The Human Consciousness Now...Our World in the Midst of Becoming...to What? Observe, contemplate Now.
SANTIAGO, Nov 20 2025 (IPS) - Climate change is no longer a future threat; it is a reality that is reshaping agrifood systems and compromising global food security. Its impacts are evident in both the quantity and quality of food, affecting agricultural yields, water availability, pest emergence, disease spread, and fundamental processes such as pollination. Even changes in atmospheric CO₂ concentration are altering crop biomass and nutritional value.
In 2024, climate shocks were the main driver of food crises in 18 countries, affecting 72 million people experiencing high levels of food insecurity. Hurricane Mellisa, which struck Jamaica, Haiti, and Cuba, is a recent example of the severe effects these events have on agrifood systems.
Over the past five decades, climate change has reduced global cereal yields by 2%-5%; in Latin America alone, maize yields have declined by around 5%. Since 1961, climate change has reduced global agricultural productivity by 21%, which is equivalent to losing seven years of progress.
If we truly want agrifood systems that are more sustainable and resilient, climate financing must prioritize agriculture and the livelihoods of rural communities. Without sufficient resources, international commitments will remain words on paper rather than concrete results
These figures make one conclusion clear: it is urgent to rethink and transform agrifood systems by accelerating mitigation and adaptation measures. But doing so requires addressing a critical financing gap.
Despite the urgency, in 2023 only 4% of climate-related development financing was allocated to agriculture, livestock, fisheries, and forestry. This imbalance threatens the ability of the most vulnerable countries to adapt and transition toward sustainable production models.
If we truly want agrifood systems that are more sustainable and resilient, climate financing must prioritize agriculture and the livelihoods of rural communities. Without sufficient resources, international commitments will remain words on paper rather than concrete results.
In this context, COP30 is decisive. The promotion of agroforestry projects in the Amazon, which restore degraded lands and directly benefit local communities, is a fundamental element for the sustainability of ecosystems related to food and agriculture.
The presentation of the Tropical Forests Forever Fund (TFFF), led by Brazil with support from the World Bank, proposes an innovative model to finance global forest conservation, seeking to mobilize USD 25 billion from countries and USD 100 billion from private investors. This approach shows that sustainability can also be an economic opportunity when there are vision and commitment.
The early approval of the COP30 agenda demonstrates political will to advance on climate financing, energy transition, adaptation, and resilience. The challenge now is to turn commitments into concrete targets, with clear deadlines and real resources. History has shown that promises without action do not feed anyone.
At FAO, we are promoting strategies that combine mitigation and adaptation, such as integrated fire management, whose Call to Action was launched at this COP under the leadership of Brazil and with the support of 50 countries.
COP30 arrives at a crucial moment to place agriculture, food, and the role of Indigenous Peoples and rural communities at the center of global discussions.
The future of food, sustainability, and global stability depends on COP30 being more than a Summit: it must be the beginning of a new era of climate action centered on agrifood systems.
Excerpt:
René Orellana Halkyer, Assistant Director-General and FAO Regional Representative for Latin America and the Caribbean
Some of you might be shocked that even though fossil fuels are 86 percent of the cause of climate change, it took 28 years before the words 'fossil fuels' could even be mentioned in the COP document. It is as absurd as Alcoholics Anonymous holding 28 years of conferences before they get the backbone to mention alcohol in an outcome document. —Kumi Naidoo, President of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty
Agroecology strengthens food sovereignty by encouraging local production and consumption. —Elizabeth Mpofu, Zimbabwean farmer
We need to protect the future of the millions of boys and girls on the frontlines of the climate crises around the world. I want world leaders to understand that this future starts now and, with urgency, position education at the core of climate resilience. —Adenike Titilope Oladosu, ecofeminist and Pan-African climate activist
COP30 is determined to build a bridge between promises and performance, words and actions, and there are multiple sticking points in the development of this bridge. In other words, it’s a 'COP of implementation.'
BELÉM, Brazil, Nov 20 2025 (IPS) - Just 30 minutes from where the UN climate negotiations are unfolding in the port city of Belém, Afro-descendant communities are engaged in a fierce struggle for the full recognition and legal titling of their ancestral territories—critical as their security and livelihoods are compromised by businesses wanting to set up contaminating landfill sites and drug cartels.
A boat ride along the expansive Amazon basin takes you inside the forest. It is the largest rainforest in the world, estimated to be 5.5 to 6.9 million square kilometers and spanning eight countries.
In the forest are the Quilombos or communities founded by descendants of Africans who escaped enslavement. They have defended their rights for generations. Across Latin America and the Caribbean, they may be known by different names, but they are all Afro-descendant communities with shared histories.
Well over 130 million people in Latin America identify as Afro-descendant, descendants of those forcibly brought to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade. In Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, and Suriname, these communities collectively hold recognized management rights to nearly 10 million hectares, or nearly 24 million acres, of land.
