'Fight against climate change can be pro-growth, pro-jobs'

New Delhi: With just about two months to go for this year's edition of the UN Climate Change Conference, or COP30, the Brazil presidency team is crisscrossing the globe, engaging with countries to ensure that the talks in November send out a ringing endorsement for multilateralism, climate action, and economic development.

"I'm more concerned with effectiveness than with discourse or declarations. This COP has to really prove that multilateralism is better, that there is an economic logic to fight climate change, and that it is a great opportunity for a new direction in economic development," said Andre Correa do Lago, the Brazilian diplomat who will serve as the president of COP30.

Hosting the annual UN climate talks is always something of a challenge: creating the conditions and working to bring nearly 200 countries to agree on a common set of decisions and plan of action to tackle climate change is no small feat. The Brazilian diplomat acknowledged that COP30 is dealing with some additional challenges.


The intensifying impacts of climate change-more heatwaves and extreme rainfall-across the world make it more urgent for countries to step up efforts to act on it. Yet, they have been slow in submitting the new round of nationally determined climate targets.

Major issues to tackle

Fractured geopolitics, continuing conflicts, trade wars and their ensuing disruptions, a reduction in public funds that developed nations provided as development and climate assistance, and the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement: these make the task of ensuring concerted and collective global action challenging.

A veteran climate negotiator, do Lago stresses that the US withdrawal from the global effort to tackle climate change poses a "different challenge" this time round. The US, the biggest historical emitter, has on several instances pulled out from climate agreements - it did not ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and, more recently, withdrew from the Paris Agreement in 2017.

This time, do Lago said, "the US is clearly acting against some of the technological solutions to fight climate change," pointing to the reduction of resources available for research, as well as the deliberate efforts to limit wind energy and resources available to it. "It's very different from denialism; now there is an effort to undermine the economic logic of the fight against climate change."

Economic logic

Part of Brazil's effort at COP30 in Belem is to counter the effort that denies the economic logic of acting on climate change. "I believe very strongly that the fight against climate change can be pro-growth, pro-development and pro-jobs and can make people's life much better," said do Lago

In focusing on implementation, making the decisions taken at the UN meetings relevant to people, do Lago hopes to demonstrate to people that climate action is not detrimental to economic growth.

Key to this is to focus on implementation. Belem, however, is not the first UN climate meet that emphasises implementation. What makes Brazil's focus different is the context.

"It is 10 years since Paris, we have already completed most of the important negotiations under the Paris Agreement, and we have had the first global stocktake that gives a clear picture of what needs to be done. Hence, [the] switch from negotiation and action to implementation," said the COP30 president.

Yet, it is the changed global circumstances, the rising toll and cost of the devastation caused by climate change that makes it difficult for developing countries to do more to reduce emissions and adapt to climate impacts.