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Greetings from Belém, Brazil, at the mouth of the Amazon River, which is home to tens of thousands of COP30 attendees for two weeks. The temperatures are high, the air is heavy, the daily thunderstorms roll in on schedule — you fully feel that you’re in the Amazon.
For the development community, the stakes feel especially stark. Environmental pressure sits alongside deep social and economic strain: Nearly half of Belém’s 1.4 million residents live below the poverty line, and 60% live in informal settlements.
So how do you connect climate and development — two agendas that intersect constantly but don’t always align in language? Brazil is trying to use its COP30 leadership to bring them together, pushing implementation, focusing on climate adaptation, elevating nature-based solutions, and emphasizing just transitions.
“It’s already in some ways a successful COP,” Binaifer Nowrojee, president of the Open Society Foundations, told me on the sidelines of the conference. “Looking at the way Brazil is leading the COP, in terms of actually placing it in the Amazon, and putting people who are impacted at the center of what they're proposing.”
As G20 president last year, Brazil prioritized the reform of multilateral development banks and climate finance, something that is set to continue at COP30. It has also elevated hunger in both spaces: at the G20 through the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty, and at COP30 through the Belém Declaration on Hunger, Poverty, and Human-Centered Climate Action. The declaration, already signed by 43 countries and the EU, commits governments to supporting small-scale farmers, enabling just transitions for forest communities, and making social protection a backbone of climate planning, with metrics to track action and implementation.
“Brazil understands that with the withdrawal of the U.S. now, it’s going to be a coalition of the willing. We’re not looking for a unanimous worldview on it. But what we’re looking for, and what Brazil is doing quite well, is pulling different countries into coalitions of the willing,” Nowrojee said.
The U.S. national-level absence is unmistakable — no senior officials are here — but dozens of state and local representatives have shown up, most notably Gavin Newsom, California's Democratic governor, who was surrounded by crowds at every event he attended.
“We need to build partnerships. ... We’re here with an open hand, not a closed fist,” I heard him say at the German pavilion right before he signed an agreement with the country’s government on climate action and renewable energy.
Those partnerships are expanding. California has long held agreements around the world, but ties with African countries in particular are growing: While at COP30, Newsom signed one with Nigeria on climate, environment, and trade — covering zero-emissions vehicles, green ports, climate entrepreneurship, methane detection, and academic exchange. It also recently signed a similar agreement with Kenya.
What this widening network of subnational partnerships means for development, climate cooperation, and exchange is something to watch.
Read: At COP30, Brazil carries forward its food-first agenda
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Forests are at the center of the conversation here — not just because we’re in the Amazon, but because they remain one of the world’s most powerful carbon sinks. Brazil’s marquee initiative at COP30 is the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, or TFFF, an innovative fund designed to pay countries to protect rainforests using investment rather than aid, reflecting the growing push to mobilize private capital for climate action.
Launched days before COP30, the fund made an immediate splash with over $5.5 billion in first-day pledges last week — still far from its $25 billion goal but higher than many expected. The United Kingdom drew attention for declining to join for now, but momentum elsewhere may be building. Two multilateral development banks — the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank — are considering investing, sources at both institutions told my colleague Jesse Chase-Lubitz. The European Investment Bank is also weighing an investment.
“Most of our new sub-Saharan member states are eligible. We’re currently considering participation and we will be able to tell you more once we have spoken with our countries,” Gianpiero Nacci, EBRD’s managing director for climate strategy and delivery, told Jesse.
Leslie Maasdorp, the chief executive officer of British International Investment, told me the approach could be a watershed moment for forests and for nature-based solutions more broadly.
“In 2006, we created the Green Bond market,” he told me over the escalating sounds of a thunderstorm. “In the first few years, only developing banks issued Green Bonds. Within six, seven, eight years, it started to be mainstream. And today, it’s an asset class worth over $2 trillion.”
“The preservation of our forests, the air that we breathe, the water. There’s no pricing mechanism on these assets. They’re natural assets, but they’re not on the balance sheets of countries. In the world, we haven’t yet designed to put these very important natural assets into market language. So, this ought to be the next trillion-dollar asset,” Maasdorp said.
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At COP30, the much-anticipated Fund for responding to Loss and Damage is finally out of the conceptual phase and into real-world operation. The fund’s executive director, Ibrahima Cheikh Diong, arrived in Belém with a small but functioning secretariat — and on Day 1, the fund opened its first call for proposals. It’s a long-awaited step toward getting money to countries already facing wildfires, flooding, and slower-onset threats such as sea level rise.
