A young woman at COP30 speaks about retracing her father’s footsteps. At only 16, her father and her grandfather were among the first families displaced by an unfolding climatic crisis of erratic weather and worsening climate conditions that goes on to date from their ancestral village in Sundarbans. Nearly 60 years later, she is on a mission to reclaim her ancestral lands.
As the world gathers in Brazil for the UN climate talks, the country’s livestock sector - one of the largest in the world - is understandably in the spotlight.
At the UN Climate Conference venue in Belém, young activist João Victor da Costa da Silva is trying to make his case heard by negotiators. The 16-year-old Da Silva has a specific request for the parties: the needs of young people with disabilities should be addressed through the lens of climate justice.
Binaifer Nowrojee, a human rights lawyer and the president of the Open Society Foundations (OSF), has lauded the Brazilian government “for significant steps taken to breathe life into the climate commitments.”
Concerned scientists at the UN climate conference in Belém are appealing for collective action to combat climate change-related misinformation and disinformation.
In a departure from the past three COPs, in Egypt, Dubai and Azerbaijan, there have been increasingly intense demonstrations from activists at the COP30 venue in Belém, the capital of the northern Brazilian state of Pará.
COP30 Brazil, though shadowed by the absence of many world leaders, remains a pivotal milestone in the global fight against climate change, tasked with building on the Paris Agreement’s momentum. Yet the glaring lack of commitment, coupled with withdrawals from the accord, casts a grim shadow over the future. The planet continues to warm, and scientists warn that current targets may not prevent a catastrophic temperature spike. While the summit’s focus on implementation not just new promises—is a welcome shift, it’s clear: words alone won’t cool the Earth.
Generational lived experiences are key to confronting and living with a changing climate, say Indigenous knowledge holders and activists at the UN Climate Conference (COP30).
As the first COP to be held in the Amazon region, in Belém, representatives of Indigenous communities reiterated the importance of generationally transferred knowledge and skills to adapt to and mitigate the threats posed by climate change.
The climate crisis is getting worse and requires fundamental changes to societies, economies, and our global financial architecture in response. While extreme economic inequality is on the rise – the world's billionaires now hold
more wealth in the world than every country except the U.S. and China – the impacts of climate change are also unequally felt, with the poor in the Global South and North most at risk.
“Devastating climate damages are happening already, from Hurricane Melissa hitting the Caribbean, Super Typhoons smashing Vietnam and the Philippines to a tornado ripping through Southern Brazil,” said Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of UN Climate Change, on the eve of COP30 in the Amazonian City of Belém. “This is why COP must achieve three things: It must send a clear signal: nations are fully on board for climate cooperation—that means agreeing to strong outcomes on all the key issues.”
When world leaders now gather in Belém, Brazil for the UN climate conference, expectations will be modest. Few believe the meeting will produce any breakthroughs. The United States is retreating from climate engagement. Europe is distracted. The UN is struggling to keep relevant in the 21st century.
Indigenous leaders from across the Amazon region are calling on climate negotiators to base climate initiatives on the recognition of the land rights of affected Indigenous communities. From the COP30 venue in Belém, these leaders are demanding full participation in the design and implementation of proposed projects.
As the world prepares
for the next COP30 summit, a quieter battle is raging in courtrooms.
Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) are the fossil-fuel industry’s new favourite weapon, turning justice systems into instruments of intimidation.
A report by the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities (GATC) and Earth Insight paints a stark picture of how extractive industries, deforestation, and climate change are converging to endanger the world’s last intact tropical forests and the Indigenous Peoples who protect them.
Political courage is the biggest obstacle to limiting the rise in global average temperature to no more than 1.5°C, said UN Secretary-General António Guterres.
A decade has passed since the adoption of the Paris Agreement, and a United Nations synthesis report released ahead of COP30 in Belém shows that "Parties are bending their combined emission curve further downwards, but still not quickly enough."
The world is falling dangerously short of meeting the Paris Agreement goals, with global greenhouse gas emissions rising to record levels and current national pledges still far off the mark, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) said in its Emissions Gap Report 2025: Off Target.
Three decades after the first Climate COP, the multilateral climate process – which was intended to serve as an instrument of justice and a guardian of the planet’s atmosphere – has fallen far short of its goals.
At COP15, the developing countries were calling for the temperature to not rise above 1.5 degrees and they ignored the Copenhagen Accord which agreed to 2.0 degrees
From the 10th to the 21st of November 2025, the 30th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP30) will be hosted in Belém, Brazil.
A new
global study has challenged a key assumption in climate planning: that the planet’s geological “carbon vault” is vast enough to hold all the carbon dioxide (CO₂) we might one day choose to bury underground after we remove it from the atmosphere. It isn’t.