The technical language of climate diplomacy still sounds distant. The challenge is to translate the planet’s urgency into people’s daily lives. The debate on started before the arrival of the delegations on . According to Palver’s monitoring of more than 100,000 public WhatsApp and Telegram groups, the main focus of discussions is on the event’s infrastructure and logistics issues. The conference carries the symbolic and logistical weight of being the first COP held in the Amazon, and Belém is preparing to receive heads of state, indigenous leaders, environmentalists, journalists, influencers and, above all, attention from all corners of the world.
COP30 takes place in a global context of disbelief in multilateral institutions, political polarization and competition between urgent priorities — wars, economic crises and geopolitical disputes. Brazil, by hosting the event in the Amazon, tries to transform geography into an argument by making the most symbolic territory on the planet for the environmental debate a space for action, not rhetoric.
The Brazilian COP presidency structured the conference into four pillars: mobilization of society, leaders’ summit, formal negotiations and action agenda. The idea is to bring the climate issue closer to people’s real lives, reinforce multilateralism and accelerate the implementation of what has already been agreed. Unlike previous editions, Brazil is betting less on big announcements and more on getting the Paris Agreement off the ground. The goal is to transform COP30 into the “implementation COP”, that is, a meeting to measure what has been done, correct course and involve governments, society and the private sector in implementing the goals.
This debate, however, still seems restricted to diplomacy or the technical staff of the climate agenda. In the groups analyzed by Palver, most of the messages are not related to the climate debate, but to COP infrastructure and logistics issues. Despite this, criticism should not go beyond that, since a position openly opposed to Brazil or the actions of the Brazilian government in the face of an event with global dimensions can be interpreted as anti-patriotic, which has been a burden on the right-wing camp, especially after a giant United States flag gained prominence in the demonstrations on Brazil’s Independence Day.
In this sense, it is expected that the opposition will try to take the debate to an unrelated topic, or even to question the importance of the event, minimizing the effects of climate change. Among the agendas that take shape inside and outside the conference, disinformation ends up gaining centrality, as it has the capacity to directly impact the implementation agenda by producing negative effects on the necessary political and social support.
“Increasingly sophisticated climate disinformation campaigns undermine confidence in scientific consensus and feed narratives that justify immobility”, explains Frederico Assis, special envoy for information integrity at COP30. It is in this field that, according to Frederico, the president defends that this will be the “COP of truth”, because “without truth there is no trust, without trust, there is no collective action; without collective action, there is no sustainable future”.
COP30, therefore, has the challenge of converting science into action, commitments into implementation, and above all, climate language, technical, distant, diplomatic, into something that speaks to the population, who already feel the effect of climate change in their daily lives. There is no possible climate policy without information and communication policy.
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