesn’t even mention fossil fuels or deforestation. The consolation prize, I suppose, is that COP30 president André Corrêa do Lago pledged to continue working toward creating those roadmaps through next year.
There were other tepid steps taken in Belém. Brazil recognized 10 new Indigenous territories. Billions of dollars of additional funding were pledged for forest conservation and climate adaptation projects, although far less than what many attendees say is needed. Environmental advocates celebrated a “Just Transition Work Program,” an agreement meant to ensure that the deployment of carbon-free energy is more equitable and that it centers human rights.
But the fossil fuel industry notched their own win by delaying the roadmap to tamp down coal, oil, and gas use. The federal government of the US, the world’s biggest oil and gas producer, decided to skip the talks entirely this year as the Trump administration tries to ramp up fossil fuel production — a move that took the pressure off other oil- and gas-producing nations.
“While we welcome strengthened provisions on the Just Transition Work Program, these wins at COP30 are decisively tempered by the disappointing omission of any reference to fossil fuels in the final text,” Ife Kilimanjaro, executive director of the US Climate Action Network, said in a press release. “Failing to name and address the climate crisis’ root cause undermines the credibility of the entire process.”
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