Jonathan Watts
A fluvial adrenalin rush flooded into the COP30 host city of Belém on Wednesday morning with the arrival of a flotilla of more than 100 boats, carrying indigenous activists, forest defenders and other civil society campaigners.
Singing, chanting and waving flags and banners declaring “Fight for the Right to Life” and “No to Soy!”, the demonstrators made their presence evident on the river as they are expected to do on the streets in the coming days.
Organisers said 5,000 people from 60 countries were participating in the “Boats for Climate Justice Flotilla,” which converged on Guajará Bay close to the University of Pará, which will be the venue for a “People’s Summit” that runs for several days alongside the main climate talks.
Activists said they are already staging four events a day in Belém, the first COP host city in several years to encourage civil society participation.
Most of the events have been colourful and peaceful, but on Tuesday night there were scuffles in the conference centre when a group of several dozen indigenous and non-indigenous activists burst into the Blue Zone, where they were confronted by UN security guards.
More than 10,000 civil society activists are expected at COP30. They are united in their desire to protect nature and the rights and territory of traditional peoples. But there are many different strategies and focal issues, ranging across anti-dam protesters, river defenders, campaigners against agro-toxins, environmental justice advocates, demarcation supporters, and groups calling for direct payments to forest people for their role in maintaining globally important biomes.
In the flotilla, The Guardian counted at least 102 vessels, including Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior and the Imperatriz on which this reporter arrived in Belém. The organisers said 200 would take part over the course of the event. They have come from all parts of South America and Europe.
On board the main vessel of the “Answer Caravan,” which has travelled over 3,000 kilometers from the main Soy-growing region of Mato Grosso, carriyng more than 300 indigenous, riverine, quilombola and peasant leaders.
Among them was Maya-Lou Kayapo, who had spent the past six nights sleeping on a hammock. “We are here to resist the threats to our land from agribusiness and mining. We want to protect our territory from invasions and destruction,” she said over the din of chanting.
The ship was festooned with banners, highlighting the many threats to the Amazon, a globally important ecosystem that, scientists warn, been pushed close to the point of no return by human activities. : “We are the frontline of the climate crisis”, “Clean rivers without mining”, “Soy destroys”, “Demarcation now!”, “No Hydrovia!” (A reference to a contentious plan to turn the Tapajos and other rivers into a traffic corridor for soy barges.”
Several participants said they were united behind the vision of a “great cobra” – a dream spirit that has become a symbol of protest and has now taken physical form in a 50-metre-long inflatable snake. In Portuguese, the word “cobra” also means payment
Sarah Rodrigues, from the Volte Grande region of the Xingu river basin.carried a banner bearing the slogan: “Snake People” “The Cobra is the guardian of our campaign,” she said. “Financial support needs to go directly to the traditional peoples who protect the forest, not to the extractivist industries.”
Key events
Oliver Milman
Al Gore has just treated, if that’s the right word, Cop30 delegates to a sort of slide show of horrors caused by the climate crisis, writes my colleague Oliver Milman.
Standing in front of a huge projection screen showing images of recent disasters around the world that were worsened by global heating, Gore said that it is “literally insane that we are allowing this to continue.”
Gore, the former US vice president and climate advocate, appeared slightly croaky (there is a bit of a bug sweeping around Belem) but raised his voice in frustration as he showed images charting record drought in the Amazon, Greenland shedding its ice, huge downpours and storms that have wiped out communities in Vietnam, Jamaica, Brazil, the Philippines and the US in recent times.
How long are we going to stand by and keep turning the thermostat up so that these sort of events get even worse?
We need to adapt as well as mitigate, but we also need to be realistic that if we allow this insanity to continue, to use the sky as an open sewer, that some things will be very difficult to adapt to.
Gore also took shot at tech billionaire and major land owner Bill Gates, who he recently criticized in an interview with the Guardian. Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, has advocated moving away from tackling the climate crisis to instead focus on its impacts upon health.
Gore said it was notable that Hurricane Melissa, the category 5 superstorm which devastated Jamaica last month, hit the island on “the exact same day that some erstwhile climate advocate said we should dial down on climate change mitigation.”