Açaí is harvested in an Afro-descendant community near Belém, Brazil, where COP30 is underway. Açaí is part of the daily diet and is historically known as a source of subsistence. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS
But the Amazon is the backdrop for the struggle for the full recognition and legal titling of their ancestral territories, as guaranteed by the Brazilian Constitution of 1988.
IPS spoke to Fabio Nogueira, a leader among the Menino Jesus Quilombola community home to 28 families about their struggles and successes.
“Without titles, Quilombolas are exposed to invasion and displacement from big companies, ranchers, farmers and land grabbers.”
Alarmingly, criminal gangs target the Quilombola communities and their leaders for illegal activities.
Increased surveillance and drug seizures on direct routes from Latin America to Europe have turned the Amazon into a drug corridor. In Brazil, drug traffickers use ‘rios de cocaine,’ or cocaine rivers, jeopardizing the safety of the Quilombos along the Amazon rainforest.
Major rivers and remote areas in many Quilombola territories serve as key “cocaine corridors” for drug trafficking. The lack of state presence and land titling makes these communities soft targets.
Today, the Amazon rainforest is also the scene of a fierce struggle against landfills or sites for the disposal of waste material. He says landfills in the Amazon cause significant problems, including contaminating the soil and water with heavy metals and other toxins and releasing greenhouse gases like methane.
“We are currently 15 kilometers away from the lixão de Marituba landfill and it still pollutes our air and environment. Now they want to bring a landfill only 500 meters from our community. The landfill will be 200 hectares in size. We are saying no to landfills and have a case in court,” Nogueira said.
“The Menino Jesus quilombola community is in a legal dispute. We are resisting the proposed landfill project.”
Belém is a port city and gateway to Brazil’s lower Amazon region. A 30-minute boat ride through the expansive Amazon River takes you inside the forest. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS
The project was planned without recognition of their existence or the impact it would have on them. The Public Defender’s Office of Pará has filed legal action and recommended the project’s suspension, citing that the land is public and part of the area traditionally occupied and claimed by the community for twenty years.
If the Brazilian State maintains the current pace of land regularization of quilombola territories, it will take 2,188 years to fully title the 1,802 processes currently open at the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform.
The slow pace of titling negatively affects forest preservation. Despite two studies indicating that the Quilombola play a crucial role in climate solutions, their ongoing struggle for basic recognition makes it difficult for them to secure their rights or access climate finance in formal spaces, such as COP30, according to Malungu, the coordinator of Associations of Remaining Quilombo Communities of Pará, which represents and advocates for the Quilombola communities in the state.
Two recent studies indicate that titling is a determining factor for the success of Quilombos in protecting the Amazon and titled territories maintain 91 percent of their forests, while non-titled territories preserve 76 percent.
“Alarmingly, self-declared territories that do not yet have certification (necessary for starting the titling process) had a rate of forest loss 400 percent higher than that of titled territories, highlighting the urgency of recognition to halt degradation.”
During COP30, a visit to the two Quilombos—Menino Jesus and Itaco-Miri—in the Amazon rainforest demonstrates the significance of communal land titling. It illustrates how this titling enhances the well-being of Afro-descendant peoples across the Amazon and how secure land tenure contributes to climate goals through carbon absorption, forest protection, and biodiversity preservation through traditional agriculture.
Throughout six generations, Quilombola communities stand out as caretakers and conservers of the Amazon rainforest’s biodiversity, using sustainable practices passed down through generations.
Menino Jesus and Itacoã-Miri territories and other Afro-descendant community lands ‘have high biodiversity and irrecoverable carbon and were associated with a 29 to 55 percent reduction in forest loss compared to control sites.’
Still, communities deliver better results with tenure security. Key data from Instituto Social Ambiental’s Study on Quilombo Territories in the Brazilian Amazon shows that while Quilombos face significant land tenure challenges, approximately 47 percent of mapped Quilombos lack even basic delimitation or fixing of boundaries, and over 49 percent of communities have not even passed the first step.
Along the Amazon basin, communities often live in houses facing the river. The forest is their backyard. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS
Meanwhile, they remain outstanding in their conservation performance. They have preserved nearly 92 percent of mapped Quilombo territories, including forests and native vegetation. From 1985 to 2022, these territories lost only 4.7 percent of original forest cover, compared to 17 percent loss in private areas.
But political recognition has moved much more slowly than scientific recognition. Shortly before COP30, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva visited the Afro-descendant communities of Menino Jesus and Itacoã-Miri near Belém, Pará, as part of an agenda of preparatory meetings for the COP30 climate conference.
It has taken 30 COPs for a historic breakthrough, as COP30 has included the term ‘people of African descent’ in draft negotiating texts of the UN climate convention for the first time. This inclusion is a significant step toward formally recognizing this population in global climate policy.
