💭 Final COP thoughts

COP30, the United Nations Climate Conference hosted by Brazil in the Amazonian city of Belém, began with fervent expectations but ended rather lukewarm.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government knew that just hosting the conference would be an immense challenge. But he argued that the world needs to experience the Amazon firsthand if it wants to conduct a well-informed climate negotiation. This, Lula said, was not going to be the COP of Luxury, but rather the COP of Truth.

While COP30 was certainly not a “FLOP,” as Brazilians opposed to the Lula government gleefully posted on social media, it did leave environmentalists and the scientific community with legitimate frustration. As negotiators left Belém with lukewarm achievements, our planet just keeps getting hotter.

To unpack the final tally of COP30, this week’s episode of Explaining Brazil welcomes climate scientist Carlos Nobre, who presided over the Planetary Science Pavilion and is just back from two long weeks of work at the conference. 

Nobre is one of the world’s leading climatologists, a researcher at the University of São Paulo, co-chair of the Science Panel for the Amazon, and a member of academies such as the World Academy of Sciences. 

He co-authored the research that earned the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 and was also responsible for creating some of Brazil’s main government climate centers, as well as the Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in the Amazon.

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