COP30 opens in Amazon amid pressure on forests, finance, adaptation

World leaders, negotiators, and civil society groups are arriving in Belém, Brazil — on the edge of the Amazon River — for the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP30, the first climate summit ever held in the world’s largest rainforest. The location is not just symbolic. Brazil is using its role as host to argue that falling deforestation, a mostly renewable electricity mix, and a new forest finance proposal give it credibility to push for a summit focused on delivery rather than new slogans. But the success of this COP will not hinge on Brazil alone. In a Devex Pro Briefing Thursday, Marcene Mitchell, senior vice president for climate change at WWF, and Karen Silverwood-Cope, climate policy director at World Resources Institute Brasil, said progress will be judged by whether countries can turn long-standing commitments into action — scaling up finance and reflecting that in their national climate plans, landing agreement on a forest finance facility, beginning to reckon with fossil fuels and subsidies, and finalizing a way to measure adaptation. They said Brazil’s presidency can help set the tone, but delivery will ultimately depend on whether countries are willing to close the gap between promises and implementation. Brazil’s credibility and contradictions Silverwood-Cope said Brazil enters COP30 with “a lot of credibility” — pointing to falling deforestation in Brazil since President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office, declining greenhouse gas emissions, and the fact that around 88% of its electricity comes from renewable sources. She said Brazil has also tried to “put climate in the fabric of multilateralism,” using its presidencies of the G20 last year and BRICS this year to place climate at the center of discussions around reforming global financial systems. While the COP presidency itself has limited power to shape outcomes, Brazil’s simultaneous leadership of these forums — G20, BRICS, and now COP30 — gives it an unusual level of diplomatic influence. That could matter for rebuilding climate trust and advancing negotiations. But Brazil also embodies a strategic tension. In 2024, it joined the OPEC+ cooperation charter and continues to pursue new oil exploration, including in the Amazon region, under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. “That’s a very important contradiction of the country, and I think it hasn’t been well explained yet,” Silverwood-Cope said. She added that observers are waiting for the government’s energy sector plans — expected in December — to clarify how Brazil intends to handle its dependence on fossil fuels while positioning itself as a climate leader. One of the most closely watched developments at COP30 will be the Tropical Forests Forever facility — Brazil’s proposal to create a long-term funding mechanism for rainforest protection — which officially launched Thursday. The structure of the fund has already been outlined: It would sit at the World Bank as an endowment, generating investment returns that are then paid to countries for verified forest conservation. What’s still unknown, and what negotiators and observers will be watching in Belém, is how much money countries are actually willing to commit. “It really could be a game changer for nature and climate finance,” Mitchell said. “It’s not a grant that needs replenishment every year … because country budgets are tight, particularly when it comes to foreign development investment.” She said what makes it significant is not only the financial model, but that it shifts the burden away from forest-rich nations — whose ecosystems act as carbon sinks that benefit everyone. The urgency is clear. The world lost about 6.7 million hectares of primary rainforest last year — mostly in the Amazon, Congo Basin, and Southeast Asia. “The most effective thing to do is to maintain standing forest,” Mitchell said. Without that, global mitigation goals become unreachable and ecosystems edge toward irreversible tipping points. The case of the missing NDCs One of the core expectations for COP30 is that countries arrive with updated nationally determined contributions, or NDCs. Under the Paris Agreement, each country is required to submit a new or stronger NDC every five years, outlining how it plans to cut emissions, adapt to climate impacts, and pay for those efforts. That is not happening on schedule. Only 78 countries have submitted their NDCs so far, which Silverwood-Cope described as “a major shortfall.” The problem is not just timing, but ambition. Mitchell called it disappointing that “some big countries didn't get them in on time, or had very low ambitious NDCs.” She added that “it's not only just having an NDC, it's what's in your NDC, right? It's important that they address all sectors.” In particular, she said too few plans from major forested nations include commitments on forests or nature. Climate finance and the Baku-to-Belém road map Another high-stakes issue is how countries will fund climate action at the scale required. At COP29 in Baku, governments agreed to a new collective quantified goal: at least $300 billion per year in climate finance for low- and middle-income countries by 2035. Many said it fell short. As a compromise, the final text acknowledged a broader long-term aim — mobilizing $1.3 trillion annually. How to get from $300 billion to $1.3 trillion is what negotiators are calling the Baku-to-Belém road map. Silverwood-Cope said the draft road map is built around a “5R” strategy — replenishing, rebalancing, rechannelling, revamping, and reshaping financial architecture. Much of it reflects discussions at the Group of 20 major economies and BRICS meetings on reforming multilateral development banks, using innovative finance tools, and leveraging private capital. But she also warned that “we don't know how it's going to be rolled out, and what are the monitoring mechanisms.” Even if agreed in Belém, the reforms imply a major restructuring of the global financial system. And current finance needs dwarf available commitments. “If you sum all of the financial needs that are presented by NDCs … you sum more than $5.3 trillion,” Silverwood-Cope said. “So even the $1.3 trillion … is actually a very low bar.” Mitchell said the debate must include a taboo subject: fossil fuel subsidies. “We as countries around the world put trillions — and I mean trillions with a T — into subsidies for fossil fuels,” she said. “If we could reallocate those subsidies … into the things we need for this energy transition and for stopping deforestation, we would be significantly down the road. So the money could be there. It's having these hard conversations.” Lastly, adaptation is expected to be a major topic at this COP. Although countries agreed in Paris to establish a Global Goal on Adaptation, putting it into practice has proved difficult because adaptation is fundamentally harder to measure and track than mitigation. Experts have had the difficult task of narrowing thousands of possible indicators down to about 100, which would form the basis for how adaptation progress is assessed. The final list is expected to be presented in Belém. With forests, finance, NDCs, fossil fuels, and now adaptation all in play, this COP is not defined by a single negotiating track — but by whether countries can turn years of commitments into something operational. That is why Belém is being called the “implementation COP.” “We've talked about this being the decade of action up to 2030 and so we do need to close that gap between words and promises and actual delivery,” Mitchell said. “That's where we need to be focused on. It's not so much new targets.”