The term ‘people of African descent’ has been incorporated into draft documents, including those related to the Just Transition and the Gender Action Plan. This had never happened in the history of the UN climate convention system, which has often been more technical and less focused on human rights and racial justice.
The Belém Declaration on Fighting Environmental Racism is a political commitment that was joined by 19 countries at the leaders’ summit before COP30 began. The text acknowledges the disproportionate exposure of people of African descent, Indigenous Peoples, and local communities to environmental harms and climate risks.
This declaration is an international agreement that seeks to foster a global dialogue on the intersection of racial equality, climate change, and environmental justice. The declaration recognizes the global ecological and racial justice crises as intertwined and proposes cooperative actions to overcome historical inequalities affecting access to environmental resources.
Its goals include reinforcing human rights and social justice in environmental policy, broadening the scope of equality in sustainable development, and building a more equitable future for all.
Coelho Teles from the Quilombo community told IPS that he is not aware of this recognition because they have “been sidelined. We do not know how to get involved and participate in COP30.”
Brazil identified forests and oceans as twin priorities and launched the Brazil-led Tropical Forests Forever Facility at COP30, seeking to compensate countries for preserving tropical forests, with 20 percent of funds reserved for Indigenous Peoples.
Science has shown communities keep forests standing. For the Tropical Forests Forever Facility to achieve desired results, those in Quilombo territories say their recognition and participation will need to be significantly more substantial.
IPS UN Bureau Report
BELÉM, Brazil, Nov 20 2025 (IPS) - Around the world, the climate crisis is fast becoming the biggest public-health threat of the century. Extreme heat now kills more Europeans than any other natural disaster. Floods in Asia displace millions and contaminate water supplies. Mosquito-borne diseases once confined to the tropics are appearing in southern Europe and the United States.
Nowhere, however, are these impacts more visible—or the responses more instructive—than in Africa, which stands at a pivotal moment in the global climate discourse. Home to 17 percent of the world’s people yet responsible for less than four percent of global emissions, the continent is on the frontline of a crisis it did little to cause.
From the Horn of Africa to the Sahel, droughts, floods, and heatwaves are fueling outbreaks of malaria, cholera, and dengue, while undermining already fragile health systems. The climate crisis is no longer a distant environmental threat; it is a daily public health emergency.
Desta Lakew, Amref Health Africa Group Director for Partnerships & External Affairs
While the Paris Agreement implicitly recognized the importance of health in climate action, it was COP28 in Dubai that marked a watershed moment. For the first time, the world finally began to acknowledge what communities across Africa have long known: climate policy is health policy.
The UAE Declaration on Climate and Health, endorsed by more than 120 countries, acknowledged that every degree of warming worsens public health outcomes and that protecting health systems is essential to climate resilience. Africa’s negotiators were central to that breakthrough—pushing health from the margins to the main stage of climate diplomacy.
Their advocacy has paved the way for the next critical milestone: the Belém Health Action Plan, being launched at COP30 in Brazil. The plan’s pillars—disease surveillance, early-warning systems, climate-smart health infrastructure, and health equity—mirror the priorities laid out in the Common African Position on Climate and Health adopted in Lilongwe and reaffirmed in the Africa Group of Negotiators’ (AGN) Declaration, which came out of the Africa Climate Summit in Addis Ababa.
The AGN was decisive in appointing a climate and health lead coordinator to ensure that health is a key thematic stream within the group, and it is now a key component of their work. The message from Africa is clear: protecting people’s health is the clearest measure of whether climate action succeeds.
Yet the global financing system has not caught up. Less than one percent of adaptation finance targets health, even as climate-sensitive diseases multiply. Despite new pledges at COP28—$300 million from the Global Fund and $100 million from the Rockefeller Foundation—the gap is measured in the hundreds of billions. Africa alone will need roughly $300 billion annually by 2030 to build resilient systems and respond to climate-related loss and damage.
Dr. Richard Muyungi, African Group of Negotiators on Climate Change (AGN) Chair
Philanthropy is waking up—the recently formed Climate and Health Funders Coalition brings together 35 institutional and individual funders and they have just committed an initial $300 million at COP30, but structural challenges remain.
Most existing climate funds remain locked behind complex applications or arrive as loans that deepen debt in economies already under strain. That approach is not solidarity—it is self-defeat. Pandemics, heat-related mortality, and vector-borne diseases do not respect borders. A health emergency anywhere can quickly become a threat everywhere.
COP30 offers the chance to change course. The Belém Health Action Plan must not become another well-intentioned declaration—it needs financing hardwired to outcomes that save lives: clinics able to function through heatwaves and floods, vaccine cold chains powered by clean energy, and community health workers trained to respond to shifting disease patterns.
