Pedro Walpole SJ
From the COP30 climate conference zones to Cúpula dos Povos (CDP) (People’s Summit) here at Belém in Brazil, people are caught with the contradictions and the frustrations. At the same time, the struggle for hope continues in getting an ambitious necessary response to the greatest global challenge of our times.
During this first week at COP30, so many people are talking to each other but with layers of conversation that don’t mix. There is the presence of suffering populations but with the absence of listening ears that allow for participation in decisions. And there is the desire to care for the Earth that conflicts with the massive ecological footprint of COP30.
Scientists at the Climate Action Tracker (CAT) and UN Environmental Program are sharing their analysis and reporting that in the last four years, the trend of lowering temperatures did not shift while carbon emissions are still slowly increasing. The effort is to try to curb this at COP30 given that the world is in line for a 2.6 degrees C with the Nationally Determined Contributions of countries. With the long-term commitments, the world could be looking at a lower 1.9 degrees C outcome.
The image above is an aerial shot by photographer Mauro Pimentel showing a massive logging operation with trucks carrying wood from a deforested area in the Amazon rainforest, in the municipality of Tome-Acu, located 181 kilometers away from the city of Belém, Para State, Brazil on 12 November 2025, as the COP30 UN Climate Change Conference was going on. This reminds me of the village where I live that was logged over in the 1970s with clear felling done like this in the lower areas. Recovery takes at least two generations and that is only the beginning.
While at COP, there are flash reminders of the exploitation of Congo, decimation of Gaza, Ukraine, typhoon disasters from Jamaica to the Philippines, the famine in Sudan, South Sudan, Haiti, Mali, Yemen, and the human populations across the world. All of these people’s lands and lives are integral to the global discussion that must turn to implementation.
For civil society, it is exhaustive to engage in this process and yet the energy and active collaboration are deeply felt.
There is an obvious truth that is being ignored and overlooked, the emperor has no clothes.
COP’s “current structure simply cannot deliver the change”
The 15 November 2024 of the Club of Rome, an Open Letter on COP reform to All States that are Parties to the Convention, Mr Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC Secretariat and UN Secretary-General António Guterres, signed by more than 20 experts, former leaders and scientists, including former UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres and former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, was direct:
“28 COPs have delivered us with the policy framework to achieve this. However, its current structure simply cannot deliver the change at exponential speed and scale, which is essential to ensure a safe climate landing for humanity. This is what compels our call for a fundamental overhaul of the COP. We need a shift from negotiation to implementation, enabling the COP to deliver on agreed commitments and ensure the urgent energy transition and phase-out of fossil energy.”
The second sentence of this paragraph was revised from the original: “It is now clear that the COP is no longer fit for purpose. Its current structure simply cannot deliver the change at exponential speed and scale, which is essential to ensure a safe climate landing for humanity.”
This call for reform earlier came out on 8 March 2023, when the Club of Rome issued An open letter to the UN Secretary General and COP Executive Secretary: Reform of the COP process – a manifesto for moving from negotiations to delivery, identifying six pillars that need to be put back to the center of the COP process to have a chance at delivering the Paris Agreement and also restructuring meetings.
The call for COP reform continues to be presented forthright by the presidency and UN elders and ‘truth to power’ is not lost. The COP structure was built for negotiation, but veto powers are too strong and least developed countries have to walk out and stay out if this continues.
The COP process is lagging badly. After the frustrations and delays of Baku, there are strong local voices in Belém that are slowly incorporated into broader thought discussions.
There is some democratic space in Brazil, as marches in the city and protest at the gates of COP are allowed and not met with threats and violence. There is acknowledgement that governments must include the protest of the people that the world can see. Urgency and ambitious delivery are at the gates and the financial dam that controls the flow capital is cracking.
What is key in this is the world’s movement into the implementation decade. Negotiators may be diplomatically silent, but like the judge and the widow (Lk18:1-7), they cannot resist the constant knocking and pull to implementation even though dominant countries, through their veto, want to immortalize themselves in history as English garden follies. The negotiators have to be dragged in internationally by a broader political accountability and by a moral commitment backed up when they get home.
The architecture of the global economy is at the core of the necessary transformation – it either redesigns or self-destructs. All the poor can do is give witness in their care and love for one another in their indigenous knowledge of land and water. That is where growth and regenerations are to be found. The cries of the Tupinambá community on the streets of COP are “we can’t eat money!”
Fix the finances
Four areas have to be reengineered for implementation:
- While the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) was implemented, the contributions are minimal and need to exponentially grow. The present process is merely dribbling the ball and must be turned around and delivered as grants. For just transition projects, and building on COP29, COP30 must mandate multilateral development banks to offer local currency loans at near-zero real rates and use guarantee windows to absorb currency risk.
- There is a need to focus on the outdated multilateral trade rules that squeeze the Global South economies supplying cobalt, lithium, and nickel used in the technical transition. These countries are pauperized and even made the context for conflict while investors are rewarded. The World Trade Organization (WTO) also must be made accountable for its unjust ruling for its obstruction of green industrial strategies. A timebound industrial-climate peace clause must be negotiated.
- Added value, land rights, local jobs, and environmental protection have to be part of the transparent trade rules. Like the exposure of fossil fuel executives eating up the bandwidth with false solutions in COP, the investor-state dispute mechanisms operating behind closed doors must be put on trial so people know the pressure on their own governments as to what they signed off on. Countries need policy space to industrialize sustainably.
- In the present climate crisis, the old global intellectual property rights and regime concentrates production and delays distribution. A waiver for climate technology must be negotiated through the Council for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Council) for priority technologies and a fast track for opening licenses and patent pool.
Belém needs to deliver on equity and fairness
A key strategy in response to these major redesign efforts is the Belém Action Mechanism, a platform that can plan, fund, and monitor a just transition. G77+China gives the signal and an agreed text is needed to establish three tasks in the near term. These are the identification of non-debt finances, access to climate technology, and ensure participation for workers, Indigenous Peoples, and local communities in national transition compacts.
For Brazil, establishing this mechanism would mark COP30 as a legacy of implementation rather than another conference of promises.
Deforestation photograph by Mauro Pimentel/AFP/Getty Images