COP30 CEO Calls for 'Realistic' Expectations for UN Climate Talks

Newsweek

2 days ago

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The CEO for this year's COP30 climate talks in Brazil used an appearance at a Newsweek London Climate Action Week event to manage expectations for the highly anticipated United Nations gathering in her country in November.
"We need to be realistic [about] where the geopolitics are at the moment, and the geopolitics are definitely not helping," COP30 CEO Ana Toni said in a Climate Conversation interview last week produced by Newsweek and partners at Hi Impact and London Climate Action Week. "We have several military wars, unfortunately, we have trade wars happening."
Brazil will host COP30 in Belém, the capital of the state of Pará, at the mouth of the Amazon River. It will be the first UN climate negotiations convened in the Amazon, highlighting the connections between climate change and nature conservation. The talks also mark the 10th anniversary of the landmark Paris Climate Agreement and countries in the agreement are due to update their national plans for meeting greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets.
COP30 CEO Ana Toni in a Newsweek "Climate Conversation" interview during London Climate Action Week.
COP30 CEO Ana Toni in a Newsweek "Climate Conversation" interview during London Climate Action Week.
Courtesy of Hi Impact
Despite strong global growth in renewable energy, EVs and other clean technologies, global emissions have reached a record high, and scientists documented that the past two years were the world's warmest on record.
That combination of factors makes COP30 an especially urgent gathering. However, the global political atmosphere does not bode well for climate progress, Toni said.
In addition to wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, President Donald Trump has imposed steep tariffs against major trade partners around the world, undermining other multilateral talks. Trump is also undoing federal policy on climate change and announced that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris agreement, as he did in 2017 during his first term as President.
Toni cautioned against hopes for a dramatic outcome from Belém.
"I know there is a lot of temptation to imagine that any one meeting will solve our problems, unfortunately this is not the case," she said. "The work will not finish at COP30, it's just a very important moment."
Toni is the national secretary for Climate Change at Brazil's Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced in January that she will be CEO of the COP30 talks along with André Corrêa do Lago, secretary for climate, who will be COP30 president.
The host nation officials for UN climate talks typically play an important role in setting the agenda for the event and guiding negotiations toward a final agreement.
She said she wants the Belém gathering to promote efforts to finance nature conservation and nature-based climate solutions.
"We need to talk much more about nature finance," she said. "We talk very little about how the financial sector, the private sector, can help with that preservation."
Toni said COP30 will also focus on the important role cities have to both reduce emissions and adapt to the growing impacts of climate change.
"When we are getting into implementation, the topics, perhaps they are less flashy, but they are perhaps more important," she said. "Many people are suffering heat waves, fires, flooding."
Newsweek's Climate Conversation also featured interviews with climate policy leader Jennifer Morgan and noted climate scientist Jim Skea.
Morgan, the special envoy for international climate action for Germany's Federal Foreign Office, echoed Toni's call for greater attention to climate adaptation and the effects of climate-driven extreme weather events.
"The costs are just extraordinary," Morgan said, noting that Germany's central bank is documenting the costs to GDP from climate change. "I don't think it's right to have a certain group of wealthy fossil actors have the power to destroy the earth, to make the lives of poor people and vulnerable people much worse."
While costs from climate impacts are growing, so are the global investments in clean energy solutions. According to the International Energy Agency, global energy investment this year will hit a record $3.3 trillion, and clean energy and electrification projects are drawing twice the investment of fossil fuels.
Sir Jim Skea, a professor emeritus at Imperial College London, chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Skea said the surging investment in clean technology comes as the costs of renewable energy and energy storage are rapidly falling.
"In many parts of the world it is now cheaper to produce electricity from wind and solar than it is from fossil fuels," Skea said. "When the financial incentives and the moral incentives—you know, reducing emissions—go in the same direction it is a very, very powerful message."