This is the only public facing event by Gore at this year’s Cop. His main focus at the summit has been to promote his Climate TRACE project, which is mapping planet-heating emissions and air pollutants causing health problems from around the world. Gore said:
We are very excited about these new tools. We have got the technology and the deployment models. Some people think we don’t have the political will but as I like to remind people, political will is a renewable resource.
I am going to be blogging this afternoon on the proposed Just Transition Mechanism, and if you don’t know what that is, stick around for a crash course. If you want to share thoughts or reaction, feel free to reach out to me at nina.lakhani@theguardian.com.
Hello comrades, this is Nina Lakhani in chilly New York City taking over the blog for the next few hours. Thanks very much to my colleague Matt Taylor in London Town who will be back in the hot seat on Friday morning.
Leading climate activists and influencers have signed a letter criticising PR firm Edelman over its role at the Cop30 summit in Brazil.
Clover Hogan, Joycelyn Longdon, Mikaela Loach and Tori Tsui are among a list of 65 influencers, creators, and climate activists to sign an open letter organised by campaign group Clean Creatives criticising Edelman over its links with big oil. The signatories have a collective following of over 24 million across Instagram and TikTok.
In September Climate Home News revealed Edelman, the world’s largest public relations agency, won the COP30 contract in July 2025, while, according to Clean Creatives F-List 2025 research, the firm also works with fossil fuel clients Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Masdar, Shell and others.
The letter explains that “Edelman has the biggest conflicts of interest of any PR agency on earth” because it generates more revenue from fossil fuels than any company of its size. It goes on to highlight one key Edelman staffer, Ana Julião, general manager, Edelman Brazil, who “is overseeing communications for both COP30 and Shell at the same time […] While supposedly working with the UN to stop climate change, she’ll also be advocating on behalf of one of the biggest polluters on earth.”
Duncan Meisel, executive director, Clean Creatives said: “The UN must take action to stop Edelman’s fossil fuel clients from influencing the COP negotiations – their conflicts of interest when it comes to fossil fuel clients are simply too numerous to ignore. It is absurd and dangerous to have the same person, literally, writing talking points for Shell and the UN Climate Talks at the same time.”
He added the letter also sent a message to other clients who want to work with Edelman. “Companies that want to engage creators, NGOs, and other climate collaborators should know that Edelman’s reputation for fossil fuel PR precedes them, and will be a barrier to effective campaigns.”
Edelman had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.
More on the links between the climate crisis and global health from Sol Oyuela, executive director for Global Policy & Campaigns at WaterAid UK, after Al Gore’s’ remarks on Bill Gates’ shifting position earlier.
Oyuela, who is in Belem, reiterated that it was impossible to separate tackling public health and addressing the climate emergency.
“Climate change is an international health emergency, directly threatening global health security – and no country is immune.
“When extreme weather strikes, water sources run dry or become contaminated and toilets overflow, fuelling deadly outbreaks like cholera and malaria, as well as dehydration and heat stress. And it’s the people least to blame who are paying the highest price – now 15 times more likely to die from floods, droughts, and storms.
“Cost-effective solutions exist, from flood defences to drought-resilient water systems. Now, COP30 must be the COP where we embed life-saving water, sanitation and hygiene solutions into climate and health plans and reach historic agreement on the new adaptation goal.
“These are life-and-death decisions that will shape the health of millions for years to come – the stakes could not be higher.”
Fiona Harvey
Finding the $1.3 trillion a year needed for developing countries to combat the climate crisis is “entirely feasible” if governments make a concerted effort, and involve the private sector, new research shows.
The High Level Expert Group on Climate Finance found that developing countries, excluding China, would need to invest $3.2 trillion a year by 2035 to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, in line with the Paris agreement.
The IHLEG, which is co-chaired by the economists Amar Bhattacharya, Vera Songwe and Nicholas Stern, published the research on which the financial settlement on the climate reached by rich and poor countries last year, at Cop29, was based.
