High-stakes Cop30 ignores ‘con job’ threats by Trump

Flying into the Cop30 host city of Belem, which is around four hours north of the megacities of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, you can understand why Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva chose the city for his “Cop in the Amazon”.

- NICK FERRIS

For around the last 45 minutes of the flight, all you can see is thick, green, canopied forest, with the occasional chocolate brown river snaking its way through. The city itself appears through the green almost out of nowhere, a regional hub of 1.3 million perched on the shoreline close to the mouth of the Amazon River.

Known as the “gateway” to the Amazon, much of the city’s wealth has come from its role as an export hub for minerals, hardwoods, and crops grown on deforested lands.

But the symbolism of Cop30 being hosted here goes beyond the location in the “lungs of the Earth”, since it was also in Brazil, at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was first established - the organisation that has pushed global action on climate change ever since.

With global emissions nearly doubling over the last 33 years, few would argue that things have progressed as hoped. What’s more, the post-Covid global consensus on tackling climate change appears to be fragmenting, with Donald Trump, president of the US - the largest historic contributor to climate change - actively pushing climate disinformation and using trade tariffs to pressure other territories, including Japan, the EU and South Korea - to buy more US oil. Trump will not attend Cop30.