Leaders from around the world have hopped off their jets on the edge of the Amazon rainforest to hold meetings and deliver speeches at the COP30 UN climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belém this Thursday and Friday.
Today, around 60 of them are listed to speak one after another. Brazil’s President Lula will open the session as host, and leaders from the UK, France, the EU and South Africa, as well as China’s vice-premier, are among those following.
Some leaders will break off from the main room for a lunch meeting on the Tropical Forest Forever Facility – an innovative but controversial Brazilian proposal to tap financial markets and pay governments to keep their forests standing. A later roundtable of leaders will cover climate and nature, covering oceans and, again – as it’s the Amazon COP – forests.
The symbolism of having COP on the edge of the rainforest has come at a price. A shortage of accommodation has prevented many – particularly from poorer countries – from travelling to Belém despite subsidies from wealthy governments and philanthropies.
The unusual timing of the leaders’ summit – a few days ahead of the official start of COP30 on Monday – was an attempt to improve the accommodation situation by smoothing out the peak in demand.
It also means that the presidents and prime ministers present will not cross over in Belém with the non-VIPs – the climate campaigners, government officials, journalists and business executives who make up the bulk of COP attendees.
With fewer leaders showing up than in recent years, and the UN already having admitted that the world will overshoot the 1.5C warming limit governments signed up to in the Paris Agreement, expect a sober start to proceedings in Belém.
We’ll be updating Climate Home News readers with the day’s key developments here, so please check back for more as the action unfolds.
UN chief: 1.5C overshoot now inevitable
Among the first to take the stage was the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres. He told the assembled leaders that “the hard truth is that we have failed to ensure we remain below 1.5 degrees” of global warming.
“Science now tells us that a temporary overshoot [beyond] the 1.5 limit – starting at the latest in the early 2030s – is inevitable,” he added. That admission is based on the findings of the UN’s annual Emissions Gap Report – published on Tuesday.
The UN’s rhetoric has now shifted from staying below 1.5C to bringing the temperature back down to that level by the end of the century, through reaching net zero emissions and then net negative emissions – where the world sucks in more greenhouse gases than it pumps out.
Under today’s policies, the Emissions Gap Report estimates there’s no chance of bringing the temperature back down to under 1.5C this century. But if governments meet all the targets they have set for themselves, there’s a one-in-five chance.
“We can make the overshoot as small, as short and as safe as possible,” Guterres told the leaders’ summit. He went on to blast governments that subsidise fossil fuels and companies that produce and sell them for “deceiving the public and obstructing progress”.
UN accepts overshooting 1.5C warming limit – at least temporarily – is “inevitable”
Speaking before him, the head of the World Meteorological Organization Celeste Saulo warned that the past three years have been the warmest on record and 2025 will be either the second or third warmest.
“Let COP30 be remembered as the moment the world changed course – with the Amazon as its witness,” said the Argentine weather-watcher. “We can’t rewrite the laws of physics, but we can rewrite our path.“
Brandishing the gavel he brought down to adopt the Paris Agreement 10 years ago, the French chair of COP21 Laurent Fabius noted that the world had been on course for 4C or more of global warming before the pact was sealed, while the climate action it spurred has brought the prediction down to 2.8C. That means, he said, “millions and millions of lives saved”.