In their fourth report, published on Wednesday at Cop30 in Belem, they elaborated on some of the sources of funding countries will need and how it should be spent.
They said that developing countries should be able to find about $1.9 trillion for their climate effort from their own domestic sources, and will need $1.3 trillion a year from external sources. That is the same amount that developed countries last year said they would ensure flows to the poor world in climate finance within ten years, though they have only pledged to provide $300bn from their own sources.
Of the $3.2 trillion in investment required, delivering the energy transition away from fossil fuels would take up about $2.05 trillion a year by 2035, and promoting natural capital and sustainable agriculture would need $350 billion per year. Strengthening adaptation and resilience would require investments of $400 billion, while $350 billion should be spent on coping with “loss and damage”, the term for the rescue and rehabilitation of countries and communities stricken by climate disaster. A further $50 billion would be needed to ensure a just transition away from fossil fuels to cleaner technologies.
According to IHLEG, the “entirely feasible path” to delivering the “new collective quantified goal” (NCQG, a requirement of the Paris agreement) of $1.3 trillion in climate finance will require more than $500bn to come from private sector investments. The World Energy Outlook report from the International Energy Agency, also published on Wednesday, found that global investments in clean energy, led by the private sector, were set to continue growing rapidly.
Bilateral climate finance from governments would need to increase from current levels of $42 billion per year, which is much less than one-tenth of one per cent of the collective GDP of high-income countries, to about $80 billion per year by 2035, according to the report.
The current and former Cop presidents, Brazil and Azerbaijan, published their “Baku to Belem roadmap” last week, also heavily influenced by the IHLEG’s work. That report made about 50 recommendations on how countries could meet the NCQG. These included taxes on wealth, levies on frequent flyers – which some countries at Cop30 have already agreed – and taxes on fossil fuels.
Those findings will be discussed at Cop but none of the options for raising climate finance outlined in the roadmap are binding on any countries. The Like Minded Developing Countries grouping, which includes Saudi Arabia and other petro states, and India, want an agenda item at Cop30 on Article 9.1 of the Paris agreement, which deals with the obligations for developed countries to provide climate finance to the poor world.
Aseel Mousa
Brazilian Bruno Zanette, 26, is currently pursuing a Master’s in Eco Design. This year, he is attending COP with the Climate Clock, a global movement calling for action on the climate emergency.
“My motivation to attend COP began when I heard, back in 2023, that Brazil would host it. I’ve since tried to align my activism toward this moment. For me, COP isn’t just about negotiations — it’s a space for connection, listening, and learning from activists around the world. It’s where strategies are shared and where I hope to strengthen international bridges for climate action.
“The main climate challenges facing Brazil are deeply interconnected. In my home state, Rio Grande do Sul, we faced Brazil’s worst flooding ever in May 2024, which killed over a hundred people and destroyed entire communities. It showed how climate change, combined with poor preparation and the weakening of environmental protections, can devastate even wealthy regions. Across the country, droughts, deforestation, and new agribusiness-driven laws are worsening the situation.
“At this COP, I don’t expect miracles from negotiations, but I hope we’ll use this moment to ignite real awareness in Brazilian society and push for the country to embrace its potential as a genuine climate leader — not an oil producer expanding into the Amazon.”
Fiona Harvey
Fear of being bullied by Donald Trump may have prompted Bill Gates to row back on the climate crisis, the former US vice president Al Gore has speculated, as he slammed the billionaire as “silly”, and the US president for his anti-climate stance.
Trump, “the most corrupt president in American history”, was “badly damaging the US economy” by pulling away from renewable energy and promoting fossil fuels, Gore warned.
“He’s already doing a lot of damage [on the climate],” Gore said, in an interview with the Guardian at the Cop30 UN climate summit in Brazil. “Maybe the biggest harm he’s doing is to the United States itself, and one figure now illustrates it. China is now exporting green technology to the rest of the world that has a cumulative export value that is significantly higher than all of the fossil fuel exports from the United States to the rest of the world. And that trend is obviously accelerating quite dramatically.”
