Cop president to the Guardian: ‘Not many countries are indifferent’ to fossil fuel phaseout
Oil-producing countries need to acknowledge the rise of clean energy, and rich countries will have to provide more assurances on finance if the chasm between negotiating nations at Cop30 is to be bridged, the president of the summit said in an exclusive interview with the Guardian’s Fiona Harvey.
André Corrêa do Lago, the veteran Brazilian climate diplomat in charge of the talks, said: “Developing countries are looking at developed countries as countries that could be much more generous in supporting them to be more sustainable. They could offer more finance, and technology.”
This does not necessarily involve an increase in the headline amount of money to be provided directly from rich world coffers, set last year at $300bn (£230bn) a year by 2035. It could also come from better use of existing finance, Corrêa do Lago added.
“You don’t need more money. You don’t need public money from developed countries. You need to leverage more dollars from each dollar that you have,” he said.
“They can offer not only more resources in banks, in multinational development banks; put more public money in funds like the green climate fund or the global environment facility, but there are an increasing number of alternatives like debt-for-nature swaps and other (instruments).”
The divide over the “transition away from fossil fuels” has emerged as the biggest faultline at the Cop30 talks, now entering their final days in Brazil. On Tuesday, more than 80 countries demanded a roadmap to the transition as a key outcome of the summit, in what some campaigners described as a “turning point”.
But they are likely to face stiff opposition from petrostates such as Saudi Arabia and others who are dependent on fossil fuels. Decisions at “conference of the party” meetings require consensus, so even a handful of states could scupper the roadmap proposal.
“Not only is (the divide) binary, but it is two extremes: one very favourable (to a phaseout) the other very unfavourable. There aren’t many countries that are indifferent,” said Corrêa do Lago.
Check out the full story from my colleagues Fiona Harvey and Jon Watts:
On Wednesday, Carbon Brief revealed the full list of 82 countries supporting some sort of roadmap on transitioning away from fossil fuels.
More than 20 are backing a declaration on the transition being circulated by Colombia. Latin American countries and the Environmental Integrity Group (Mexico, Liechtenstein, Monaco, the Republic of Korea, Switzerland, and Georgia) back a roadmap in official submissions to the UN climate body.
The EU, minus Poland and Italy, have also backed the roadmap and there have been supportive public statements from small island states, as well as the UK, Mongolia and others.
Key events
Damian Carrington
Cop30 is a place for Paris Agreement parties to flesh out their climate plans. But it is also a bit of a trade show for countries, trade groups, and NGOs. My intrepid colleague Damian Carrington, the Guardian environment editor, is continuing his analysis (read a previous installment here) of the pavilions at the climate talks. Here are his latest assessments:
Democratic Republic of the Congo: Huge! Like the enormous rainforest it hosts. Real plants too. Top job.
World Nuclear Association: Barren, empty. Like a fall-out zone.
Brazil: Fabulous forest vibe. But inexplicably no coffee stand. Did the UK pavilion steal it?
Japan: Like an Apple store, gadgets out on display. Cool, but fancy tech isn’t going to save us.
Sweden: Decent effort. But seriously, couldn’t Ikea have provided some funky furniture?
Planetary sciences: Bravo! A rare pavilion that is just lovely to look at. Unlike the climate science itself which gets uglier each day.
Finland: Uninspiring. But gets a mention for an excellent slogan: “Cool by Nature”
Jonathan Watts
President Lula has spent late morning and early afternoon at Cop30 looking for common ground, listening to concerns, and trying to use his charm to push forward a global roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels and end deforestation, reports Jon Watts from Brazil.
After flying into Belém around 10:20am, the Brazilian leader considered strategy with senior members of his negotiating team, including COP president André Corrêa do Lago and environment minister Marina Silva.
Emerging nations were his first priority in meeting with other delegations, including Brics allies China, India and Indonesia. It is unclear as yet how that gathering went, but this huge grouping will be one of the keys to success.
Another is The European Union, whose chief delegate – from Portugal – was invited in for another meeting. Brazil is hoping the EU will lead in rallying the climate funds needed to unlock an agreement in Belém.
