World leaders who descended on the United Nations annual climate summit in Brazil on Thursday only needed to look out their airplane windows to sense the unfathomable stakes.
Surrounding the coastal city of Belém is an emerald green carpet festooned with winding rivers.
But the view also reveals barren plains: Some 17 per cent of the Amazon’s forest cover has vanished in the past 50 years, swallowed up for farmland, logging and mining.
Known as the “lungs of the world” for its capacity to absorb vast quantities of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that warms the planet, the biodiverse Amazon rainforest has been choked by wildfires and cleared by cattle ranching.
Here on the edge of the world’s largest remaining rainforest, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva hopes to convince world powers to mobilize enough funds to halt the ongoing destruction of climate-stabilizing tropical rainforests in danger around the world and advance the many unmet promises laid out at previous meetings.
But they’ll have to overcome reduced participation from the planet’s three biggest polluters. The leaders of China, the United States and India will be notably absent from a gathering of heads of state over the next two days.
The formal UN climate talks begin next week at the Conference of Parties, known as COP30.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres opened Thursday’s gathering with harsh words for world powers who he said “remain captive to the fossil fuel interests, rather than protecting the public interest.”
Guterres said allowing global warming to exceed the key benchmark of 1.5 C — as laid out in the Paris Agreement — represented a “moral failure and deadly negligence.”
“Even a temporary overshoot will have dramatic consequences,” he said. “Every fraction of a degree higher means more hunger, displacement and loss.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney won’t be attending the summit. Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin is going next week, along with former environment minister Steven Guilbeault, who is a veteran of diplomatic efforts on climate and helped finalize a global agreement on protecting nature at a UN conference in Montreal in 2022.
U.S. absence looms over leaders’ meeting
U.S. President Donald Trump, who calls climate change a hoax and withdrew his country from the Paris climate accords the same day he entered office in January, won’t send any senior officials. China will send its vice-premier, Ding Xuexiang.
That leaves the rest of the summit’s leaders — including British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron — to confront not only the consequences of an intensifying global climate crisis but a daunting set of political challenges.
Advocates and diplomats have raised concerns that the absence of the U.S. — which has at times played a key role in convincing China to restrain carbon emissions and securing financing for poor countries —could signal a more global retreat from climate politics.
In a rousing speech, Brazil’s president, known as Lula, warned that the “window of opportunity we have to act is rapidly closing” and said there was “no greater symbol of the environmental cause” than the Amazon rainforest.
“It is only right that it is the turn of the Amazonian people to ask what the rest of the world is doing to prevent the collapse of their home,” he said.
Without mentioning Trump directly, Lula hinted at the U.S. president’s denial of climate science and abandonment of promises to control greenhouse gas pollution.
“Extremist forces fabricate falsehoods to gain electoral advantage and trap future generations in an outdated model that perpetuates social and economic disparities and environmental degradation,” he said.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro, however, called out Trump directly for his absence, saying it was “100 per cent wrong.”
“Trump is against humankind,” said Petro, whose feud with his U.S. counterpart escalated in recent weeks as Trump accused him of being a drug kingpin and imposed financial sanctions on him and his family.
“We can see the collapse that can happen if the U.S. does not decarbonize its economy,” he said.
Chile’s left-wing president, Gabriel Boric, similarly singled out Trump, saying his recent speech denying climate change at the UN General Assembly was “a lie.”
Indigenous groups also warned that Trump’s inaction is emboldening other countries to ignore the crisis.
“It pushes governments further toward denial and deregulation,” said Nadino Kalapucha, the spokesperson for the Amazonian Kichwas Indigenous group in Ecuador.
“That trickles down to us, to Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, where environmental protection is already under pressure.”
Javier Milei, Argentina’s right-wing president, has already mimicked Trump’s moves, threatening to quit the Paris Agreement and last year pulling Argentine negotiators out of the climate summit in Azerbaijan. He boycotted this week’s meeting as well.
Some experts see a silver lining in the Trump administration’s absence, saying it reduces the risk of one country foiling an ambitious agreement that requires a full consensus.
“Even if the U.S. plays an outsized role, it is one country, and there are over 190 nations coming to COP, many of which are willing to stand up to the destructive tactics of the fossil fuel industry,” said Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director with the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Brazil encapsulates the climate dilemma
Lula, who has presented himself as a champion of climate diplomacy in the Global South and won widespread praise for reducing deforestation in the Amazon, seeks to leverage Brazil’s moment on the world stage to push for action on curbing planet-warming emissions and helping poor nations adapt to extreme weather and other perils of climate change.
But his commitment has run into economic pressures.
Lula recently granted state oil firm Petrobras a licence to explore oil near the mouth of the Amazon River, which environmental advocates say risks damaging oil spills. He has hit back at accusations of hypocrisy.
“I don’t want to be an environmental leader,” Lula said Tuesday. “I never claimed to be.”
Those tensions are at the heart of the conference and Lula’s centerpiece proposal — a new Tropical Forests Forever Facility that would pay 74 heavily forested, developing countries to keep their trees standing, using loans from wealthier nations and commercial investors.
The conference will test whether Brazil can drum up enough money to make its ambitions a reality. Existing UN funds for climate loss and damage have drawn only modest contributions.
