The 30th COP in Belém was a dual event. On the one hand, it has presented itself as a center for the most relevant negotiations for the future of the planet and humanity. On the other hand, it served as a large trading office.
This ambiguity is not accidental, it expresses the way in which the array of diplomatic zones, institutional structures and spaces for civil society were operated at the Conference, in a structure that increasingly favored the supremacy of vested interests.
Throughout the ten days of the event, Belém witnessed a clear presence of mining, oil and agribusiness companies that promoted “green sustainability” discourses that were inconsistent with Amazonian reality and the struggles of traditional peoples. Meanwhile, a few kilometers away, on the tropical margin, a new massive oil exploration project continues to advance, with a strong environmental and social impact. In parallel, social movements organized the People’s Summit, which sought to strain the official discourse and show the possibility of another climate agenda.
In theory, the 30th session of the Conference of the Parties carried extraordinary symbolism. The city of Belém, located on the banks of the world’s largest tropical forest, has been completely renovated and designed, with environmental licensing drawbacks, as a model of Brazilian climate leadership.
Even the fire that broke out in the Blue Zone, although there were no deaths, highlighted the improvisation and fragility of the infrastructure that was celebrated during the event.
Lula’s government presented him as a “policeman of truth”, linking the event to moral courage and the need for quick action. However, this discourse belies the growing capture of the conference by extractive, financial and corporate actors.
It is no coincidence that indigenous leaders, such as Ailton Krenak, warn of the risk of the meeting turning into a big deal aimed at negotiating oil, timber and rare earths under the pretext of sustainability.
The report “A COP dos Lobbies”, produced by Observatory De Olho nos Ruralistas and FASE, reinforces this criticism by showing how large companies with broad social and environmental responsibilities are using this event to reinforce their discourses of environmental responsibility.
Companies such as Vale, Hydro, Bayer, Raízen and Rumo Logística emerge as champions of green initiatives while complaints, lawsuits and serious social and environmental impacts pile up. In the financial system, institutions like ITAO and BTG Pactual allocate billions to chains that also drive deforestation.
The report reveals that private funders acted long before the conference began, affecting its organisation, priority topics and access to strategic areas. This influence is illustrated by the geography of the COP, divided between the Blue Zone, reserved for formal negotiations, and the Green Zone, open to civil society, businesses and NGOs. Alongside them, parallel structures funded by major corporations have emerged, such as pavilions and alternative spaces that spread their discourses and strengthen alliances with government bodies.
The Agrizone initiative, organized by Embrapa and funded by the National Federation of Agriculture and Bayer, embodies this coexistence between the state and the private sector. The same is happening with the development station, which is financed by MV Infra, an entity working to make environmental licensing more flexible. These examples demonstrate an environment in which special interests have strongly dominated the public agenda and influenced the formulation of climate policies.
This context has once again highlighted the conflict of temporalities. There is a time when indigenous peoples and traditional communities are already facing the destruction of their lands. There is the slow time of diplomacy, which is supposed to work with goals as far away as 2030 and 2050. There is the era of financial companies, which operate according to the logic of permanent expansion of profit.
There is ecological time, which is no longer the future, and is already manifesting itself in the present through extreme climate events, biodiversity loss, and regional collapse. At the UN Climate Change Conference (COP30), these times have not converged, as the time of capital tends to overlap with all other times.
However, conflict is not only temporary, but also about ways of being. On the one hand, the capitalist extractive mode treats land as a resource. On the other hand, the indigenous and riverine way understand regions as relational and inherited bodies. The institutional mode reduces nature to a financial asset, while the ecological mode operates according to biological cycles and does not negotiate its capacity for renewal.
Belém made these clashes visible. In a city, a river can be a relative or logistical corridor, a forest can be an organism or repository of carbon credits, and a region can be a body or reservoir of oil.
Contradictions also run deep within the Brazilian government. Lula’s environmental policy oscillates between environmental rhetoric and the practices of ministries that advocate expansion of oil production, agribusiness development, and regulatory flexibility.
The Environment Ministry is trying to promote energy transition measures, while the Mines and Energy Ministry plans to transform Brazil into one of the world’s largest export oil producers. The Ministry of Agriculture considers the goal of eliminating deforestation by 2030 unrealistic due to the production drive of agricultural extraction and export of agribusiness.
Despite this scenario, there was resistance. The People’s Summit brought together more than a thousand entities from sixty-two countries and provided space for demands, complaints and expressions. The Global Climate March, which included some thirty thousand participants, raised issues of environmental justice, human rights and criticism of the predatory economic model. Indigenous peoples were the main parties and stated that there is no serious climate plan without land demarcation and respect for ILO Convention No. 169.
Thus, year after year it becomes clearer that the COP has been a “ritual of environmental guilt management for elites”, who offer their amnesty through future promises of environmental conservation, distant goals and promises of ecological transformation, as a political fetish that suppresses real destruction, generates climate denial and maintains the system that produces environmental devastation.
The authors do not consult with, work for, own shares in, or receive funding from any company or organization, and have disclosed no relevant relationships beyond their academic positions.