To make that happen, global donors, multilateral banks, and high-emitting nations should agree on three urgent steps. First, earmark a defined share of climate finance for health adaptation—not as an afterthought but as a performance metric in every climate-finance report; second, shift from loans to grants for health-related climate resilience to prevent compounding debt crises; third, invest in African-led solutions that the rest of the world can adopt or learn from—from Kenya’s heat-health action plans in Nairobi to Tanzania’s clean cooking agenda.
Africa’s experiences offer valuable lessons for the world. The ingenuity that kept health services running through droughts and pandemics is precisely what other countries will need as wildfires, vector migration, and heat emergencies escalate globally. The world should be studying and scaling these innovations—not waiting for crises to reach their own doorsteps.
Ultimately, if the climate crisis has taught us anything, it is that health security is climate security. What happens in Nairobi or Niamey reverberates in New York and New Delhi. COP30 must deliver ambitious and just outcomes that strengthen adaptation and protect the most vulnerable. We will consider COP30 a failure if it does not deliver an ambitious adaptation decision that resonates with Africa’s climate change impacts and realities.
Leaving Belém with promises alone would be a failure of vision and of justice. Leaving with funded commitments would signal a turning point: proof that the world finally understands that safeguarding health is not a regional concern—it is the foundation of collective resilience and of our shared future.
Desta Lakew is Amref Health Africa Group Director for Partnerships & External Affairs; Dr. Richard Muyungi is African Group of Negotiators on Climate Change (AGN) Chair
IPS UN Bureau
Excerpt:
Less than one percent of adaptation finance targets health, even as climate-sensitive diseases multiply. Africa alone will need roughly $300 billion annually by 2030 to build resilient systems and respond to climate-related loss and damage.
BELÉM, Brazil, Nov 20 2025 (IPS) - The language of agricultural sustainability changes like the seasons – from “climate-smart” to “regenerative,” “agroecological,” and “nature-positive.” Each term reflects good intentions, but the growing list risks duplication, confusion and delay.
The recent CSA Conference in Brasília gathered leaders from policy, science and finance ahead of COP30 to focus not on buzzwords but on the shared foundations of sustainable food systems, which is all the more important in the Grave New World. For all the various theories of change, many share the same principles of soil health, crop innovation, inclusive finance and resilient livestock production.
In the midst of the COP30 climate talks, consensus will depend on recognizing that climate action and protecting livelihoods must advance together. Leaders must challenge themselves to measure success not only in emissions reduced, but also in the quality of life sustained by a thriving and resilient rural economy. With Brazil’s COP presidency determined to accelerate agreements into action, the challenge now is to accept and advance context-specific approaches in pursuit of a shared goal.
At present, fragmentation continues to divide institutions, donors, NGOs and producers, with competing ideologies slowing progress toward sustainability at the speed and scale required. For example, while a vast number of organizations are currently backing the concept of regenerative agriculture, others tread the paths of sustainable intensification or climate-smart agriculture. But some of the practices, such as agroforestry, could fall under each of these concepts.
And the Koronivia Joint Work on Agriculture (KJWA), established prior to COP26, has been succeeded by Sharm el-Sheikh Joint Work on the Implementation of Climate Action on Agriculture and Food Security and yet farmers are still waiting for clear national strategies to emerge from years of workshops and working papers. While the principles underpinning these joint work programs are sound, they have not generated action at the speed needed.
On the other hand, the six CSA Conference themes – from soil health and crop innovation to finance and policy – offer a fundamental framework around which there is already much agreement and can deliver results under whichever buzzword it is categorized. The themes also reflect the priorities of Brazil’s Action Agenda and ABC+ Plan, highlighting practical areas of consensus.
Brazil’s experience offers tangible examples of how shared priorities can move from discussion to delivery. The ABC+ Plan (2020–2030) forms the backbone of the country’s low-carbon agriculture strategy, integrating sustainable practices like no-till farming, pasture recovery and biological nitrogen fixation into a coherent national framework. It represents a direct contribution to the COP30’s Action Agenda’s agricultural pillar, transforming abstract goals on soil health and productivity into measurable outcomes.
Building on this, Brazil’s RENOVAGRO is the financing arm that enables the implementation of the ABC+ Plan, demonstrating how public policy can activate private investment to move all Action Agenda ambitions forward together. By tying credit eligibility to verified adoption of low-carbon practices, the program allows farmers to commit to transitions that would otherwise be out of reach. This realizes the ABC+ Plan’s policy objectives and shows that progress depends not necessarily on new ideas, but on acting decisively on the systems that already work.
At COP30, the challenge is not to settle on the right language but to sustain the right actions – whatever this might look like according to local circumstances and resources. Progress depends on scaling what we already agree on: sound policies, accessible finance that doesn’t exclude vulnerable populations and resilient food systems that keep production within environmental limits. The next phase must prioritize implementation over invention.
