COP30: The tragedy of climate inaction

Is the habitability of the Earth still a concern for the world's leaders? The extinction of species, the increasing number of devastating wildfires, the deadly floods, the unbearable heat, and the relentless drought we are experiencing are, however, only a foretaste of the future. Climate change has begun. It is irreversible. The challenge now is to adapt to it. This reality and preventing further damage. Behind the figures and acronyms of the climate fight, people are being torn from their lands, deadly disasters are multiplying… Humanity is on the brink of disastrous consequences if we do not change anything.

Just days before the opening of COP30 in Brazil , and as we prepare to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Paris Agreement , major political leaders continue to look the other way, contenting themselves with ineffective, empty pronouncements, when they haven't succumbed to the most blatant climate skepticism. In December 2015, the world applauded this historic agreement sealed in the French capital, despite all its limitations and shortcomings, restoring a clear conscience to capitalism without imposing any sanctions mechanism. The result today is appalling.

The world's leading economic power has consigned it to oblivion, its president preferring to "drill indiscriminately" and declaring, at the end of September before the UN General Assembly, that climate change was "the greatest scam ever perpetrated against the world." With some truly compelling arguments. "They said global warming was going to kill the world... But then it started getting colder," Donald Trump pointed out. Fossil fuel and polluting industry lobbyists couldn't have dreamed of a more zealous ambassador. Yet, the facts, the science, demonstrate a very different scenario. Last June, 61 scientists from 17 different countries asserted that exceeding the 1.5°C threshold was now inevitable , definitively shattering any hope of respecting the first target set by the Paris Agreement.

COP30, opening on November 10 in Belém , in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, will be a moment of truth. And the preliminary negotiations held in Bonn last June do not bode well, given the highly tense geopolitical context. There was virtually no discussion of taxing polluting companies, debt cancellation, or reforming the global financial system. This suggests that the summit is not very promising and that the UN negotiations will be arduous. Hope may instead lie with the People's Summit, which will meet on the sidelines of COP30.

From the Amazon to working-class neighborhoods, from landless Brazilian peasants to union members fighting for a just transition, civil society around the world will unite to voice a single demand: climate and social justice. All, in the diversity of their cultures, are convinced that the same exploitative systems are exhausting both the land and its workers, and that the struggle for the planet cannot be separated from the struggle for human dignity. Climate change is not an accident of history. It is the direct product of a capitalist model based on endless growth, the capture and privatization of resources, and widespread competition. More than on unambitious diplomatic summits, the future of the planet hinges on the mobilization of the people themselves. The ecological emergency has become a democratic emergency. We will not save the planet with the rules of those who are destroying it.