With a UN report warning that global carbon emissions remain too high to stop global warming, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said on Tuesday that this month’s UN climate change summit in Belém would be a ‘COP of Truth’ and offer real solutions.
Despite three decades of global negotiations, countries will not be able to prevent warming from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius — the main objective of the Paris Agreement, negotiated a decade ago. Instead, the world is on track for extreme warming of 2.3°C to 2.5°C, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) said on Tuesday.
The forecast assumes that countries will fulfill the promises they have made so far to reduce emissions. If they don’t comply, the world will become even hotter.
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“This will be difficult to reverse,” UNEP said of exceeding 1.5ºC, noting that countries would need to move even faster and make even greater reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to avoid runaway climate change.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is in Belém for this month’s COP30, said failures to deliver on previous climate agreements — including the Kyoto Protocol and promised climate finance — were demoralizing for people around the world.
Speaking to reporters from international outlets at a naval base in Belém, Lula said countries must fulfill past promises rather than making new ones.
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‘We don’t want the COP to continue being a fair for ideological products. We want the things we decide to be implemented,’ said Lula, noting that some countries are ‘not complying’ with the Paris Agreement, which obliges them to limit warming to ‘well below’ 2°C above pre-industrial levels, working towards a limit of 1.5°C.
Tuesday’s UN emissions report noted that the current warming trajectory was just 0.3°C lower than a year ago, before COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, meaning the new plans announced this year did little to change the situation.
Brazil will propose the creation of a new global environmental council linked to the UN, with powers to travel and monitor progress on climate pledges around the world.
Meetings and resources
COP30 will feature the participation of dozens of indigenous groups during the negotiations. Still, limited capacity and high costs have created logistical headaches.
‘We decided to do it here because we didn’t want to be comfortable, we wanted challenges. And we wanted the world to come and discover the Amazon’, said Lula.
Many company executives, bankers and investors, however, have decided to head to São Paulo, where they hope to help accelerate climate action in the real economy by highlighting what is working.
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Clean energy sector groups said in a report also on Tuesday that more than 1,000 projects in the field are under development around the world. More than 70 of them, worth a total of $140 billion, are ready to launch in the coming months, according to the Industrial Transition Accelerator and the Mission Possible Partnership.
Near São Paulo’s financial center, business experts participated in panel discussions, meetings and round tables that covered topics from carbon markets to best practices for pricing the carbon contained in a tree plantation.
Hitachi Energy chief sustainability officer Alicia Argüello said she participated in a roundtable discussion on Monday about green electricity networks. ‘I received a lot of comments,’ he said.
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Across town, at a huge convention center, another three-day event featured more than 150 speakers.
Some were disappointed to be so far away from the COP30 discussions in Belém, meaning they will not be able to engage with country officials.
‘These people, including ourselves, tend to be implementers,’ said Climate Fund Managers chief executive Andrew Johnstone.
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The fact that they are not in Belém ‘affects the peripheral discussions and collaborations that can result from the meeting of ideas and people. This is negative. ‘
The world has made some progress in 30 years of climate negotiations. A decade ago, when the Paris Agreement was signed, the planet was on track for a temperature rise of around 4°C.
But in 2024, according to UNEP, global carbon emissions increased by another 2.3%, reaching 57.7 gigatons of CO2 equivalent.