Leaders have an opportunity to move from promises to performance. The task ahead is to scale what already works – not to define new concepts, but to deliver proven solutions faster.
Brazil’s example shows that integration works better than focusing on the continued search for a universal solution. There is no single path forward, only a combination of context-specific approaches bound by diplomatic agreement and sustainable financing.
By focusing on fundamentals, we can avoid the paralysis of competing definitions and begin to act collectively by applying the policies and practices we know works in ways that fit local realities.
Ana Maria Loboguerrero, Director, Adaptive and Equitable Food Systems at Gates Foundation
Dhanush Dinesh, Chief Climate Catalyst at Clim-Eat
IPS UN Bureau
PRETORIA, South Africa, Nov 20 2025 (IPS) - The end of South Africa’s G20 presidency does not mean the end of its ability or responsibility to promote the issues it prioritised during 2025. It can still advocate for action on some of these issues through its further participation in the G20 and in other international and regional forums.
In this article, I argue that going forward South Africa should prioritise the financial challenges confronting Africa that it championed in 2025.
South Africa established four overarching priorities for its G20 presidency. Two of them dealt with finance. One sought to “ensure debt sustainability for low-income countries”. The other was to mobilise finance for a just energy transition.
The importance of debt, development finance and climate to Africa’s future is clear. Over half of African countries are either in debt distress or at risk of being in distress. More than half of Africa’s population live in countries that are spending more on servicing their debt than on health and/or education.
In addition, 17 African countries experienced net debt outflows in 2023. This means that they were using more foreign exchange to pay their external creditors than they received in new debts that could be used to finance their development. The continent is also experiencing extreme weather events that are adversely affecting food security and human wellbeing.
In short, African countries are caught in a vicious cycle. The impacts of climate and their struggle to meet their debt obligations are interacting in ways that undermine their ability to meet their sustainable development goals.
South Africa’s priorities
South Africa’s priorities for its G20 presidency were ambitious. Success required meaningful action at three levels:
Awareness. South Africa would need to bring the international community to a better understanding of the nature of the debt and development finance challenges confronting African countries and of the consequences of failing to address them.
Process. South Africa would need to convince the G20 to correct the shortcomings in the Common Framework it had devised to deal with low-income countries seeking debt relief.
The examples of Zambia and Ghana showed that the Common Framework was cumbersome, slow and unduly favourable to creditors. For example, the framework requires the debtor to engage separately with each group of its creditors in a sequential process. This means that it should not negotiate with its commercial creditors until it has successfully negotiated with its official creditors.
Commercial creditors can’t give debt relief until the official creditors are satisfied with their deal and are confident that the commercial creditors will not receive more favourable treatment from the debtor than they have received.
Another complication is the IMF’s multiple roles in debt restructurings as an advisor to and a creditor of the debtor countries. In addition, it does the debt sustainability analysis that determines the amount of debt relief that all other creditors are expected to provide to the debtor country in order for it to regain debt sustainability.
The more optimistic its assessment, the smaller the contributions the various creditors, including the IMF, are expected to provide. These contributions can either be in the form of new funding or new debt terms.
Substance. The current debt restructuring process treats debt as a technical financial and legal problem rather than as the complex multifaceted problem that is experienced by debtor countries. The former perspective limits the scope of debtor-creditor negotiations to the terms of the financial contracts.
The negotiations focus on the adjustments that must be made to these terms because the debtor cannot comply with its originally accepted obligations. They treat as largely outside the scope of the discussions the adverse impact the debt situation has on the sovereign debtor’s other legal obligations and on the social, political, environmental and cultural situation in the debtor country.
This approach in effect leaves the debtor to deal with these other issues on its own. This artificial distinction between the debtors’ other legal obligations and those it owes to its creditors makes it very difficult for the debtor to escape the vicious debt, development and climate cycle in which it is trapped. It forces it to choose between its commitments to its creditors and its development obligations.
Over the course of 2025, South Africa has been very effective in raising awareness of the African debt crisis and its dire impact on African countries. South Africa persuaded the G20 finance ministers and central bank governors to issue a declaration on debt sustainability at the end of their October meeting.
The declaration is the G20’s eloquent acknowledgement of the problem and of the need for more discussion of how these debt issues are managed by both debtors and creditors. Unfortunately, it does not contain any firm G20 commitments on what it will do to remedy the situation.
There has not been substantial progress at the process and substance levels. This is unlikely to change in the remaining weeks of South Africa’s G20 presidency.
But there are three actions that South Africa can take beyond the end of its term to ensure that the African debt crisis continues receiving attention.
Three actions
First, it should ask a group like the African Expert Panel that it established to advise the president to prepare a technical report that identifies and analyses all the barriers to Africa accessing affordable, sustainable and predictable flows of external development finance.