Gates, a philanthropist and founder of Microsoft, made waves around the world when he publicly argued for pushing the climate crisis down the international agenda, in favour of more focus on health issues.
“The idea of slowing down on climate again, every climate scientist that I know and respect just threw up their hands and said, ‘What in the world is he thinking?’” said Gore, in an interview with the Guardian at the Cop30 UN climate summit in Belem. “When Trump was elected the second time, Bill fired most of his climate staffers and went to the White House and lavished praise on Trump, and then put out this series of statements last week that puzzled anybody who was really concerned about the climate crisis.”
Gore noted that the chiefs of many large businesses in the US are in fear of reprisals from the US president if they disagree with him. “It may be that he is really worried that Trump will bully him the way he has bullied other ultra wealthy business people. It looks like it may be possible that he’s scared of Trump.”
The US president responded with social media posts praising Gates’ reversal.
Gore said: “I don’t know why [Gates] would do this… the only rave review of what he put out last week was from Donald Trump. Yeah,Trump loves it. That may be what Gates was shooting for.”
Gates and Gore were formerly seen as philanthropic allies in the fight against major problems facing humanity, including the climate crisis, appearing at the same events to warn of the consequences for humanity and the need to act.
Setting up the climate crisis and the global health crisis as opposing choices for intervention, as Gates appeared to do, was wrong, added Gore. “The idea that there is a binary choice between health and climate is an idea that’s been roundly rejected by virtually every scientist in this field, and the World Health Organisation has said long since that climate is the number one health threat to humanity.”
He added: “I almost felt badly for Bill when the same day he put his statement out the Lancet, the very authoritative, deeply respected Lancet Commission, put out its latest report showing the enormous health consequences of not accelerating climate action. The idea that you have to choose one over the other is quite silly.”
Instead of taking money away from climate action, Gates should have advocated that governments re-purpose the hundreds of billions they spend giving subsidies to fossil fuels, and focus them on health instead, Gore argued. “It’s literally insane that governments around the world are forcing their taxpayers to subsidise the destruction of part of humanity’s future,” he said. “Accelerating solutions to the climate crisis is one of the single most effective ways to improve health care in the world.”
Gore also robustly defended the UN process of annual “conference of the party” meetings on climate. “The cop process accomplishes far more than it is given credit for accomplishing, partly because it serves as a nucleus for all of the industry and NGO and trade groups and civil society groups that assemble at cop every year, and many of them come up with their own agreements that move things forward.”
Industries and governments were pushing ahead with new technology and implementing renewable energy and other low-carbon initiatives, he said. “The achievements of each successive cop are often cumulative, and the Cop process itself is one of the principal reasons that the sustainability revolution has shifted into high gear, and more and more nations are now realising that this is the future.”
He said: “There is a lot of very positive progress underway. It’s just stunning to watch the progress in these solutions [to cutting greenhouse gas emissions and shifting to a low-carbon economy.] There’s a completely false view out there that somehow we are losing ground.”
Although temperatures have for two years surpassed the vital threshold of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, there was still time to avoid the worst ravages of the climate crisis if governments acted now, Gore said. “We still have agency. It is certainly not too late to avoid the catastrophic harms that the scientists have have been warning us about, but every 10th of a degree matters. We are recklessly moving toward some negative tipping points that we need to avoid. So it’s not too late, but it’s time for us to to accelerate action.”
He added: “All around the world, people are listening to the most powerful voice in this entire global debate, and that voice is the voice of Mother Nature.”
Gore also celebrated what he sees as a “generational change” in the US, by which many people are turning towards climate action even while the federal governments is dismantling it. He warned that Trump might face a “less obsequious” Congress, in the light of the series of election defeats for Republican candidates at US elections last week.
“The American people spoke pretty loudly and clearly last week, in unexpectedly large landslide defeats for Trump in every election that was on the ballot, and Republican senators have now begun to break with him on some of his priorities,” said Gore. “It may be that going forward, he will have a less obsequious Congress that is not as terrified of him as they have been in his first year.”
