BRAZIL COP30 SHOWS WANING CONCERN

THERE’S a message in holding the November 6-11 international summit on climate change at Belem, Brazil.

- GURBIR SINGH

The confabulation among nations on the state of the environment or Conference of Parties (COP30) has been convened at the gateway of the endangered Amazon rain forests, the world’s largest, 5.5 million square kilometres of tropical forests threatened by logging and mining.

Unfortunately, Belem is not as exciting as Paris or Egypt’s seaside resort of Sharm El-Sheikh. The conference is seeing tepid response with only a few dozen world leaders making the trek to this Latin American outpost. Leading lights from some of the most important and populous nations are absent. India, the US, China and Russia.

The Donald Trump United States, and China, are skeptics on Climate Change goals, while Russia is in the midst of a terrible shooting war. But it is indeed surprising that India, a usually sane voice on environment issues, has given COP30 low priority this round. There is no denying climate change as a global cause is losing steam.

Long shadow on COP30

The environment movement is also facing the long shadow of Trump’s push back. Though he is not coming to Belem, speaking at the United Nations in September Trump dismissed climate change as ‘the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world’. “The entire globalist concept, asking successful industrialized nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies, must be rejected completely and totally,” he added.