Belém, Heat and Hope: Walking the Tightrope of an “Implementation COP”
The air in Belém was thick with river humidity and expectation. Vendors at the Ver‑o‑Peso market folded baskets of açaí and tucupi into neatly stacked pyramids, while colleagues from delegations huddled under the shade of mangrove trees, comparing notes and scanning the list of plenary sessions. For months this city in the Brazilian Amazon had been promised a rare thing: a COP that would move from speech to action.
“We called this the implementation COP,” a Brazilian minister told me on the steps of the conference centre, palms wiping the sweat from his brow. “The work was supposed to be not about signing more declarations, but doing what was already promised.”
That promise—the one stitched into the Paris Agreement in 2015 and amended, reiterated and amplified across subsequent COPs—has a simple, brutal logic: cut greenhouse gas emissions fast enough to keep global heating near 1.5°C. In diplomatic language it’s mitigation; in everyday language it’s the future of harvests, coasts, and lives. Yet delivering mitigation is a system-shaking task. It demands reworking power grids, overhauling transport, retraining workforces and reengineering economies. And anywhere people depend on oil money, the disruption is not theoretical—it’s existential.
From Dubai to Belém: Momentum Meets Resistance
At COP28, delegates celebrated a landmark commitment to start a managed transition away from fossil fuels. The headline felt like progress. But momentum is not destiny. In the months that followed, signals of backsliding appeared: a lukewarm follow‑up at the next COP, and then in Belém the blow-by-blow of negotiations revealed an old faultline—wealthier nations pressuring for a roadmap to phase out fossil fuels while oil-producing blocs and some large economies insisted their energy futures could not be boxed in.
“You can’t ask us to shut the tap when you haven’t minded the well,” a delegate from an oil-producing country told me bluntly. “We have citizens to feed, schools to run, hospitals to maintain.”
On the other side of the table, representatives of small island states and least-developed countries spoke with a different kind of urgency. “We are losing homes, not promises,” said a health worker from a coastal community in West Africa. “People tell our children climate change is future tense. We know it’s now.”
Money on the Table—or Not
For many of the delegates from the Global South the conversation in Belém never started with fossil fuels. It began with finance: the bruising politics of who pays for the damage and how quickly the money moves. The Loss and Damage Fund, long campaigned for and finally agreed, remains a promise until cheques exchange hands. Wealthier nations have historically failed to meet the €100 billion climate finance pledge they agreed to years ago; even where climate finance flows, it is often in loans, not grants, deepening indebtedness.
“We were not willing to agree to tighter fossil fuel commitments while our hospitals, mangroves, and farmers go under,” said an African climate negotiator. “If implementation means painful change, then the Global North has to make sure countries can adapt and recover.”
Numbers offer a clearer view. Delegates in Belém kept returning to a few stark figures: the long-promised €100 billion annual goal is often cited as a benchmark, yet independent analyses show that delivered amounts have been inconsistent and frequently fall short of needs; adaptation finance needs alone are projected to run into the tens to hundreds of billions per year, depending on the methodology. And a line in the sand—$300 million a year—became shorthand in many closed-door sessions for an initial, symbolic flow to the Loss and Damage Fund, insufficient in scale but politically significant if unlocked.
Local Voices, Global Stakes
Walk outside the negotiating halls and the story is tactile. A fisherwoman on the shores of Belém laughed nervously when I asked whether she trusted the diplomats. “They speak like priests,” she said. “They pronounce, but they don’t plant.” Behind her the Guamá River carried dead leaves and plastic bottles; a child waded ankle-deep, tossing a stick. The contrast was immediate—the ornate conference rooms where delegations argued about carbon accounting versus the riverbanks where people already live at climate’s blunt edge.
Indigenous leaders, too, were present in force—many of them skeptical but not silent. “Our forests are not a bargaining chip,” said an elder speaking through an interpreter. “You cannot speak of implementation while corporations plan to dig through our bones.” These words landed in a cavernous plenary hall and circulated in newsfeeds—an echo of climate justice claims that have driven activism for decades.
How the Negotiations Unraveled—and Why It Matters
Negotiations in Belém ended not with a triumphant roadmap but with an uneasy compromise that left many delegates frustrated. An attempt led by a coalition of countries—85 strong, including multiple EU members and Latin American states—to enshrine a “roadmap for transitioning away from fossil fuels” into the final text was blocked. The opposing camp, anchored by oil-producing states and backed by geopolitical heavyweights, insisted on language that allowed for energy sovereignty and gradual transitions.
“We are not anti-transition,” a spokesperson for one of the oil-producing delegations said. “We are pro-fairness. Tell me when the finance is here and I’ll agree to the timetable.”
So what did Belém deliver? For some it reiterated the perennial truth of climate diplomacy: that moral clarity collides with political power. For others it underscored a more practical reality—without guarantees of finance for adaptation and loss and damage, calls for rapid fossil fuel phaseouts are unlikely to be accepted by those who fear economic collapse.
What If the World Keeps Waiting?
Ask yourself this: if promises to the most vulnerable remain unpaid while the extraction of fossil fuels continues, who bears the burden? The question is not rhetorical. It goes to the heart of global inequality and the architecture of international cooperation.
Every COP becomes a mirror of broader geopolitics—trade shifts, energy security anxieties, electoral cycles and the rise of populism. Belém reflected those currents. It also showed that implementation cannot be a mantra uttered by ministers in air‑conditioned rooms; it must be built into budgets, industrial strategies and the livelihoods of the people living at the margins.
- €100 billion: the long-promised annual climate finance target from wealthy nations (delivery to date remains contested and incomplete).
- Loss and Damage Fund: established in recent years but starved of the consistent, scaled finance that would make it functional for many recipients.
- Adaptation finance needs: estimated in the tens to hundreds of billions annually by various analyses—far exceeding current flows.
Belém’s Aftertaste: A Call for a New Politics of Trust
On my last night in Belém I walked the waterfront as markets closed and kids chased each other under sodium lamps. A youth activist I’d met at a march watched a barge drift by and said, “We will keep pushing—but we need partners, not lectures. Show us the money, show us the jobs, and then tell us how to change.”
Climate policy without finance is like a recipe without ingredients. Belém asked the world to choose: continue with polite, incremental steps that placate interests and paper over inequity, or create a new politics—one that pairs the hard talk on fossil fuels with an equally hard commitment to pay, to retrain, and to protect the people already losing everything.
Will the next COP square that circle? Will wealthy nations finally convert pledges into bank transfers that communities can use immediately? Or will the tug of geopolitics keep the world on the same slow, dangerous path?
Belém didn’t resolve these questions. But it made them unavoidably clear. The city’s humid air, ever-present river and voices from the street made the stakes impossible to ignore: implementation is not just a policy objective. It’s a test of whether the global community can match its words with the concrete support that will decide which futures are possible—and for whom.
