Brazil Tries to Keep Climate Cooperation Alive

BELÉM, Brazil—This humid Amazonian rainforest city is swarming with all the trappings of a United Nations climate summit except one: a U.S. negotiating team.

Tens of thousands of participants from more than 190 countries and dozens of Indigenous groups are staging two weeks of meetings, protests, and negotiations during this year’s summit, known as COP30. Though no U.S. diplomats are present, Foreign Policy has seen a handful of conference-goers sporting white-and-green “Make Science Great Again” hats. California Gov. Gavin Newsom also made a defiant appearance on Tuesday.

The annual climate conference, held this year in Belém, is the first since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to the White House and triggered the United States’ second exit from the 2015 Paris Agreement. This time, Trump has gone beyond withdrawing from international climate diplomacy and is actively working to undermine it. U.S. sanctions threats last month against envoys from countries on the verge of reaching a landmark deal to limit global shipping pollution succeeded in blocking the agreement.

The threat of potential U.S. sabotage hangs over Belém, where countries are negotiating if and how they will speed up climate action. Trump’s pressure could give political cover to delegations that are already dragging their feet on climate issues for any number of reasons. Saudi Arabia, for example, moved in lockstep with the United States to torpedo the shipping pollution deal. U.S. proxies could act similarly at COP30.

However, host nation Brazil watched this adverse political environment build for a year and hatched a plan to make progress in Belém in spite of it.

A key pillar of Brazil’s approach to COP30 is what some climate strategists call “coalitions of the doing.” Rather than waiting for absolute consensus among U.N. member states, Brazil is moving in smaller groups to push action forward and emphasizing how climate action can lead to economic development.

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But many targets set at past conferences have not been met. As a result—and given geopolitical headwinds—Brazilian officials have said that Belém should focus on implementing existing goals rather than setting new unanimous targets.

To address unmet climate pledges, Brazilian officials have focused extra energy on countries that are eager to engage.

“We are working to speed up action with countries that are willing to accelerate,” said Rafael Dubeux, a senior Brazilian Finance Ministry official.

This is a growing trend at COP summits: Because the unanimous agreements can be vague and cautious, in recent years, countries have united in smaller groups to set more ambitious climate targets of their own. These include pledges to end deforestation and reduce heat-trapping methane emissions by 30 percent (compared to 2020 levels) by the end of this decade.

In the lead-up to COP30, Dubeux and colleagues helped craft a plan for a new investment fund to protect tropical forests that had received some $5.5 billion in pledges as of last week. Brazil and the United Kingdom announced a program to help seven countries track and reduce so-called super pollutants such as methane. And Brazil rallied at least nine countries and the EU to join a group devoted to collaborating on carbon markets.

With the forest fund, Brazil already overcame a potential obstacle from the United States. The fund’s technical supervision is due to be carried out by the World Bank, where Washington is the largest shareholder. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has called for the bank to deprioritize some of its climate-related work. If the United States wanted to block the bank’s participation in the forest fund, it likely could.

“The World Bank is a multilateral institution, and many of its members emphatically supported the idea,” Dubeux said. The project’s backers carefully emphasized that it was focused on forests rather than climate change more broadly. The fund got the green light.

Brazilian officials are also emphasizing the economic dividends of climate action. They are not alone in this approach. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in July that countries clinging to fossil fuels are “missing the greatest economic opportunity of the 21st century.” Finnish President Alexander Stubb echoed this language in Belém last week, calling climate investments a “growth and prosperity plan.”

Globally, investments in clean energy this year are on track to be double those in fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Agency. China dominates global production of green technologies such as solar panels, batteries, and wind turbines, far outpacing the United States. Although the adoption of these products is speeding decarbonization across the developing world, without transfer of the underlying technologies, countries might miss the opportunity to develop green industries at home.

