Amazon-hosted summit stresses ‘mutirão’ spirit

The 2025 U.N. climate conference formally opened in Belém, deep inside Brazil’s Amazon, with its president urging delegates to adopt a “mutirão” — a Brazilian notion of many hands working together — to accelerate emissions cuts and climate finance. Speakers said the world is now warming faster than when the Paris Agreement was signed a decade ago, and that communities across the tropics are already paying the price through deadlier storms and floods. But the mood was complicated by the absence of the United States, which has once again stepped back from active Paris participation, leaving European, Latin American and small island states to push key agenda items. Negotiators said that without U.S. political muscle, progress on loss-and-damage funding and on a global target for renewable energy will be harder to lock in. Still, U.N. climate chief Simon Stiell argued the talks have pulled the world away from the catastrophic five-degree path scientists once feared and that clean energy investment — now in the trillions — shows momentum ordinary citizens can feel in the price of power and transport. Brazil, keen to showcase deforestation gains, used the opening day to link forest protection to development money.

Can the talks deliver real action?

Diplomats said the task in Belém is less about writing new promises and more about getting countries to implement the ones they have already made. Several climate-vulnerable nations said wealthy economies have not delivered enough grants, or offered finance on favorable terms, to help them adapt to rising seas and extreme heat. They warned that if COP30 ends with yet another nonbinding text, voters back home will see U.N. climate diplomacy as remote from daily life. The summit is also taking place just days after Typhoon Kalmaegi tore through parts of Southeast Asia, a timely reminder — cited repeatedly in plenary — that warmer oceans are amplifying damage. Brazil’s government is betting that hosting the talks in the Amazon, rather than in a distant capital, will keep pressure on participants to fund forest communities and Indigenous-led protection. But the absence of Washington, and the presence of skeptical voices from the current U.S. administration, could embolden countries that want to slow-walk coal and oil exit plans. Observers say the rest of the G7 will now have to overperform to keep 1.5°C alive.