Belém Awakes: A River City at the Center of a Planet on Fire
There is a heat here that announces itself before anything else—a humid, floral temperature that hits you when you step off the plane and into Belém’s river-breeze. Boats drift lazily on the brown water of the Guajará Bay, vendors call out in the sun-baked aisles of Ver-o-Peso market, and the Estação das Docas, where the conference buzz is thickest, is bedecked with a smiling COP30 mascot that tourists queue to photograph.
But beneath the color and the açaí stands, there is an urgency that cuts through the carnival atmosphere. The leaders’ summit wrapped days ago, and now negotiators gather for two intense weeks of talks that may determine whether the Paris Agreement remains a living framework or a letter of good intent. The message coming from Belém is blunt: climate co‑operation must be more than rhetoric.
The Three Tests Facing Negotiators
Simon Stiell, the UN Climate Change Executive Secretary, framed the task simply: the talks must show that nations are “fully on board” and acting together. He set out three interlocking goals negotiators need to meet.
- Agree strong outcomes across the board so that global cooperation is visible and credible.
- Move faster to implement the climate pledges already made—across energy, transport, agriculture and industry.
- Make climate action real in people’s lives—linking it to jobs, health, cleaner air and affordable, secure energy.
“We must show up for each other,” Stiell told delegates in the shadow of palm trees and shipping containers. “If the world’s nations don’t coordinate, the gap between what we promise and what we do will keep widening.”
From Political Declarations to Tangible Action
The leaders’ summit that preceded the talks brimmed with rhetoric about solidarity—a chorus, in many ways, responding to past years of fractured U.S. climate policy and the jarring reality of climate denial. António Guterres, the UN Secretary‑General, delivered one of the more urgent refrains: global temperatures are poised to cross the 1.5°C threshold temporarily in the early 2030s unless the world changes course immediately.
“One year above 1.5 degrees,” he warned, “is not a statistic; it is a sentence—written in droughts, in reefs gone, in villages under water.” The moral framing was deliberate: protecting a livable planet is not a geopolitical nicety, the secretary‑general insisted, it is an imperative tied to survival and dignity.
The Weather Isn’t Waiting
Outside the conference halls, evidence of that “sentence” is stacked in headlines and in the lives of people across the tropics. From Hurricane Melissa’s strikes on the Caribbean to super-typhoons flattening coastal communities in Vietnam and the Philippines, and a tornado that ripped into southern Brazil, the echoes of extreme weather are global and immediate.
Weather agencies warn that 2025 is set to be among the warmest years on record. The World Meteorological Organization reported that 2025 could be the second or third warmest year, and climatologists remind us that each of the 10 hottest years ever recorded has occurred in the past decade.
“You come to a place like Belém and you can see the climate story in people’s faces,” said Dr. Maria Oliveira, a Brazilian climatologist who spent her childhood near the Amazon’s tributaries. “It isn’t abstract. It’s floods that ruin crops, heat that makes work impossible, and storms that force people to move.”
Forests at the Top of the Agenda
For the first time in three decades of COP meetings, tropical forests—the planet’s lungs—are not an afterthought. Brazil’s President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has pushed hard to make forests central to the conversation. He announced a plan, the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, to marshal an initial $25 billion from governments with the aim of leveraging another $100 billion from financial markets.
“If standing forest is worth more than cleared land,” Lula said, “we will have changed the math that drives deforestation.” The facility’s ambition is to make conservation economically preferable to conversion—so an acre of Amazon rainforest is permanently more valuable standing than as farmland.
That simple equation is powerful. Norway, a wealthy nation that paradoxically also benefits from oil revenues, pledged $3 billion over ten years to the fund—an infusion that rode the headlines here. China said it would participate though it offered no immediate figure; France and Germany signalled possible support, while some countries, including the UK, held back.
“This is not charity,” said Ana Tavares, an indigenous leader from Pará, her voice threaded with weary hope. “This is reparation—because our forests were never just trees. They are our medicine, our river, our future.”
Money, Trust and the Politics of Fairness
Money—or the lack of it—has always been the hard part of climate negotiations. Developing nations have long accused richer, industrialised countries of failing to deliver promised climate finance. The “Call of Belém for Climate,” produced at the end of the leaders’ summit, urged the restoration of trust and collective mobilisation. Negotiators will spend much of the coming days arguing over how much, how fast, and under what conditions aid should flow.
“Finance is the bridge between promise and action,” said Dr. Kwame Mensah, an economist with a climate finance institute. “If trust erodes, so does cooperation. This isn’t just numbers on a page—this is livelihoods, adaptation and the ability to plan.”
Expectations are high, and so is scepticism. Many delegates argue that climate action must be fairer and more inclusive—particularly in ways that protect indigenous rights and local livelihoods. That, too, will test the negotiators’ ability to stitch policy to real-world justice.
Leaving Belém: A Question for the World
As the sun sets over the docks and the carnival colors dim, the questions remain stubborn: can nations translate bold language at summits into immediate, equitable, and durable action? Can tropical forests be treated as assets in a reimagined global economy rather than as resources to be extracted? And can the people most affected—indigenous communities, small farmers, coastal towns—have their voices turned into protections rather than footnotes?
Standing on the riverwalk, an old fisherman named José watches barges slip by and talks about changes in the tide and in the fish. “My grandfather taught me to read the river,” he says. “Now the river reads us. We must learn to listen.”
Will the negotiators in Belém listen? Will they build the bridges of finance, justice, and implementation that Stiell, Guterres, Lula, and others call for? The answers will shape whether we keep the 1.5°C red line as a threshold of hope or allow it to slide into history—one warm year at a time.
What will you do when your leaders return home with promises from Belém—will they be enough? The planet is waiting for the answer.
