Ryan Ba­choo

Lead Ed­i­tor - News­gath­er­ing

Pres­i­dent of the 30th Con­fer­ence of the Par­ties (COP30), An­dré Cor­rêa do La­go, says Small Is­land De­vel­op­ing States (SIDS) have found a home in Belém, Brazil, and that their needs will be front and cen­tre at the Unit­ed Na­tions Cli­mate Change Con­fer­ence.

The an­nu­al sum­mit opened in the Ama­zon yes­ter­day, with much at stake for the South Amer­i­can host na­tion. Do La­go was asked about his mes­sage for SIDS as he walked back to the ple­nary hall late yes­ter­day evening. He replied:

“This is al­ways one of the main dri­vers of ne­go­ti­a­tions. Small Is­land De­vel­op­ing States are the con­science of the world. We are in the Ama­zon, and they speak the same lan­guage as the peo­ple of the Caribbean be­cause they know what it means to pre­serve what they have. You are at home here in Belém, and we are go­ing to be to­geth­er.”

COP30 opens with op­ti­mism

Do La­go opened COP30 by ac­knowl­edg­ing the cul­tur­al and po­lit­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance of host­ing the sum­mit in Belém. He high­light­ed in­dige­nous per­for­mances and the pres­ence of Brazil­ian artists, stress­ing the per­son­al re­spon­si­bil­i­ty he feels as COP Pres­i­dent. He al­so not­ed the co­op­er­a­tion re­quired to fi­nalise the agen­da, stat­ing that the agree­ment reached “will not on­ly al­low us to start work­ing to­day very in­ten­sive­ly, but will al­so al­low us to ex­plain to the world why these ad­di­tion­al is­sues that have been raised re­al­ly mat­ter.”

Do La­go added that he in­tends to fol­low the ex­am­ple of his pre­de­ces­sor, say­ing he “will try to fol­low his very good ad­vice as I pre­side over this COP.”

Mean­while, UN Cli­mate Chief Si­mon Stiell fo­cused on mo­men­tum and ur­gency. He em­pha­sised that glob­al cli­mate ac­tion is show­ing mea­sur­able progress:

“We are now bend­ing the curve of plan­et-heat­ing emis­sions down­wards – for the very first time.”

But he warned that the pace must ac­cel­er­ate, high­light­ing the eco­nom­ic op­por­tu­ni­ties in clean en­er­gy and the ris­ing hu­man costs of de­lay. “Paris is work­ing to take us for­ward. Now it’s time to hit the ac­cel­er­a­tor for peo­ple, pros­per­i­ty, and the plan­et.” He stressed that COP30 must de­liv­er so­lu­tions that reach peo­ple di­rect­ly, es­pe­cial­ly those al­ready fac­ing se­vere cli­mate im­pacts.

Max­i­may: Ma­jor COP

for Caribbean

On the side­lines of COP30, cli­mate change ex­pert Steve Max­i­may said this is a cru­cial con­fer­ence for the Caribbean. Max­i­may, Man­ag­ing Di­rec­tor of Sci­ence-Based Ini­tia­tives, is ad­vo­cat­ing for a just tran­si­tion in the agri­cul­tur­al sec­tor us­ing a new cli­mate fi­nance in­stru­ment.

“When you look at the open­ing cer­e­monies, you get a sense of the tone for the rest of the COP. I think the tone set this morn­ing ex­em­pli­fies what we are look­ing for in an im­ple­men­ta­tion COP at the birth­place of this whole cli­mate change move­ment. We were here in Rio in 1992,” he said.

A new re­port projects that the glob­al av­er­age tem­per­a­ture will rise 1.5°C above pre-in­dus­tri­al lev­els with­in the next few years. Max­i­may urged ne­go­tia­tors not to be dis­cour­aged, clar­i­fy­ing:

“We have passed 1.5 in a weath­er con­text. What we’re talk­ing about with 1.5 is sus­tained over a decade, and we haven’t got­ten there yet. When peo­ple say we should not be talk­ing about 1.5, it’s a gen­uine mis­un­der­stand­ing. We’re try­ing to pre­vent 1.5 from be­com­ing a cli­mate sta­tis­tic. It’s cur­rent­ly a weath­er sta­tis­tic, but we don’t want it to be a cli­mate sta­tis­tic.”

Asked what he would con­sid­er a suc­cess­ful COP30, Max­i­may said:

“In a gen­er­al sense, a com­mit­ment to more than the 300 bil­lion that came out of Azer­bai­jan. I don’t think we’ll get to 1.3 tril­lion, but if we could reach 700 bil­lion with com­mit­ment, that would be sig­nif­i­cant. For some­one who has been in this strug­gle for a long time, com­mit­ment is more than just words. That would be a suc­cess.”

The COP30 pres­i­den­cy faces pres­sure to move the con­fer­ence from ne­go­ti­a­tions to im­ple­men­ta­tion, en­sur­ing con­crete progress on cli­mate ac­tion.