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Tenacity and optimism. These seem to be the two qualities that climate advocates have as they prepare to charge into the 30th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP), COP30, from 10 – 21 November.
Climate advocates in Australia and the Pacific Islands are urging for COP30, held in Belem on the edge of the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil, to focus on ambitious and radical solutions on health, climate justice and inclusive and transparent negotiations.
These COP conferences facilitate an annual global conversation on climate change. Recently however, these conferences have been called many things from a “multi-cultural celebration”, a “circus”, to even a “total waste of time”.
It has become evident that many UNFCCC followers are increasingly frustrated at the slow pace of progress and lack of accountability. Climate activist Greta Thunberg has boycotted the last several conferences. Papua New Guinea too did not send a delegation to last year’s COP29 conference similarly citing a lack of progress.
Despite this, it is expected that some 45,000 people may attend COP30 in Belem. As described by Pacific climate activists, while these conferences often deliver heartbreak, many feel a perpetual need to attend in order to not be rendered invisible in these discussions of our collective future.
I have been to several of these COP conferences and despite the heartbreak, I continue to follow the UNFCCC. They provide community, a platform, a common global language, and a unifying process to both rally around and complain about. This year I will be working with Croakey to bring you coverage of COP30.
This particular article, I will walk you through:
- COP debunked: Put simply, what are these conferences?
- A Brazilian COP: What do we expect from Belem?
- How is health expected to be handled at COP30?
- How you can get involved with the COP30
- More resources for the COP-curious.
Sprinkled throughout this article are the wise words of several climate activists, scholars and COP30 attendees who generously provided their opinions and hopes.
COP debunked
There are dozens of amazing resources that can well explain what the UNFCCC is (some are listed below). But to contextualise this discussion, I will provide a quick breakdown of the conference.
The UNFCCC is an international treaty and the UN process in which parties (UN recognised governments) negotiate several global agreements on climate change including the Paris Agreement (2015). UNFCCC negotiations occur all year-round, meaning the COP conferences serve as the final negotiations and subsequent announcements at the end of each year.
Recent COP conferences have had two zones; a ‘Blue Zone’, the site of official negotiations, and a ‘Green Zone’ which is organised by the host country and is open to the public.
Given the enormous number of negotiating tracks, there are always multiple negotiations happening at once within the Blue Zone. This often makes COP an exhausting experience for smaller delegations, like that of the Pacific Islanders, where negotiators cover multiple tracks and often miss out on negotiations when meetings clash.
There are also official side events that governments and civil society members can apply for and are approved and scheduled by the UNFCCC secretariat. Increasingly though, much of the activity at COPs are in the pavilions in the Blue Zone.
These pavilions are run by country governments, international governmental organisations and large non-governmental organisations and host their own plethora of panel, networking and general ‘showing-off’ events.
They are expensive to run and create a trade show environment. Both the side events and pavilion spaces are where civil society gets to converse, share and scheme while the negotiations happen.
Given the cost of travel and increasing calls to ensure transparency, there are also ‘online badges’ which allow participants access to the UNFCCC’s COP portal to watch negotiations. Many of the COP plenary events will likely also be live-streamed on the UNFCCC YouTube page.
What to expect
The location of the COP conferences change each year. They are hosted by each of the UN geographic categories – this year in South America. Brazil was chosen within the Latin American and Caribbean Group category to host. Their decision to host the conference in a smaller city, Belem, is for the purpose of locating the conference in the Amazon Rainforest.
Earlier this year, diligent COP followers were feeling nervous about the Brazilian COP Presidency’s logistical organisation. Despite the expectation that the host city should put in place measures to ensure capped accommodation costs, prices for accommodation in Belem had already skyrocketed by July.
Writing this only a few weeks out from COP30, it has been rumoured that Belem is still 12,000 beds short to accommodate accredited delegates. There was also significant concern about parts of the Amazon being levelled to put in place a new, four lane highway to connect delegates from their flight to Belem.