Gore had some praise for Zohran Mamdani, the progressive politician who was elected mayor of New York. “Some of his proposals were ones that I did not agree with, but I thought that he ran a stunningly effective campaign. His basic skills as a politician were impressively on display.”
Jonathan Watts
A fluvial adrenalin rush flooded into the COP30 host city of Belém on Wednesday morning with the arrival of a flotilla of more than 100 boats, carrying indigenous activists, forest defenders and other civil society campaigners.
Singing, chanting and waving flags and banners declaring “Fight for the Right to Life” and “No to Soy!”, the demonstrators made their presence evident on the river as they are expected to do on the streets in the coming days.
Organisers said 5,000 people from 60 countries were participating in the “Boats for Climate Justice Flotilla,” which converged on Guajará Bay close to the University of Pará, which will be the venue for a “People’s Summit” that runs for several days alongside the main climate talks.
Activists said they are already staging four events a day in Belém, the first COP host city in several years to encourage civil society participation.
Most of the events have been colourful and peaceful, but on Tuesday night there were scuffles in the conference centre when a group of several dozen indigenous and non-indigenous activists burst into the Blue Zone, where they were confronted by UN security guards.
More than 10,000 civil society activists are expected at COP30. They are united in their desire to protect nature and the rights and territory of traditional peoples. But there are many different strategies and focal issues, ranging across anti-dam protesters, river defenders, campaigners against agro-toxins, environmental justice advocates, demarcation supporters, and groups calling for direct payments to forest people for their role in maintaining globally important biomes.
In the flotilla, The Guardian counted at least 102 vessels, including Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior and the Imperatriz on which this reporter arrived in Belém. The organisers said 200 would take part over the course of the event. They have come from all parts of South America and Europe.
On board the main vessel of the “Answer Caravan,” which has travelled over 3,000 kilometers from the main Soy-growing region of Mato Grosso, carriyng more than 300 indigenous, riverine, quilombola and peasant leaders.
Among them was Maya-Lou Kayapo, who had spent the past six nights sleeping on a hammock. “We are here to resist the threats to our land from agribusiness and mining. We want to protect our territory from invasions and destruction,” she said over the din of chanting.
The ship was festooned with banners, highlighting the many threats to the Amazon, a globally important ecosystem that, scientists warn, been pushed close to the point of no return by human activities. : “We are the frontline of the climate crisis”, “Clean rivers without mining”, “Soy destroys”, “Demarcation now!”, “No Hydrovia!” (A reference to a contentious plan to turn the Tapajos and other rivers into a traffic corridor for soy barges.”
Several participants said they were united behind the vision of a “great cobra” – a dream spirit that has become a symbol of protest and has now taken physical form in a 50-metre-long inflatable snake. In Portuguese, the word “cobra” also means payment
Sarah Rodrigues, from the Volte Grande region of the Xingu river basin.carried a banner bearing the slogan: “Snake People” “The Cobra is the guardian of our campaign,” she said. “Financial support needs to go directly to the traditional peoples who protect the forest, not to the extractivist industries.”
Damian Carrington
Here’s a little timeline cleanse amidst the serious business of Cop30. Or in fact a big one – very big.
A new, double-headed floating wind turbine is set to obliterate the record for the largest turbine. It will be not far off a kilometre wide and rival the Empire State Building in height, generating 50MW of power – double today’s largest turbine.
It is being built by Ming Yang Smart Energy in China and the company has already deployed a 16MW version of the device (pictured below), which is called OceanX. The prototype has survived multiple typhoons, the company says.
“If successful, this model can be a game changer in the floating wind industry,” Umang Mehrotra, at research firm Rystad Energy, told Scientific American.
The Age of Electricity is here, the International Energy Agency said today in its flagship annual report. Even if all climate action halted today, renewables would still grow faster than any other major energy source – their cheapness means their growth is locked in.
China knows this – it also reported today its first month where more than half of new cars sold were electric.
The US, under Trump, does not. The IEA’s central scenario projects that Trump’s anti-climate policies means the US will have about 30% less solar power by 2035 than forecast last year.