After a private lunch, Lula was scheduled to meet with negotiators representing the Africa Group and Small Island States, who are most affected by the climate crisis and are often seen as its moral persuaders.
Following this, the Brazilian president is due to talk to representatives of indigenous groups and civil society. Among the achievements of this COP is a greater-than-ever representation of forest peoples inside the negotiating area and the announcement of land demarcation for ten indigenous territories. https://cop30.br/en/news-about-cop30/government-of-brazil-advances-in-the-demarcation-of-ten-indigenous-lands
Rumours have flown around all day that Lula might call a plenary and gauge support for a roadmap. But this is not on his schedule.
Later, there will be talks with business leaders. And hopefully, at the end of the day, a press briefing. We will keep you updated!
Cop president to the Guardian: ‘Not many countries are indifferent’ to fossil fuel phaseout
Oil-producing countries need to acknowledge the rise of clean energy, and rich countries will have to provide more assurances on finance if the chasm between negotiating nations at Cop30 is to be bridged, the president of the summit said in an exclusive interview with the Guardian’s Fiona Harvey.
André Corrêa do Lago, the veteran Brazilian climate diplomat in charge of the talks, said: “Developing countries are looking at developed countries as countries that could be much more generous in supporting them to be more sustainable. They could offer more finance, and technology.”
This does not necessarily involve an increase in the headline amount of money to be provided directly from rich world coffers, set last year at $300bn (£230bn) a year by 2035. It could also come from better use of existing finance, Corrêa do Lago added.
“You don’t need more money. You don’t need public money from developed countries. You need to leverage more dollars from each dollar that you have,” he said.
“They can offer not only more resources in banks, in multinational development banks; put more public money in funds like the green climate fund or the global environment facility, but there are an increasing number of alternatives like debt-for-nature swaps and other (instruments).”
The divide over the “transition away from fossil fuels” has emerged as the biggest faultline at the Cop30 talks, now entering their final days in Brazil. On Tuesday, more than 80 countries demanded a roadmap to the transition as a key outcome of the summit, in what some campaigners described as a “turning point”.
But they are likely to face stiff opposition from petrostates such as Saudi Arabia and others who are dependent on fossil fuels. Decisions at “conference of the party” meetings require consensus, so even a handful of states could scupper the roadmap proposal.
“Not only is (the divide) binary, but it is two extremes: one very favourable (to a phaseout) the other very unfavourable. There aren’t many countries that are indifferent,” said Corrêa do Lago.
Check out the full story from my colleagues Fiona Harvey and Jon Watts:
On Wednesday, Carbon Brief revealed the full list of 82 countries supporting some sort of roadmap on transitioning away from fossil fuels.
More than 20 are backing a declaration on the transition being circulated by Colombia. Latin American countries and the Environmental Integrity Group (Mexico, Liechtenstein, Monaco, the Republic of Korea, Switzerland, and Georgia) back a roadmap in official submissions to the UN climate body.
The EU, minus Poland and Italy, have also backed the roadmap and there have been supportive public statements from small island states, as well as the UK, Mongolia and others.
Nina Lakhani
Climate compensation for war-related harms is happening.
Ukraine will claim $43bn in climate compensation from Russia to help fund a green-recovery and rebuild, making it the first country ever to seek reparations for greenhouse gases generated during an unlawful war, writes my colleague Nina Lakhani.
The figure is based on research by the European funded Initiative on Greenhouse Gas Accounting of War (IGGAW) which found that Russia’s invasion has generated 237m tonnes of carbon dioxide – the equivalent of the annual greenhouse gas emissions of Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia combined.
The emissions come from direct military activity, wartime fires, strikes on energy infrastructure, the displacement of civilians and commercial aviation, and the vast quantities of steel and concrete needed for reconstruction. Around 3m hectares of Ukrainian forests have been destroyed or damaged by war, reducing its greenhouse gas absorption capacity by 1.7m tonnes per year.
