Belém, Brazil, was host to this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference, which concluded last week. COP30, the 30th Conference of the Parties, nearly 200 countries that are signatories to the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015, was convened to review national and collective targets aimed at decarbonizing the atmosphere to keep global temperatures from a mean increase of over 1.5°C (2.7°F).
Choosing Belém for the conference seemed apt considering the important role the Amazon basin and its massive tropical rainforest play in the world’s climate. Described by many climatologists as the lungs of the planet, the Amazon is threatened today by a growing Brazilian economy that is committed to development, which is threatening the river, the rainforest and the biodiversity of the region.
In Nature Communications this month, an article entitled Vulnerabilities and compound risks of escalating climate disasters in the Brazilian Amazon describes how climate-related disasters between 2000 and 2022 have disrupted the Amazon Basin and its human population. There has been a surge in extreme weather events, including a 124% increase in heavy and damaging rainfall leading to floods, a 300% increase in droughts and heatwaves, and a 409% increase in wildfire outbreaks. Total economic losses have risen 370% amounting to US$634.2 million annually. In smaller Amazonian towns and cities, the population has seen a 9.58% shrinking of the local economy, which is contributing to a widening gulf of socioeconomic disparity for the local population compared to the rest of Brazil.
Continued deforestation of the rainforest is seen as a major climate change impactor. Yet, the practice of forest clearing in Brazil to plant crops or manage herds of cattle continues even under the current, more environmentally-conscious federal government. As more of the Amazon forest gets cut down, the river basin is increasingly being turned into a savannah like the African Sahel. That means the climate is being changed with lengthening dry seasons plus more extreme heat events. So, COP30 in Belém should have demonstrated a sense of urgency, at least to help Brazil and other equatorial countries like those in Asia and Africa, seeing similar climate change impacts.
That, however, was not the case. The conference president, André Corrêa do Lago, Brazil’s Secretary of Climate, Energy and Environment, and a climate change activist, asked COP30 participants to create roadmaps for phasing out fossil fuels and halting and reversing deforestation. What he got, however, was a non-binding, unofficial agreement on these important issues.
The real surprise was that a conference held in the Amazon Basin couldn’t agree on the latter goal to end deforestation, while viewing the environmental destruction happening in plain sight.
So, what did COP30 yield? It is called the Belém Package, a comprehensive consensus-based program that includes:
- An extended timeline to 2035 with $1.3 trillion to be spent annually for climate action, including a tripling of adaptation finance to help vulnerable countries cope with climate impacts, originally agreed upon at COP28.
- The Global Implementation Accelerator, a voluntary and collaborative initiative to support countries in accelerating NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions) to lower atmospheric emissions, and to create capacity building through technical and financial resource sharing.
- An annual pledge of $66 billion to be spent on accelerating renewable energy growth, and $82 billion annually to address transmission needs and energy storage infrastructure from the power and utility providers that form UNEZA (Utilities for Net Zero Alliance).
- A US$5.5 billion tropical forests forever fund involving 53 participating countries that pledged at least 20% of this money to be spent on the Indigenous populations located in affected areas.
- The Belém Health Action Plan, involving 30 countries and 50 organizations and $300 million from the Climate and Health Funders Coalition to strengthen climate-related health plans for hospitals, surveillance and disease prevention, especially in the Global South.
- Support from 10 countries for the RAIZ Accelerator, an initiative to restore degraded farmland based on a Brazilian program that has raised $6 billion in restoration projects covering 3 million hectares.
- The Gates Foundation pledged $1.4 billion to support smallholder farmers impacted by climate change.
What didn’t happen at COP30?
- Despite 80 nations calling for a timetable to phase out fossil fuels, major fossil fuel-producing countries were able to block consensus.
- No roadmap to end deforestation was created despite the location in Belém, next to the Amazon rainforest.
- The watering down of NDCs regarding emission reduction targets is ensuring that the 1.5°C (2.7°F) Paris Climate Agreement goal established by over 190 nations will likely no longer be attainable.
The lack of leadership from the U.S., with Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, meant the second-largest carbon emitter was not at the table. It meant U.S. muscle to affect global climate policy was no longer in play. It meant fossil fuel producers, backed by the Trump administration’s pro-coal, oil and gas messaging, could resist the efforts of the COP to implement the goals established at COP28 of a global fossil fuel phaseout.
So, at best, COP30 was a conference that fell far short of what is currently needed to mitigate global warming, and it means another lost year for the global community to take meaningful climate change action.