Hello, Matthew Taylor here. I will be running the liveblog for the next few hours, keeping across on the latest developments from Day 3 at Cop30.
We had protests overnight and there are more planned for this morning. But as we wait for things to get going in Belem it is worth flagging this piece by my colleague Nina Lahkani highlighting the health impact of fossil fuel projects around the world.
Day three begins at Cop30
Dharna Noor
The second day of Cop29 ended with a bang, as dozens of Indigenous protestors forced their way into the conference center. The demonstrators, some of whom wore headdresses and carried instruments, pulled doors from their hinges, shoved through security scanners, and tussled with guards before successfully entering the venue. “Our forests are not for sale,” one protestor’s sign read.
It’s a sign that this year marks the return of major protests at UN climate talks, after several years of repression. More demonstrations are planned at the venue for the rest of the week, both on and off site.
Some 50,000 people are attending Cop30, from the civil society groups holding rallies, to the researchers poring over esoteric documents, to the politicians huddling together in brightly lit rooms. One group, however, is conspicuously absent from the climate talks: a delegation from the US, the world’s largest historical greenhouse gas polluter.
It’s the first time the US has sat out the negotiations completely, research organization Carbon Brief confirmed on Tuesday. US president Donald Trump, who calls the climate crisis a “hoax,” pulled the country from the Paris Agreement in January as part of an all-out assault on climate policy.
California governor Gavin Newsom, who arrived at the climate talks on Tuesday, strongly condemned Trump’s anti-environmental agenda: “He’s an invasive species, he’s a wrecking ball president,” he said at a press conference. “He’s trying to roll back progress of the last century, he’s trying to recreate the 19th century, he’s doubling down on stupid.”
Newsom, whose state has the world’s fourth-largest economy, is the topmost US official at Cop29. Everywhere he went on Tuesday, he was followed by hoards of spectators. In meetings and press conferences, he assured crowds that California is committed to climate action.
“The United States of America is as dumb as we want to be on this topic, but the state of California is not,” he said at a meeting earlier Tuesday. “And so we are going to assert ourselves, we’re going to lean in, and we are going to compete in this space.”
Response to the US’s absence has been mixed. On Monday, Tuvalu’s Home Affairs and Environment Minister Maina Vakafua Talia said Trump’s withdrawal showed “a shameful disregard for the rest of the world.”
But on Tuesday, Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations framework convention on climate change, said on Tuesday that the US’s absence from the talks “actually is a good thing.”
“Ciao, bambino,” was her response to the US’s departure from the Paris agreement.
At a press gaggle, Newsom said: “That’s a hell of a statement coming from the mother of the Paris Agreement.” Trump’s absence “creates opportunity” for local leaders to step into the fold on climate policy, Newsom said.
“What stands in the way becomes the way. This is an opportunity for us bottom up at the local level to assert ourselves,” he said. “He pulled away. That’s why I pulled up.”
Tuesday was a big day for the showcasing of local climate leadership, said Ana Toni, Cop30’s CEO, at an evening press conference. More than 185 city representatives met to speak about adaptation to extreme heat, and more than $20 speak about about concrete action to beat the heat and financing for it, she said.
Subnational actors can make a major difference in climate policy, including in the US, studies show. But Trump could still attempt to derail that progress, some have warned. Cop30 are especially concerned in light of the Trump administration’s behavior at an international maritime meeting last month, where officials menaced some foreign leaders and threatened tariffs on those who supported a carbon fee on shipping.
Tomorrow morning, activists will hold another protest, placing the spotlight on Trump specifically. They will hold a banner that says “resist climate saboteurs,” adorned with an outline of the US president.
“Trump’s lack of presence so far is a blessing in disguise, but you never know when he’s going to try and botch the talks,” activist Denise Robbins, an organizer of the action, told the Guardian.
She urged global leaders to resist any pressure they may face from the US. “No matter what happens in the US, the rest of the world needs to come together and act on climate,” she said. “It’s the only way we’ll keep to the goals of the Paris climate agreement.”