Pavlo Kartashov, deputy minister for economy, environment and agriculture, said at Cop30 on Tuesday:
“In many ways, Russia is fighting a dirty war and our climate is also a casualty. The vast amounts of fuel burned, forests scorched, buildings destroyed, concrete and steel used, all these things are essentially ‘conflict carbon’ and have a considerable climate cost. We in Ukraine face brutality directly, but the climate shockwaves of this aggression will be felt well beyond our borders and into the future.”
There’s mounting pressure for states to be held accountable for the vast quantity of planet-warming gases generated by military infrastructure and operations. Even before war-related activities are counted, militaries account for almost 5.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions annually – more than every single country except the US, China and India. Yet states are not required to include these in their reporting to the UNFCCC.
In 2022, the UN general assembly decided that Russia should compensate Ukraine, prompting the Council of Europe to establish a damages mechanism. Ukraine plans to submit its claim in early 2026, which will be supported by the historic ICJ climate ruling from July which confirmed that states committing illegal acts resulting in climate harms can be held accountable, with compensation being one possible form of legal redress.
Ukraine has pledged to align its rebuild with EU climate policies. Earlier this year, the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced €265m in funding for Ukrainian energy security and “green transition”.
Europe’s support for Russian accountability stands in contrast to its silence over Israel’s destruction of Gaza. In May. the Guardian reported that the long-term climate cost of destroying, clearing and rebuilding Gaza could top 31m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) – greater than the combined 2023 annual greenhouse gases emitted by Costa Rica and Estonia. Earlier this month, an Italian journalist was fired by his news agency after asking a European Commission official why Israel shouldn’t pay for the reconstruction in Gaza.
‘This is a power struggle’: Susana Muhamad on fossil fuel phaseout and Cop30
Coal, oil, and gas account for 90% of planet-warming carbon pollution, but UN climate negotiations have become a “huge convention” focused on “defending fossil fuels,” according to Colombia’s former environment minister Susana Muhamad.
“Fossil fuels are in the judgement chair, and always winning the battle,” she told my colleague Jon Watts and I.
Two years ago at Cop28 in Dubai, countries agreed to “transition away” from fossil fuels to meet the goals of the Paris agreement — a pledge Muhamad helped secure. But since then, the use of coal, oil, and gas has slowly ticked up. “The scale of the problem is not being addressed,” Muhamad said.
She is aiming to take on the issue by promoting the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty, a proposed agreement which Colombia and 16 other countries have endorsed. She has just become a special envoy for the treaty, she shared exclusively with the Guardian, a role she will use to help sort out the thorny realities of kicking planet-warming fuels.
Muhamad has seen those challenges firsthand. Shortly after the 2023 climate talks, Colombia pledged to halt all new exploration contracts for fossil fuel. A key obstacle, she said, has been securing the “fiscal capacity to invest in the transition” and pay off debt burdens without fossil fuel profits.
“Colombian oil is not the best oil: It’s heavy, it’s expensive to extract, we don’t have huge reserves,” she said. “But still, we are so dependent on it.”
Then, there are the political challenges. “The political debate becomes, ‘let’s stick what is what we know, but sticking to what we know will be an economic disaster,” she said.
Effective climate action, she said, requires an understanding that phasing out fossil fuels requires a massive social and economic transition. “The non-proliferation treaty intends to put the economic question at the center,” she said.
In April, Colombia will host the first-ever international conference on the phase out of fossil fuels, it recently announced. (At Cop30, the country is also circulating a declaration, separate from the UN climate process, to draw political attention to a plan to phase out fossil fuels.)
Not just any phaseout will do, Muhamad said. She was critical of those who look for a solution only in markets and technology, without looking at the question of justice.”Green capitalism”, she said, would continue “the logic of competition and dominance that always gives profit to some at the cost of others, and that will not work.”
Muhamad has become a leading proponent of this progressive approach to climate action in recent years. Getting to this point required what she describes as a “journey through the system” motivated by “intellectual curiosity,” a refusal to swallow contradictions and a “compulsive” search for answers.