This report should be submitted to the South African president in the first half of 2026. Next year, South Africa will still be a member of the G20 Troika, which consists of the current, immediate past and the incoming G20 presidents.
Consequently, next year, it will still be able to table the report at the G20. South Africa can also use the report to promote action in other appropriate regional and global forums.
Second, South Africa and the African Union should create an African Borrower’s Club that is independent of the G20. This club should be a forum in which African sovereign debtors can share information and lessons learned about negotiating sovereign debt transactions and about responsible debt management. When appropriate, the club can work with regional African financial institutions.
The club, working with regional organisations like the African Legal Support Facility, can also sponsor workshops in which interested African sovereign debtors can share information and more critically assess their financing options. They can also work to improve their bargaining capacity in sovereign debt transactions.
The African Borrower’s Club should also be mandated to establish an African Sovereign Debt Roundtable that is modelled on the Global Sovereign Debt Roundtable. This entity should be an informal forum, based on the Chatham House Rule in which the various categories of stakeholders in African debt can meet to discuss the design of a sovereign debt restructuring process that is effective, efficient and fair and that adopts an holistic approach to a sovereign debt crisis.
Third, South Africa should capitalise on the fact that the impacts of climate, inequality, unemployment and poverty on Africa’s development prospects are now acknowledged to be macro-critical, and so within the IMF’s macro-economic and financial mandate. South Africa should call for a review of the IMF’s operating principles and practices and its governance arrangements.
This call should note that the multilateral development banks have been the object of G20 review for a number of years and that this has resulted in important enhancements in their capital frameworks and operating practices.
On the other hand, the IMF has not been subject to a similar review despite the fact that its operations have had to undergo possibility even more extensive revisions.
Daniel D. Bradlow is Professor/Senior Research Fellow, Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria.
IPS UN Bureau
BELÉM, Brazil, Nov 20 2025 (IPS) - The heat in the Hangar Convention Center of the Amazonia, in the northeastern Brazilian city of Belém, has reached the negotiation rooms of the climate summit. Over the past 72 hours, one of the most delicate and significant discussions of this climate meeting has been taking place: the path to progressively abandon the production and use of coal, gas, and oil.
In recent hours, a global coalition of rich and developing countries, led by Colombia, has doubled down on pushing for a fossil fuel phase-out roadmap, while major producer countries resist it.
“The plan must have differentiated commitments, the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies, and the reform of the international financial system, because foreign debt payments are punishing us,” Colombian Environment Minister Irene Vélez explained to IPS.
For the official, the 30th United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP30) on climate change must result in a roadmap. “People are mobilizing, demanding climate action; we have to start now,” she urged.
In Belém, the gateway to the planet’s largest rainforest, it is no longer just about reducing emissions but about transforming the foundation of the energy system, thus acquiring a moral, political, and scientific urgency. What was initially meant to be the “Amazon COP” has mutated into the “end-of-the-fossil-era-COP,” but the roadmap to achieve it is a toss-up.“The plan must have differentiated commitments, the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies, and the reform of the international financial system, because external debt payments are punishing us” –Irene Vélez.
Two years after the world agreed at COP28, held in 2023 in Dubai, to move away from fossil fuels, Belém is the moment of truth, upon which the effort to keep global warming below the 1.5° Celsius limit largely depends—a goal considered vital to avoid devastating and inevitable effects on ecosystems and human life.
Thus, the discussion among the 197 parties to the United Nations climate convention has shifted from the “what” to the “how,” and especially to the “when,” questions that have turned potential coordinates into a geopolitical labyrinth.
In that vein, a coalition of over 80 countries emerged on Tuesday the 18th to push the roadmap, including Colombia, Chile, Guatemala, and Panama among the Latin American countries.
One challenge for the roadmap advocates is that the issue is not explicitly part of the main agenda, a resource that the Brazilian presidency of COP30 could use to shirk responsibility on the matter.
The issue appears on the thematic menu of COP30, which started on the 10th and is scheduled to conclude on the 21st, and whose official objectives include approving the Global Goal on Adaptation to climate change and securing sufficient funds for that adaptation.
Approximately 40,000 people are attending this climate summit, including government representatives, multilateral agencies, academia, and civil society organizations.
An unprecedented indigenous presence is also in attendance, with about 900 delegates from native peoples, drawn by the ancestral call of the Amazon, a symbol of the menu of solutions to the climate catastrophe and simultaneously a victim of its causes.
Also present and very active in Belém are about 1,600 lobbyists from the hydrocarbon industry, 12% more than at the 2024 COP, according to the international coalition Kick Big Polluters Out.
The clamor from civil society demands an institutional structure with governance, clear criteria, measurable objectives, and justice mechanisms.