Labor organizers in Brazil are worried about importing green technologies rather than building them domestically, said Deyvid Bacelar, the general coordinator at the Brazilian Unified Federation of Oil Workers. Though some oil workers might one day get clean energy jobs due to decarbonization, Bacelar pointed to union research that found that in jobs such as installing imported solar panels, “the pay is lower, and the benefits are worse.”

Though Brazil is rich in many of the raw ingredients for the energy transition, that does not guarantee decent work, Bacelar warned: “We hope the government works so there are green industries in Brazil with well-paying jobs, instead of our country’s role being only selling raw materials.”

At COP30, Brazil has called for green dividends to be shared among countries, and several top officials in the administration of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva have crafted policies to try to address these concerns. (Lula is a former union leader.) The government of the Brazilian state of Bahia, home to a BYD plant, recently secured commitments from the Chinese automotive giant to build a local research center, use Brazilian components in its vehicles, and train local workers.

“Brazil, with its strong state capabilities, can be a model for other developing countries on how to negotiate technology benefits from China’s massive green overseas investments,” said Tim Sahay, a co-director of Johns Hopkins University’s Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab. “It can share lessons on how to bargain for technology in exchange for access to its resources or access to its markets.”

Brazil has worked to put green industrialization into the COP30 agenda. Lula highlighted the importance of technology transfers in speeches ahead of the conference. And on Nov. 14, Brazil and partners such as Indonesia, South Africa, South Korea, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom are expected to pledge to create a secretariat for cooperation on green industrialization, saying that the process must “address, rather than deepen global inequalities,” according to a draft declaration seen by Foreign Policy.

The draft declaration also pledges work to align countries’ standards about which goods count as low carbon. That can benefit both developed and developing countries, said Linda Kalcher, the executive director at European climate consultancy Strategic Perspectives: “Not only does it help the Europeans import material that meets their standard, it also helps them diversify away from one single supplier. … [M]ost importantly, it builds value chains in other countries.”

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For one, though there is clearly money to be made through some types of climate action, such as investing in green energy systems, for others, it is not a straightforward case. Projects such as sea walls to prevent flooding and irrigation systems to help farmers cope with droughts often don’t yield a quick and obvious payout. That is why U.N. climate summits have historically devoted major efforts to reaching unanimous agreements on how governments—especially rich ones—will pay for climate action.

If COP30 focuses mostly on small-group coalitions of the doing, then poor countries may be left stranded without much-needed funding.

“The private sector will not spend a lot of money on [climate] adaptation, full stop,” Kalcher said. “The private sector will go where it’s profitable. That might not be in smaller island states. So this is where the public money is still needed.”

Another area where many climate experts say that Brazil’s COP strategy could underdeliver is on messaging about transitioning away from fossil fuels. That goal was unanimously set at the 2023 COP summit, but last year’s conference issued no new guidance.

Meanwhile, Brazil’s major ramp-up of domestic oil production has led some activists to question its credibility as a climate leader. Oil is among Brazil’s top exports. The Brazilian diplomat running COP30, André Corrêa do Lago, has often avoided answering questions about if or how the conference will advance efforts to transition away from fossil fuels. Language endorsing such a transition rarely crossed Lula’s lips this year, though it was mentioned frequently by his environment minister, Marina Silva.

But COP summits can still bring surprises—and one of the first in Belém was Lula’s new willingness to call for a fossil fuel phase-down. He did so in a speech, a Guardian op-ed, and a statement posted online, where he called for a road map for countries to overcome dependence on fossil fuels—echoing one of Silva’s longtime demands.

It’s still too early to know whether negotiators will codify that call into a unanimous decision in Belém; fossil fuel-friendly and Trump-friendly countries could try to shoot it down. But even if they do, Brazil and partner countries have worked for progress in areas that are more resilient to diplomatic sabotage.

While Trump’s two-time withdrawal from the Paris Agreement has given China an opportunity to lead on climate change, Brazil is also flexing its own position as a middle power by elevating issues such as technology transfer.

This climate conference in the jungle has made clear that the global energy transition is moving forward without the White House. The open questions are how fast it will go—and which countries will benefit.