After growing up in Bogotá in a family with Palestinian roots to living with mine workers in post-apartheid South Africa, she moved to Europe and worked for the oil giant Shell for five years, then moved into the human rights sphere before entering a left-wing party in Colombia.
“All of that came to a conclusion, which is that this is a power struggle,” she said. “It has to be solved through politics.”
Earlier this year, Muhamad stood as presidential candidate in her party’s primaries before stepping aside. Looking ahead to the election, she fears the United States may intervene to support the far right.
“It’s going to be super nasty,” she predicted.
Trump has already targeted Colombia’s left-wing government, Muhamad noted. Last month, the US imposed sanctions on Colombian president Gustavo Petro – allegedly for failing to stop drug cartels — after revoking Petro’s visa in September after he took part in pro-Palestinian protests in New York.
“It’s like overthrowing democracy in Colombia,” Muhamad said. “What they’re trying to do is to put the symbol of the progressive movement in Colombia, which is Petro, and put him down with all sorts of lies.”
Colombians are also among the 80 people who have been killed by the Trump administration’s twenty-plus strikes on boats which it alleges are carrying narcotics around Venezuela. On Monday, the US president suggested he could expand the US military strikes beyond Venezuela to targets on land in Colombia and Mexico. Trump’s threats on Colombia and Venezuela, Muhamad said, are driven by the desire to secure minerals and other resources.
“There is something coming back. which is imperialism,” she said “They are the strongest military force and they can rip planet Earth for their interest.”
It’s a sign of the threat of authoritarianism, she said, which comes from a “triangle of power”: the military industry, the technology sector, and fossil fuel capital. “That’s the struggle we have to battle against,” she said.
Authoritarianism is a major problem for climate action, Muhamad said. Right-wing extremism is on the rise from “the masses of disengaged populations that have been left by neoliberalism” and are disillusioned with the broken promises of green capitalism, she said.
The only answer, said Muhamad, is to foster a green economy that improves people’s lives. “Make them excited about the future, make them have a horizon of the future,” she said. “We have to push to be more radical and more democratic.”
She said the recent incursions into the Cop30 conference center by some social movements, including Indigenous activists, were “great.”
“It’s the people’s resistance that will move this, not the technocrats and the bureaucrats writing text,” she said. “We need the government, of course, but if it’s not from the bottom up, it’s going to be very difficult. The fossil capital will win.
“The real change for climate has to be a revolution from the people.”
Damian Carrington
Here is a reminder of the stakes being played for at Cop30, in a study published yesterday, writes my colleague Damian Carrington.
If the 2003 European heatwave was repeated in today’s world, made 1.5C hotter by the burning of fossil fuels, it would kill 18,000 people in a single week. That death rate is comparable to peak COVID-19 mortality in Europe.
“Mass mortality events remain plausible at near-future temperatures despite current adaptations to heat,” say the authors. We learned last mont that rising heat is already killing one person per minute.
So as the delegates in Belém wrangle text and square brackets, they would do well to remember what it is all for: reducing human suffering.
Climate finance: ‘No transition on an empty tank’
Jonathan Watts
From my colleague Jon Watts in Brazil:
Industrialised nations need to step up on climate finance if there is to be a realistic roadmap to reduce the world’s fossil fuel dependency, the director of Power Shift Africa, Mohamed Adow said at Cop30 on Wednesday.
“Developing countries cannot drive the energy transition with an empty tank,” he told a press conference organised by the Climate Action Network. “We need climate finance to help enable developing countries to be able to deliver on the transition.”
“This transition must be fast, it must be fair, it must be financed. And that is a demand we have from developing countries.”
Adow said the European Union needs to lead other developed countries to move in this area, particularly on adaptation finance where there were currently no clear details about how funds would be provided either in nationally determined contributions or in the main negotiating texts of the Belém climate.
He said vulnerable countries needed to see a tripling of adaptation finance, reaching $120 bn exclusively from public grant-based sources. “Anything short of that is going to shortchange the poor and vulnerable countries of the world.”
In Belém, he said developed nations were trying to limit discussions to criteria – measurements and indices – rather than delivery and quantity. “Coming from a pastoralist community, I must say that, you know, however many times we weigh a cow, we wouldn’t make it any fatter.”
