Five months to go 'Climate is our biggest war. We need to focus and not be diverted'

With Cop30 looming, negotiators are worried about the effect of military and trade wars, writes Fiona Harvey

- Fiona Harvey

Climate is our biggest war," said Ana Toni, chief executive of Cop30, the UN climate summit to be held in Brazil this November. "Climate is here for the next 100 years. We need to not allow other wars to take our attention away from the bigger fight that we need to have."

Toni is worried. With only four months to go before the global summit, the world's response to the climate crisis is in limbo. Fewer than 30 of the 200 countries that will gather in the Amazonian city of Belém have so far drafted plans, required by the 2015 Paris agreement, to stave off the worst ravages of climate breakdown.

The task ahead is huge. In the past two years, for the first time, global land temperatures soared to more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels - breaching the limit that governments have promised to keep at multiple climate meetings. Meanwhile the US president, Donald Trump, has withdrawn from the Paris agreement and is intent on expanding fossil fuels and dismantling carbon-cutting efforts.

The European Union is mired in tense arguments over its plans, which could be delayed. China, the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, has said little publicly but is rumoured to be considering weak targets that would condemn the world to far greater heating. World leaders' attention is elsewhere as the conflict in the Middle East threatens to spiral. Poor countries are labouring under a mountain of debt, and the continuing cost of living crisis in many countries is fuelling populism and opposition to green policies.

Toni, a Brazilian economist, warned that this was a serious danger to Cop30. "There's no doubt that the wars that we've seen - military wars and trade wars - they are very damaging - physically, economically, socially - and they divert the direction and the attention from climate," she said.