Last year’s UN climate summit in Baku opened with President Ilham Aliyev calling oil a “gift of God.” This year’s COP30, staged on the edge of the Amazon in Belém, began on a very different note. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva used his opening address to confront climate denial and call for urgent action.
“Climate change is no longer a threat of the future. It is a tragedy of the present,” Lula said, criticizing those who reject climate science and stressing that the impacts are falling hardest on developing countries and poorer communities already facing extreme weather. He urged a “fair transition” away from fossil fuels and warned that the climate emergency is widening inequality between “those who can live with dignity and those who should die.”
More than 190 countries are in Belém for two weeks of negotiations aimed at curbing record-high emissions and rising global temperatures. But climate has slipped down many national agendas amid competing economic and security concerns, putting pressure on delegates to make concrete progress.
UN climate chief Simon Stiell noted the world has made progress since the Paris Agreement of 2015 and said countries have begun to bend the global emissions curve downward. Still, he warned, efforts must accelerate rapidly. “I am not sugarcoating it,” he said. “We must move much, much, faster on both reductions of emissions and strengthening resilience.”
Before Paris, projections put the world on track for as much as 3.5°C of warming by 2100. Current national climate plans, or NDCs, if fully implemented, would limit warming to roughly 2.5°C — an improvement but far from the 1.5°C target. Many countries failed to update their NDCs as required ahead of COP30. A new UN analysis estimates global greenhouse gas emissions will fall about 12% by 2035 compared with 2019 levels, slightly better than prior forecasts but still far below the roughly 60% reduction scientists say is needed by 2035 to stay on a 1.5°C pathway. The UN has said staying below 1.5°C is now virtually impossible without a temporary overshoot, a scenario that threatens low-lying island nations.
Brazil framed COP30 as a summit of implementation — a chance to turn promises into tangible action. Stiell said that must include a managed phase-down of fossil fuels, a tripling of renewable energy capacity, and a doubling of energy efficiency gains. He urged agreement on indicators to measure adaptation progress and on ways to scale up finance. Last year’s COP29 outcome included a pledge that at least $300 billion per year should flow from developed to developing countries by 2035, but many observers say that figure is far too small. A key task in Belém will be how to expand finance toward an estimated $1.3 trillion annually. Lula bluntly observed that such investment is “much cheaper than waging war.”
Amid geopolitical tensions and multiple conflicts — and the absence of the United States from the conference — Stiell appealed for cooperation. “In this arena of COP30, your job here is not to fight one another — your job is to fight this climate crisis, together,” he said.
COP30 president Andre Corrêa do Lago urged negotiators to embrace mutirão, a Portuguese word of Indigenous origin meaning collective effort. Both do Lago and Lula emphasized defending science and multilateralism in an era of misinformation. Lula called this a “COP of truth” to counter falsehoods and disinformation, which a recent report found has surged ahead of the summit.
Stiell warned of the huge economic and human costs of failing to raise ambition. “Not one single nation among you can afford this, as climate disasters rip double digits off GDP,” he said, pointing to recent extreme events: a super typhoon that battered the Philippines and a deadly hurricane that struck Jamaica and eastern Cuba. He argued it is unforgivable to fail to act when solutions already exist.
Those solutions, Stiell noted, are economically viable: wind and solar are now the lowest-cost energy sources across roughly 90% of the world, and global investment in renewables — which this year surpassed coal as the largest source of electricity — has doubled compared with fossil fuels. “The economics of this transition are as indisputable as the costs of inaction,” he said.
As negotiations begin, key sticking points include the pace of fossil fuel phase-downs, scaling finance for mitigation and adaptation, and measures to protect the most vulnerable. Brazil’s hosting in the Amazon adds symbolic weight to those debates, highlighting the urgency of protecting vital ecosystems while ensuring a just global transition.
Edited by: Jennifer Collins