Another speaker at the event, Caroline Brouillette, the heat of the Planet Action Network Canada, said the UK, Australia, the EU and Canada were also blocking progress on the Belém Action Mechanism which is at the centre of efforts to achieve a just transition away from fossil fuels.
“These are countries who are telling us they have come here to save and support multilateralism. But international cooperation requires more than words. It requires actual institutional support,” she said. “This is the litmus test of these talks.”
By comparison, China was playing a positive role, said Shreeshan Venkatesh of Climate Action Network International. “There are many ways in which China has done way, way, way more than those developed countries have in its transitions, in its actions,” he said.
“We expect China to also be a voice for developing countries, also make sure that they have equity and justice at the heart of everything that they do….There is no energy transition, there is no effective climate action without China’s support ..They are critical in maintaining the unity of the developing countries and I think they do that well.”
Damian Carrington
Climate disinformation is one of the biggest barriers to climate action, writes environment editor Damian Carrington. As Eva Morel, at QuotaClimat, told him recently: “Facts are the foundation of trust, which in turn underpins law, and ultimately, democracy.”
Here at Cop30, Elisa Morgera, UN special rapporteur on human rights and climate change, said, contrary to the Brazilian organiser’s slogan, “This is not yet the ‘Cop of Truth’.”
“It is now well-established by independent research that there have been six decades of climate disinformation and obstruction by the fossil fuel industry, who had the knowledge that their activities would cause climate change and decided not to release that to the public.
“Instead they invested in a very complex series of strategies to keep the public away from the truth about fossil fuels being the main cause of climate change.
“Climate disinformation, in and of itself, can be a violation of human rights to information, to science and to participate in decision making processes. The six decades of climate disinformation mean all our efforts to protect human rights in the context of climate change have been undermined and continue to be undermined.
“So states must first of all inform the public about the fossil fuel industry’s deliberate contributions to the planetary crisis and to climate disinformation. Second, we need to ensure in every space that we have access to accurate science based information on the need to de-fossilise our economies (and) make sure we ban fossil fuel advertising, including sponsorships.” (The city of The Hague and The Guardian, for example, have already done this.)
“People also need to know also about the health impacts from the fossil fuel industry. Medical (experts) indicate that every single organ in our bodies is negatively harmed by fossil fuels. Even if we don’t live near fossil fuel operations, we are all harmed by air pollution and plastics in every part of our bodies.”
The fact that it took 28 annual Cop climate meetings to mention fossil fuels is the result of those decades of disinformation and obstruction, Morgera said. Cops also attract large numbers of fossil fuel lobbyists.
“Having much clearer rules of conflict of interest is crucial, similar to what we’ve seen at the World Health Organisation for the tobacco industry, because the playbooks are the same. This is not yet the ‘Cop of Truth’.”
You can read more here in a recent interview with Morgera by my colleague Nina Lakhani, in which Morgera calls for criminal penalties against those peddling disinformation.
Cop30 has seen 15 nations sign theDeclaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change, including Germany and Belgium. The UK has not signed up. “It is very disappointing,”said Bob Ward, at the London School of Economics. “The UK is currently being bombarded by climate misinformation from the US, including the interview with Donald Trump on GB News at the weekend when he claimed climate change is a hoax. The UK needs to take action against rampant climate misinformation.”
Dharna Noor
Dharna Noor here, taking over from my colleague Matthew to bring you live updates from Cop30 in Belém! Stay tuned for more coverage from the ground.
Overnight we published a piece on the extent of lobbying by big agriculture at this Cop by my colleague Nina Lakhani.
Now we have had an update from Hazel Healy, editor in chief at DeSmog, which worked with the Guardian on the investigation. Writing from the Blue Zone at Cop30 Healy says:
This year in Brazil, food lobbyists are everywhere. We see them on panels in the UN’s Blue Zones, they have a whole other tented, air conditioned parallel event space called the Agrizone just around the corner, and refurbished mansions scattered around the city are holding exclusive events.
