I’m here in Belém, Brazil for the annual UN Climate talks (COP 30) set to get underway on November 10 in the shadow of a sobering United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report confirming the world will breach the 1.5ºC mark. Before we plunge into hectic agenda fights and intense negotiations over bracketed text in draft agreements, it’s worth remembering what these talks are ultimately about. They’re about decisions made by world leaders that are deeply consequential for everyone’s health and prosperity, and that will determine the kind of world we leave for future generations.
Many of the issues are perennial, and they will surface in specific ways at this COP—billed as an ‘implementation’ COP meant to focus on climate actions that need to be taken now not just vague promises of future commitments.
In a previous blogpost, I highlighted some things to watch at this COP, including how countries plan to step up ambition on their emissions reduction commitments, aka nationally determined contributions (NDCs), and the need to simultaneously advance adaptation measures. I also called attention to whether trust can be rebuilt over richer nations’ grossly insufficient climate finance for lower income countries. Of course, the influence of fossil fuel interests that swarm COP is a major threat to ambitious outcomes here.
At the heart of global climate agreements is the recognition that we cannot solve this problem solely as individual countries, regardless of how big or small, but we can succeed if we tackle it together by each doing our fair part.
Synergies between global and domestic climate action
COP can feel remote and arcane, but what’s agreed to here can boost clean energy and climate efforts at home—and what countries do through domestic policies and investments significantly affects the level of ambition at COP. At COP and at home, those actions must include efforts to expand access to cheap, clean, renewable electricity while phasing out polluting fossil fuels; opportunities to protect communities from climate impacts already baked in; and signals to decision makers across the global economy about aligning innovation and investments with climate and human development goals.
Acting together by boosting renewable energy and transitioning away from fossil fuels, we can bend the global emissions curve meaningfully and limit the rise in global average temperatures. At the same time, the emissions building up in the atmosphere come primarily from richer nations—although other major emitters like China are playing a growing role—and are unleashing costly and deadly impacts around the world already. Therefore, every country must also invest in protecting its people, economy and critical ecosystems from these worsening impacts, and richer nations have a responsibility to pay toward those efforts in lower-income nations.
The synergies between domestic policies and global climate ambition are crucial. When they work well, we get a multiplication of collective efforts. The Paris Agreement, secured 10 years ago, led to a crucial acceleration in clean energy deployment around the world and cuts in heat-trapping emissions.
Clean energy was already on the rise, and nations and businesses took the Paris Agreement as a guide to accelerate that momentum through domestic policies and investments. Collectively, that has helped bend the global emissions trajectory and reduce how much global average temperatures will rise over this century (albeit not by nearly enough as we are still on track to overshoot 1.5°C and even 2°C).
But when those synergies fray or break down, the impact can also be felt both at home and on the global stage. Right now, we are at one of those critical junctures, as the Trump administration tears up US clean energy policies and investments, disgracefully steps away from the Paris Agreement, and tries to undermine global climate action. At Belém, it will be crucial for the other 190+ nations to isolate the Trump administration in its deeply harmful actions and anti-science rhetoric and forge ahead to find an ambitious global consensus.
It’s in every nation’s self-interest to limit dangerous climate change and embrace the economic and public health benefits of a clean energy transition—and it’s in the global collective interest. The time for zero sum thinking and hiding behind other countries’ inaction is over as the planet teeters on the brink of overshooting 1.5°C of warming.
Why COP 30 Matters
COP is an opportunity to see the challenges in our daily lives mirrored in struggles around the world, and to seek common ground in addressing them in ways that prioritize regular people, not powerful political interests and the billionaire class. The massive global income inequities, that amplify the harms in the lowest income countries and communities, also come into focus here.
As I prepare for COP, I’ve been reflecting on how extreme climate-fueled disasters are now a harsh reality for so many people across the United States and the world. The people still reeling from Hurricanes Helene and Milton have something life-altering in common with people in Jamaica, Haiti and Cuba recently hit by Hurricane Melissa.
Also, the people in the Philippines who have just endured Typhoon Kalmeigi and other cyclones this year, on the heels of a record-breaking 2024 cyclone season. Small island nations face looming existential threats from sea level rise that will be familiar to people in coastal Louisiana.
No one chooses to be on the frontlines of these disasters they did not cause, and everyone deserves support in getting back on their feet and being better protected from the next storm, or wildfire, or flood. Meanwhile, the UNEP Adaptation Gap report points out the huge shortfall in current funding for adaptation in lower income nations. This is an issue that will be front and center at this COP.
I’ve also been thinking about how people at home in the United States are struggling to afford their electricity bills, even as the Trump administration and the Republican-led Congress are decimating clean energy policies that would have helped drive down costs, and even as the costs of proliferating data centers are being passed on to all of us consumers.
Meanwhile, around the world millions of people don’t even have access to modern forms of energy and all too many depend on polluting fossil fuels that are taking a steep toll on their health. Massively ramping up renewable energy and energy efficiency (and the infrastructure to enable that)—solutions that are at our fingertips already and that are cheaper than fossil fuels in most cases—is unquestionably the commonsense path forward to tackling many of these challenges.
Being at COP is a fresh reminder that alleviating global poverty and improving people’s lives is directly and intrinsically connected to addressing climate change. Solutions to all these grave and pressing challenges can and should be aligned.
Misguided calls to pit these priorities against each other are puzzling, wrong and deeply harmful. Unchecked climate change will set back human development and already is in some places suffering from drought, extreme heat, intensified storms, and threats to water and food security. Investing in expanding access to renewable energy, drought-resistant crops, heat health protections for workers, universal healthcare, safe affordable housing, and a human rights-centered framework for people displaced by disasters are crucial both for people’s health and economic well-being, and for addressing worsening climate impacts.
Solving for problems simultaneously is the call of the hour, and it’s a no-brainer. What’s often standing in the way are entrenched interests who are making a lot of money off the current fossil fuel-based economy and are craven enough to weaponize the plight of people who live in poverty to keep the world chained to polluting fossil fuels.
Acting together is the antidote to delay, distractions and lies
Back in 1992, the world adopted the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), here in Brazil, recognizing the science on climate change and the imperative to act together based on that science. It’s an almost miraculous global agreement that truly stands the test of time. Here is Article 2 from the UNFCCC, for example:
The ultimate objective of this Convention and any related legal instruments that the Conference of the Parties may adopt is to achieve, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Convention, stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Such a level should be achieved within a time-frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.
Despite the clarity and urgency of scientific reports from the IPCC and others in the decades since then, governments have not adopted strong enough policies and the fossil fuel industry still holds far too much sway over the world’s energy choices.
That we are at this sobering moment in the climate fight can be cause for gloom. I am here alongside many smart, committed people—including leaders from US states, cities and businesses, and climate justice advocates from around the world—because the fight still matters. It matters more than ever. We know the causes of climate change, we know the solutions to address it—now let’s get our political leaders to adopt them, using every beneficial tool at our disposal.
COP is by no means the only venue for this fight—although it is an important one, as it’s the only place where every country, no matter how big or small, has a voice. Everyone has a role and place where they can engage in this fight for our future.
Here in the US that could be in your public utility commission proceedings, in state legislatures, through efforts to push back against EPA’s rollback of the Endangerment Finding, or through investments your business makes. It could be through art that provokes and engages more people. It could be through campaigns to save precious forest and coastal ecosystems. And it’s tremendously uplifting to know that like-minded people around the world are also fighting where they can for these same goals and aspirations.
As ever, this is a fight we can only win by acting together, from our backyards to the world.
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