Beginning in December, countries will be able to submit proposals for the fund’s first $250 million grant window. The total pot — $788 million in voluntary pledges — remains far below what countries say they need. Between 2000 and 2019, climate change caused a staggering $2.8 trillion in loss and damage globally, or roughly $16 million every hour, according to a 2023 Nature analysis. But this first window, known as the Barbados Implementation Modalities, will help shape how the fund grows and evolves.
A resource mobilization strategy is expected by 2027 as the board looks for predictable finance beyond these early pledges. All options are on the table, from additional grants to philanthropy and even private-sector funds, and the option to one day go to capital markets, Diong told me in Belém.
For now, it’s a tiny, scrappy team that Diong expects will grow to around 25 people. “Our intention is to be lean and mean, so we don’t spend all the money on overhead — we spend the money on the countries.” The early years, he added, require flexibility. “These fundamentals are an experiment for the first four years. We’re basically building the plane as we fly. But the reality is we’re getting a sense of urgency — the needs of the country. We can’t afford to wait and say we’re going to get everything perfect.”
Civil society groups argue the pace is too slow and the financing far too small, and indeed, the demand has been evident. “Country representatives have been knocking on our doors,” said Richard Sherman, board cochair at the fund. “Hopefully our doors are now open.”
Read: Inside the loss and damage fund’s first year — and what comes next (Pro)
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And while funds, initiatives, and geopolitics have dominated much of the conversation so far, COP is also — at its core — about the actual negotiations among countries. So how are those going? Long story short: We’re halfway through and a lot is still unsettled.
Here are a couple of the big items I’ve been following closely:
• Agenda. Parties remain divided. The holdup centers on whether or not to add four issues onto the negotiation table, namely climate finance and the lack of ambition in countries’ national climate plans, trade measures, and transparency. None of the issues have a consensus, and the back-and-forth has dragged on all week. How this gets resolved will be an early test of the Brazilian presidency. A clearer picture should emerge tomorrow, when the next stocktaking plenary is scheduled.
• Adaptation: Countries still can’t agree on when or how to finalize the Global Goal on Adaptation. A proposal to triple climate adaptation finance for developing countries appeared in the latest draft, but negotiators are mostly focused on the list of indicators that will measure progress — a list that experts have been trying to narrow down from thousands to roughly 100.
• Fossil fuel transition. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva last week called on world leaders to draw up road maps to “overcome dependence on fossil fuels.” A growing number of countries are backing the idea of a Roadmap for Fossil Fuel Transition and want it included in the final COP package.
Belém was Portugal’s first foothold in the Amazon in 1616, and between 1879 and 1912, it was the epicenter of the rubber boom — a period defined by extraction, coercive labor, and the violent expansion of frontier industries into Indigenous territories. More than a century after that boom ended, that fundamental tension between Indigenous communities and extractive interests remains palpable.
This is meant to be an Indigenous COP. And in many ways it is — representatives from numerous Indigenous groups are everywhere: at main meetings, at packed side events, moving through the halls. Leaders have come not only from across the Amazon basin but from far beyond it. At one pavilion, I listened to a Pacific representative as she told us that she had recently visited the Amazon River by canoe and lamented that it was “very sick,” offering prayers in solidarity with Amazonian peoples.
But the contradictions are clear. Yes, this COP is in the Amazon, and Lula has been lauded for his work on combating deforestation. But at the same time, Lula has also opened new areas of the Amazon to drilling.
On Tuesday evening, these tensions broke into full view as Indigenous protesters surged into the Blue Zone. Demonstrators marched in carrying flags demanding land rights and signs declaring that their territories are not commodities, as security pushed back and barricaded entrances with tables. “We want our lands free from agribusiness, oil exploration, illegal miners and illegal loggers,” Gilmar, a leader from the Tupinambá people who originally settled Belém, told reporters.
Indeed, visibility is not the same as influence. Less than 1% of global climate finance reaches Indigenous communities, despite their central role in stewarding some of the world’s most important carbon sinks and safeguarding 80% of the planet’s remaining biodiversity. The new TFFF has pledged that at least 20% of its funding will go to Indigenous peoples — a notable shift, but still untested.
But as Patrick Brown, campaigns and operations director at the economic justice group Equal Right, said: Compensation for Indigenous peoples “shouldn’t be contingent on the margins that might be made by investors in London or New York.”
This COP’s ability to deliver tangible gains for Indigenous communities will be something to watch — and, as the protests made clear, something Indigenous leaders here in Belém are watching closely too.
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