Listen to this article
About 4 minutes
The audio version of this article is generated by speech synthesis, a technology based on artificial intelligence.
U.N. climate talks began Monday on the fringes of the Brazilian Amazon as leaders pushed to accelerate efforts to curb global warming by dramatically reducing the carbon pollution that causes it. But the main American negotiators were absent.
Negotiators cannot forget that “the climate emergency is an increase in inequality,” host President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva told them. He said he had chosen the host city of Bethlehem instead of “a finished city” to understand the impact of warming on the Amazon and on poverty.
“Rising global temperatures are wreaking pain and devastation, particularly among the most vulnerable populations,” he said at the conference known as COP30.
This year’s negotiations are unlikely to result in an ambitious new agreement. Instead, organizers and analysts are billing this year’s conference as the “implementation COP.” Countries had a duty to do: present their updated national plans to combat climate change.
Participants on Monday highlighted cooperation. Individual countries cannot reduce their greenhouse gas emissions fast enough, UN climate secretary Simon Stiell has said.
“Your job is to fight this climate crisis together,” Stiell told negotiators.
Andre Correa do Lago, president of this year’s conference, stressed that negotiators must engage in “mutirão,” derived from a local indigenous word that refers to a group uniting for a task.
US skips summit
Complicating these calls is the situation in the United States, where President Donald Trump has long denied the existence of climate change. His administration has failed to send high-level negotiators and is withdrawing for the second time from the 10-year-old Paris Agreement, the world’s first pact to combat climate change.
The Paris Agreement was supposed to limit warming to 1.5°C above the historical average, but many scientists now say countries are unlikely to stay below that threshold.
The United States has released more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air from burning coal, oil and natural gas than any other country. China is now the largest carbon polluter, but because carbon dioxide remains in the air for at least a century, more carbon dioxide has been produced in the United States.
The Brazilian president denounced climate disinformation without mentioning the absent Americans by name.
“COP30 will be the COP of truth,” said Lula. “They are attacking institutions, they are attacking science and universities. Now is the time to impose another defeat on the denialists.”
Palau Ambassador Ilana Seid, who chairs the Alliance of Small Island States, said the U.S. withdrawal “really changed the gravity” of the negotiating system.
Trump’s actions are harming the fight against climate change, said former US special climate envoy Todd Stern.
“It’s a good thing they’re not sending anyone. It wouldn’t be constructive if they did,” he said.
Although the U.S. government is not present, some participants, including former top U.S. negotiators, are nominating U.S. cities, states and companies they believe will help pick up the slack.
Lula and Stiell said the 10-year-old Paris Agreement is working to some extent, but action needs to be accelerated. They highlighted the devastation of recent weeks, including Hurricane Melissa in the Caribbean, typhoons that hit Vietnam and the Philippines and a tornado that devastated southern Brazil.
Scientists say extreme weather events have become more frequent as the Earth warms.
“Climate change is not a threat for the future. It is already a tragedy of the present time,” Lula said.