“The roadmap has become a difficult issue to ignore; it is already at the center of these negotiations, and no country can ignore it. The breadth of support is surprising, with rich and poor countries, producers and non-producers, indicating that an agreement is about to fall,” Antonio Hill, Just Transitions advisor for the non-governmental and international Natural Resource Governance Institute, told IPS.
Activists protest on Wednesday the 19th against fossil fuel exploitation at the entrance to the venue of the Belém climate summit, in the Amazonian northeast of Brazil. Credit: Emilio Godoy / IPS
Poisoned
The push for the roadmap comes from the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, promoted by civil society organizations, strongly adopted by Colombia, and which so far has the support of 18 nations, but no hydrocarbon-producing Latin American country, such as Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, or Venezuela.
Colombia, despite also being a producer and exporter of fossil fuels, has presented its Roadmap for a Just Energy Transition, with which it seeks to replace income from coal and oil with investments in tourism and renewable energy.
Colombia’s 2022-2052 National Energy Plan projects long-term reductions in fossil fuel production. The country announced US$14.5 billion for the energy transition to less polluting forms of energy production.
But for the rest of the region, the duality between maintaining fossil fuels and promoting renewable energies persists.
A prime example of this duality is the COP30 host country itself, Brazil. While the host President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and his Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Marina Silva, have insisted on the need to abandon fossil fuels, the government is promoting expansive oil and gas extraction plans.
In fact, just weeks before the opening of COP30, the state-owned oil group Petrobras received a permit for oil exploration in the Atlantic, just kilometers from the mouth of the Amazon River.
But Lula and his team committed that this summit in the heart of the Amazon would be “the COP of truth” and “the COP of implementation,” and the issue of fossil fuels has become central to the negotiations, which Lula joined on Wednesday the 19th to give a push to the talks and the outcomes.
In their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)—the set of mitigation and adaptation policies countries must present to comply with the Paris Agreement on climate change signed in 2015 at COP21—Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, or Chile avoid mentioning a managed phase-out of fossil fuels.
Simply put, they argue they cannot let go of the old vine before grasping the new one. This stance also involves a delicate aspect, as nations like Ecuador depend on revenues from hydrocarbon exploitation.
Therefore, the Global South has insisted on its demand for funding from rich nations, due to their contribution to the climate disaster through fossil fuel exploitation since the 17th century.
The result of the presented policies is alarming: although many countries have increased their emission reduction targets on paper, they lack details on phasing out production. The only existing roadmap is the growing extractive one.
In fact, the Global Stocktake of the Paris Agreement process, originating from COP28, demanded that countries take measures to move towards a fossil-free era.
The argument is unequivocal: various estimates indicate that fossil fuels contribute 86% of greenhouse gas emissions, the cause of global warming.
But a key point is where to start. For Uitoto indigenous leader Fanny Kuiru Castro, the new general coordinator of the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin –which brings together the more than 350 native peoples of the eight countries sharing the biome–, the starting point must precisely be at-risk regions like the Amazon.
“It is a priority. If there isn’t a clear signal that we must proceed gradually, it means the summit has failed and does not want to adopt that commitment. We will have another 30 years of speeches,” she told IPS, alluding to that number of summits without substantial results.
In the Amazon, oil blocks threaten 31 million hectares or 12% of the total area, mining threatens 9.8 million, and timber concessions threaten 2.4 million.
And in that direction, a major obstacle arises: how to finance the phase-out. The roadmap has a direct link to the financial goals aimed at the Global South, with a demand for US$1.2 trillion in funding for climate action starting in 2035.
“Can the COP deliver the financial backing that countries need to reinvent their economies in time to guarantee just and inclusive development?” Hill questioned.
The atmosphere in Belém is of a different urgency compared to Dubai or Baku, where COP29 was held a year ago. The roadmap to a world free of fossil fuel smoke remains a blurry map, drawn freehand on ground that is heating up far too quickly.
In Belém, humanity is deciding whether to brake gradually or to accelerate, with the air conditioning on and a full tank.
BELÉM, Brazil, Nov 19 2025 (IPS) - At a Conference of the Parties, where science intersects with politics, reaching agreements is often a tricky business. What is inside the last-minute negotiations as the COP presidency tries to get the parties to agreement at the final plenary?
COP negotiators are diplomats and government officials who meet at the Conference of the Parties to negotiate and agree on how to address climate change. They are also often joined by COP delegates’ representatives from civil society, social movements and businesses.
As representatives of their respective countries that are parties to the UNFCCC treaty, they discuss, debate, and haggle over their preferred wording of texts and legally binding agreements regarding how to address climate change during closed-door sessions.
Windowless Closed-Door Meetings
These closed-door meetings are often also windowless, and negotiators often lose track of time as they work through extensive documentation and diverse national positions to form a final agreement towards the end of the COP summit schedule.
