Belém in the heat: a river city hosting the planet’s fever
Stepping off the plane in Belém, the capital of Brazil’s Pará state, feels like walking into a warm, humid embrace. The Amazonian air wraps itself around you — thick with the smell of river mud, grilled fish, and açaí — while street vendors call out in a chorus that has sustained generations. This week, that same city has become the world’s uneasy living room: leaders, negotiators, activists and scientists milling together at COP30 as new data lands like a thunderclap from the World Meteorological Organization.
The message is stark: 2025 is shaping up to be one of the hottest years on record, part of an “unprecedented streak” in global temperatures. From January to August, global average surface temperatures sat about 1.42°C above pre-industrial levels — a hair cooler than the historic spike of 1.55°C recorded in 2024, but still well into the danger zone of systemic change.
Numbers that won’t warm anyone’s heart
Behind the numbers are weather systems and economies in upheaval. The WMO’s analysis makes clear that the years from 2015 through 2025 are the 11 warmest in recorded history, and the last three years alone are the hottest trio yet in 176 years of observations. Ocean heat — the slow, relentless battery of warming that feeds storms and bleaches reefs — continued to climb in 2025, eclipsing levels seen in 2024.
Sea levels, too, tell a worrying story: long-term rates of rise have doubled, and 2024 registered a new record for annual global average sea level. While 2025 shows a slight dip, scientists caution that this is likely temporary behavior superimposed on a long-term trend.
Key climate facts in full
- Jan–Aug 2025 global surface temperature: +1.42°C vs pre-industrial
- 2024 record high: +1.55°C
- 2015–2025: the 11 warmest years on record
- Ocean heat continued to rise in 2025 above 2024 records
- Atmospheric concentrations of CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide were at record highs in 2024 and are expected to be higher in 2025 at many measurement sites
- Global investment in clean energy (2024): roughly $2 trillion — about $800 billion more than was invested in fossil fuels that year
Voices from the summit and the market
On the summit stage, officials speak in urgent tones. “We are sailing into uncharted waters,” a WMO climate scientist I met in Belém told me. “Even if El Niño — which amplified temperatures in 2023 and 2024 — has weakened to neutral, the underlying warming caused by fossil fuel combustion and land-use change keeps driving us upward.”
At Ver-o-Peso market, a vendor named Marisa — who sells smoked tambaqui and spoons of feverishly purple açaí — says the changes are visible in everyday life. “Our rivers are behaving differently,” she said, wiping her palms on her apron. “The rains come heavy, the fish move; my brother says the seasons don’t know their names anymore.”
A delegate from a small island state, whose country faces biopsy-thin coastlines and rising tides, leaned in during a panel and said simply: “Every millimeter of sea level rise is a threat to our school, our cemetery, our memory.”
Politics, money and the illusion of easy answers
The political theater in Belém is as charged as the air. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, hosting the event, has launched an ambitious Tropical Forest Forever Facility — a proposed finance vehicle intended to attract up to $125 billion in long-term investment to protect the world’s forests, with a $10 billion startup pot still seeking backers. It’s the kind of headline-grabbing move that shows both the potential and the limits of summit diplomacy: big promises, harder follow-through.
“Forests are worth more standing than cut down,” a policy advisor in Lula’s office told me, speaking of the logic behind treating standing trees as part of a nation’s wealth. “But turning that into cash flow — for communities, for conservation — requires political courage and creative finance.”
That courage is what United Nations voices are pleading for. “Each fraction of a degree matters,” a senior UN climate adviser said during a session. “Every year we spend above 1.5°C risks irreversible losses to ecosystems and human wellbeing. The difference between 1.5 and 2°C will be measured in lives and livelihoods.”
Money is shifting, but power still resists
There are reasons for guarded optimism. In 2024, investors poured roughly $2 trillion into clean energy — solar and wind are now the cheapest sources of power in many regions. Yet fossil fuels continue to enjoy sizable subsidies and entrenched political influence. “Clean energy is winning on price and potential, but political systems remain hooked on old revenues,” an energy economist told me in a corridor interview, running his hand through his hair.
He added, “The blocking is not technical; it’s structural. Corporations, some state policies, and legacies of trade and power are the hard part.”
On the ground: adaptation, loss and the ethics of response
Out beyond the conference center, in communities along the Amazon’s braided channels, people are already adapting in practical, sometimes heartbreaking ways. A fisherman named João showed me a rusted outboard motor he’d replaced three times in five years because flood patterns now wash it away. “We laugh, but it’s a bitter laugh,” he said. “My grandmother taught me to read the river like a book. Now the pages are torn.”
Policy debates in Belém will address mitigation — slashing greenhouse gas emissions toward ‘net zero’ — and adaptation, which involves expensive infrastructure, relocation, and social programs. But there’s a third dimension that rarely makes budget lines: justice. Who pays when a coastal community loses its home? Who profits when a corporate lobby delays a transition?
“Net zero is the only solution we have to halt the worst,” said an environmental campaigner from West Africa. “But net zero without justice becomes a new form of colonialism — where the poor pay to offset the emissions of the rich.”
Where do we go from here?
Walking back through Belém’s lanes, past stalls of manioc and tapioca and the echo of far-off drums, I kept thinking about choice. The science says a temporary overshoot of 1.5°C is now almost unavoidable without dramatic, immediate reductions — but it also says we can still bring temperatures back down by the end of the century if the world moves decisively.
So what will leaders choose? Short-term electoral gain or long-term survival? Subsidies for old industries or investments in communities and clean tech? A fund that protects forests — fully capitalized and governed with accountability — or lip service and spreadsheets?
Belém is a reminder that climate policy is not an abstract debate in distant capitals: it is a question of whether our children will remember the taste of river fish and the shade of standing trees. It is also a measure of our moral imagination.
As the mercury climbs and negotiators hunker down, the real test will be whether words on stage turn into laws, money into measured support, and guilt into action. Will this COP30 be remembered as the place where the world finally acted with the urgency science has long demanded — or as another chapter in the slow erasure of planetary commons?
Look around. The markets, the mangroves, the rivers — they are keeping score.
