From this Monday until November 20, the world meets in the Brazilian city of Belém do Pará for the UN Climate Summit. COP30 must clarify whether this collective way of facing the climate crisis, the so-called multilateralism, is plugged into life support after the active boycott of the US or if it can take concrete actions after the speeches.
The Brazilian president himself, Lula da Silva, has set the bar high: “This is not the time for more speeches,” but the COP arrives in a situation “of decreasing confidence in multilateralism” as a formula for achieving progress, as the head of energy and climate studies at the Montaigne Institute, Joseph Dellate, says. So the question arises as to whether this summit serves to save multilateralism and whether it can also achieve progress in the fight against climate change.
Multilateralism is the word that floats around all the time. UN Secretary General António Guterres told Lula as soon as he arrived in Brazil: “Thank you for your firm commitment to multilateralism now that the world is at stake.” But what is it? In principle, something as simple as collaboration between countries to address common problems.
It seems designed to tackle the great common problem of humanity: climate change. And it was the model that allowed us to reach a legally binding agreement such as the 2015 Paris Agreement. Paris was approved by consensus, without voting, and establishes that each party commits to doing what it can to stop global warming. You obligate yourself to comply by signing the Agreement.
It was what saved action against the climate crisis after the unmitigated failure of the 2009 Copenhagen COP that was to renew the Kyoto Protocol (to which, for example, the US or Canada never joined).
However, and fulfilling his self-assigned role as an anathema to collaboration, US President Donald Trump has decided not to send high-level delegates to COP30. Although Trump announced in January that his country is leaving the Paris Agreement, the effective exit takes a year. In addition, the COP is an event of the United Nations Convention Against Climate Change (UNFCCC) in which the US continues to participate. That is, if they don’t go it’s because they don’t want to.
The US has directly bombed the climate negotiation by officially declaring that they do not admit that any environmental measure can harm their interests.
“Belém will be the definitive test of whether multilateralism can respond to the climate emergency or if the system is definitively captured by corporate interests and the richest countries,” summarizes the coordinator of the climate area of Ecologists in Action, Javier Andaluz, hours before traveling to Brazil.
The answer seems to be in Europe, China and host Brazil. “I have been a climate negotiator for many years and what has changed is the current feeling of urgency,” explains the president of the Belém COP, André Corrêa, who has underlined the importance of the multilateralist system.
However, these three actors land with their obstacles. The EU almost reached Brazil without a common climate plan, China has committed to a slight cut in emissions once it reaches its peak, and Brazil has just approved new oil drilling.
What can come out of Belém?
At this point and with the delegations in the Amazon, the Government of Brazil intends to transform the COP30 in Belém into the Climate Summit of “implementations”. Supported by the moral authority of indigenous peoples and the green talisman of the jungle, the host plans to direct his renowned “cordial diplomacy” towards the environmental field. A mix of diplomacy and pragmatism, irreverence to modify the official roadmap and popular pressure.
Brazil wants to place deforestation at the epicenter of the discussions. The Tropical Forest Fund for Life (TFFF) is the star proposal of the Lula government. The plan aims to raise funds so that countries such as Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo can be remunerated for the “environmental services” provided by their rainforests. In this COP, Brazil aspires that the resources offered by the first world are not just loans, but donations.
On the other hand, “an important point of the TFFF is that 20% of the funds are allocated directly to traditional communities and indigenous peoples,” said Ciro Brito, lawyer and climate policy analyst at the Socio-Environmental Institute (ISA), official negotiator at COP30, in a telephone interview. On the other hand, Brazil intends to achieve other hits parallels: a global agreement to support the use of biofuels (22.5% of the fuel used in the country is bio) and the creation of a single carbon market that brings order and corrects greenwashing.
What happens is that the big issue continues to be how to wean humanity off of fossil fuels, that is, oil, coal and gas, which are responsible for 75% of gas emissions into the atmosphere. Reducing this focus is what is called mitigation in the COPs.
“In mitigation we are not going to be able to have much because national plans, such as that of the European Union, have arrived much later than they should have,” explains Javier Andaluz. “What we see is that Brazil, which wants something positive to come out of its summit, can achieve several agreements between various parties on different issues, but not in the global agreement of all countries. And that, which has much less legal force, is almost born as a dead letter,” he concludes.
indigenous peoples
Indigenous peoples will have a historic presence at COP30. Not only are they represented in some panels of the Blue Zone, but they have their own village built in the Green Zone reserved for civil society. Célia “We, indigenous people, no longer want to be seen as part of the landscape, but as political subjects of a new time. We are ready to build a living pact between peoples, forests and possible futures,” says Célia. The indigenous cause will have its own demonstration, on the 17th, whose motto is “A Resposta Somos Nós” (we are the answer).
Brazil will incorporate one of its most beloved social legacies to the unofficial side of COP30: the Cúpula dos Povos (People’s Dome). Founded at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, a key piece of the anti-globalization cycle led by the World Social Forum (it was born in 2001 in Porto Alegre), the Cúpula dos Povos will hold a true counter-summit in which social movements are the true protagonists. “The presence of four thousand indigenous people from all over the world will put pressure on the negotiations. The Cúpula dos Povos has a methodology: hold thematic debates and at the end present a letter to the presidency. This letter will be critical and will help us change the scenario of the negotiations,” explains Ciro Brito.
On the 12th, a boat demonstration of his kind It will leave from the Dome of the People along the Guama River that flows through Belém. And on the 15th, the Dome leads the Unified Global March. As if that were not enough, Belém brings more popular innovations: the Yello Zones (discussion points in the peripheries and favelas) and a Black Zone to discuss issues such as environmental racism. Ruth Ferreira, one of the coordinators of the seven Yellos Zones of Belém, assures this medium that they want to put on the table how environmental racism and the climate crisis affect the peripheries of the world. “Each area has the particularity of its own territory. We want people to feel part of the climate debate and see themselves as agents of change,” Ferreira tells elDiario.es.
So the game is played in Belém, a city in which before the climatic changes, the torrential downpour every afternoon was so strong that people were left without a specific time “depois da chuva”. At the threshold of the wet season, the weather forecast for climate negotiators is a true message from Earth: more heat and much less rain than usual for these dates.
Source: www.eldiario.es