COP 30, Belém, is posting a daily photographic glimpse into the collective effort to build trust, dialogue, and cooperation to accelerate meaningful climate action and deliver its benefits to all. Many hope this message will permeate inside these rooms.
The UN climate summit has now entered its final stages. The Brazilian COP30 Presidency has extended working hours, scheduling late-night meetings for the last two nights—Monday and Tuesday, Nov 17 and 18, 2025.
Tonight might not be any different, as the COP30 Presidency pushes for a rapid compromise and conclusion of a significant part of negotiations to pave the way for a “plenary to gavel the Belém political package.”
After all, the COP is where the science of the Paris Agreement intersects with politics.
The Elusive True Mutirão
The COP30 Presidency is urging all “negotiators to join in a true mutirão—a collective mobilization of minds, hearts, and hands,” saying this approach helps “accelerate the pace, bridge divides, and focus not on what separates us, but on what unites us in purpose and humanity.”
But this is the point in the negotiations, even in a ‘COP of truth,’ as COP30 was staged to be, where the real claws come out amid accusations of protectionism, trade tensions and geopolitical dynamics as the worlds of business, politics and human survival intersect.
Even as UN officials urge parties to accelerate the pace, warning that “tactical delays and procedural obstructions are no longer tenable” and that deferring challenging issues to overtime results in collective loss, reconciling deep differences among nations is proving easier said than done even within the Global Mutirão—a concept championed by the COP30 presidency.
It calls for worldwide collective action on climate change, inspired by the Brazilian and Indigenous Tupi-Guarani tradition of mutirão, which means “collective effort.” The bone of contention at this juncture is what some parties see as weak climate commitments, insufficient financial pledges from the global North to South, and trade measures.
Protectionism
Trade measures are turning contentious and deeply debatable in Belém because of a difference of perspective—developing countries view them as protectionism, while some developed countries see them as necessary to level the playing field for their climate policies.
For developing countries, protectionism is a deliberate strategy by more developed countries to limit imports to protect their industries from foreign competition and therefore give them an undue advantage. Developing nations say this is unfair because it restricts their ability to export and gain access to larger markets.
The core of the debate at COP30 is the inclusion of issues like the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) in climate talks. For some countries, CBAM is a direct part of climate action and belongs at COP. Others say it is an agenda best discussed at the World Trade Organization.
The EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is a tool to put a price on the carbon emissions of certain imported goods, ensuring that the carbon price for imports is equivalent to that for domestic EU production. Its main goals are to prevent “carbon leakage,” or companies moving production to countries with weaker climate policies, encourage cleaner production globally, and protect EU businesses by creating a level playing field.
How to Go About a Just Transition?
The business of climate change is not the only thing that is complex and divisive. There are also small island states calling for rapid emissions cuts vis-à-vis the positions of major emerging economies. G77 and China are an intergovernmental coalition of 134 developing countries that work together to promote their collective economic and developmental interests within the United Nations framework.
China is not an official member and does not pay dues. It has been a partner since 1976, providing significant financial support and political backing to the G77. Developed countries such as the UK, Norway, Japan, and Australia are pushing back against their proposed global just transition, thereby prolonging the negotiations.
Developed nations are refusing the global just transition proposal by the G77 and China because they see it as a new and unnecessary mechanism and a duplication of existing structures. They refuse to accept the financial and technical support these countries are asking for to facilitate this transition. Simply put, they want a less strict framework that allows their own interpretations of existing institutions and funding structures for the just transition.
Where is the Adaptation Financing?
Finance for adaptation is similarly a sticking point. Developed nations are dragging their feet around committing sufficient funds to support developing nations to adapt to climate impacts and transition their energy systems. It is still not clear whether financial commitments will be embedded inside adaptation goals or remain as they are—separate.
Lobbyists and the Fossil Fuel Debate
Amidst growing tensions, it is also not clear whether this COP will phase out or phase down fossil fuels in the final agreement. The large delegation of fossil fuel lobbyists suggests it is too early to call. On the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), those who want indicators for measuring adaptation progress directly linked to financial commitments will not budge. The settlement of this matter could potentially take two years (or more).
Disagreements are ongoing about the mandate of the Mitigation Work Program, which seeks to raise ambitions on national emissions reduction. In general, insiders to the negotiations are saying general negotiation tactics are at play.
Some participants are employing delay tactics to buy time and ultimately weasel out of certain commitments; a lack of trust continues, as it has in previous COPs, along with generally slow progress on building consensus around various contentious issues.
This feature is published with the support of Open Society Foundations.
IPS UN Bureau Report
Excerpt:
The COP30 Presidency is urging all “negotiators to join in a true mutirão—a collective mobilization of minds, hearts, and hands,” saying this approach helps “accelerate the pace, bridge divides, and focus not on what separates us, but on what unites us in purpose and humanity.”