This lobby often goes under the radar. Pressure groups have purposefully neutral names like Protein Pact – an initiative of the Meat Institute, which represents 95 per cent of US livestock producers. (DeSmog knows who they are because we mapped all the groups in the lead up to this summit and counted the number of lobbyists, with The Guardian.)
Now, if the food and farming business were coming here in good faith, that would be OK – the UN needs big polluters to get on board with tackling the climate crisis, right?
But this is not what we are seeing. Trade groups, particularly those that represent the animal farming sector (meat, dairy, feed), who are lobbying here, do one of two things, usually both at once: insist they are the “solution” to climate change, and demand public money for technological fixes that peer-reviewed science shows cannot deliver the scale of reductions needed.
They are really successful (and they will say so themselves) at keeping food emissions out of the spotlight.
This translates into countries still not having plans to tackle food sector emissions in their climate plans (Only 16 out of 54 countries reviewed by the OECD have specific emissions-reduction targets for agriculture in their NDCs).
It means there is still no independent roadmap to chart a pathway for agriculture towards sustainability that industry progress (or lack of) can be measured against (like you have for fossil fuelled industries like transport).
Away from Cop30 England and Arsenal footballer Beth Mead has taken a stand on the climate crisis. Writing for the Guardian the Euro 2025 winner warns that the changing climate threatens the future of the global game.
Jonathan Watts
‘Why do we need to prove that we’re afraid in order to be taken seriously?’
Five youths from around the world will call for a COP for children in the Belém conference centre today in recognition that this generation is among the most vulnerable to the climate crisis.
They will tell stories in the Blue Zone of how their lives are affected by rising temperatures and ever more extreme weather, then make a demonstration in the corridors of the conference centre.
The organisers of the event say children represent one-third of the world’s population. Three-in-four of them live in the Global South, which is bearing the brunt of droughts, floods, storms and heatwaves.
At least 5.9 million children could fall into poverty by 2030 as a result of the climate crisis and 242 million students have already had their classes disrupted by extreme climate events say the São Paulo-based Alana Institute, which describes itself as a social and environmental impact organization that promotes and inspires a better world for children.
“We call for a COP for Children, in which we have for the first time a bold decision on child sensitive language,” they say. “Therefore, we urge Parties to include children as a primary consideration, as referred to in Article 3 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, by addressing the disproportionate impacts of climate change on children and relevant policy solutions in national planning and implementation processes.”
Earlier this week, the institute arranged a three-generation exchange between 40 children and adolescents with leaders such as Mary Robinson, Ana Lucia Villela and Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim. One 11-year-old named Vicente asked the elders: “Why do we need to prove that we’re afraid in order to be taken seriously?“
João Paulo Amaral, of the institute said: “If this is the COP of Inclusion, we cannot leave one-third of the world population behind. We need this COP to consider children as a primary consideration, as their health and life are at risk. Let’s remember, every adult was a child and a safer climate for children is a safer climate for all.”
WaterAid climate campaigners are at the Cop30 conference and earlier this week handed in an open letter calling on governments to place water at the heart of their climate plans.
Samia Anwar Rafa, a youth WaterAid campaigner from Bangladesh said:
I want to see more climate financing flowing into communities who are the most vulnerable to climate impacts. Like in Bangladesh, where we’re experiencing the harsh realities of climate change with severe cyclones, prolonged droughts and increasingly salty drinking water
Frequently left out of the COP process and often unable to follow its progress, these communities suffer the worst impacts of floods, droughts, and unsafe water access.
This week, we need to make decisions that are felt around the world – from Belem to Bangladesh. We don’t want to just see empty promises, we need to see delivery now.
Barkat Bin Saïda Matazaky, a WaterAid Young Climate Leader from Madagascar said:
Water connects us, sustains us, yet too often it fails to reach everyone equally. From my perspective, in Madagascar, there are communities whose survival, health, and livelihoods would depend entirely on reliable access to clean water.
“Climate risks are intensifying: some regions face severe droughts while others experience devastating floods. Without proper coordination, investments remain fragmented, and vulnerable communities risk being left behind.