However, I have some seen increasing faith in the Brazilian Presidency to deliver a unique, well organised and hopefully ambitious COP30. There has been particular praise for the letters that the Brazilian Presidency has been periodically publishing about their plans for the conference.
Through these letters, it has become clear that the Brazilian COP will clearly focus its attention on deforestation and the value of forests as both carbon sinks and biodiversity havens.
Safety has also been a concern of many in the lead-up to COP30. There have been particular concerns about the trafficking of young people in this particular area of Brazil which has prevented some organisations sending youth delegates to this year’s COP.
The Youth constituency group of the UNFCCC (YOUNGO) has worked hard this whole year with the Presidency to put in place mechanisms to ensure the safety of children and young people. However, these mechanisms were only launched in October, a little too late for many young people who don’t have access to the extraordinary funds required to book last minute flights to Brazil.
The other thing that makes COP30 important is that Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are due this year. NDCs are reports that state members ‘must’ (legally binding language) provide every five years. These should include the long-term goals of states on how they are working to achieve 1.5 degree consistent targets.
These were due in February 2025, 90 percent of all member states failing to get theirs in on time. Australia submitted in September, a week after Australia’s new emissions targets of 62-70 percent emissions reductions were announced – targets that experts have noted are not 1.5 degree consistent.
You can read all the NDCs here. Unlike the Global Stocktake, they do not all contain progress and rather just the goals that member states say they are aiming to achieve. Regardless, they are a fascinating and highly recommended read.
Looking to COP31
Finally, for us in Oceania, we will be looking to see if Australia will win the bid for hosting rights to next year’s COP31.
James Blackwell, Indigenous Research Fellow at the Australian National University, told me, “a COP conference being held in Australia is a great opportunity to centre and focus on Indigenous peoples being impacted by and fighting against climate change. Not just in the Pacific but here on this continent too – Indigenous peoples are the most impacted by climate change globally and this is something often left to the sidelines of international conferences.”
Informed by the massive consultation of youth undertaken for the 2025 Australian Local Conference of Youth (LCOY), Natasha Lutz from Australian Youth for International Climate Engagement, similarly said, “with Australia’s COP31 bid placing our climate leadership under greater scrutiny – and amid growing international politicisation, conflict, and uncertainty – the [LCOY] Statement stands as a testament to the ambition, integrity, and resolve that the next generation of Australian leaders expects to see reflected both at home and on the world stage.”
I think overall, the sentiment that progress is too slow and ambition is chronically lacking at the COPs is a common perspective amongst climate activists.
AnneMary Vikatoria Raduva, a Fijian youth climate activist, told me about the perspective of Pacific young people. “I expect our leaders to be honest with us right now. For far too long we have been mourning, lobbying and advocating for a greener and safer planet. This is the time to be serious now. I expect our regional leaders to be firm with their climate action plans and not be swayed by the love of power and wealth,” she said.
“Our People have suffered, our people are crying out for help. We have had enough of waiting, of being pushed aside. We are rising and we are raising the climate alarm louder than ever. Taking us to COP and not hearing our concerns and cries is not climate inclusion, it is a climate joke.
“To not include us into any spaces – is anti-democratic. When our islands are underwater, our people are classified as climate refugees and that is a fear that we all have and we will not let that happen.”
Similarly, John Smith from the Peoples Climate Assembly said: “we should expect world governments at COP30 to act decisively, acknowledge the severity of the crises, and to take urgent and deep action to cut fossil fuel use and emissions.
“We need a just transition that protects workers, communities and First Peoples, and to protect and restore nature for cooling, and sequestering carbon.
“We need to halt rapid temperature increases worldwide. Climate finance must not impoverish the global south and must factor in adaptation to increasingly severe impacts.”
Health ambitions
The issue of human health is something that has been somewhat neglected in the negotiations of the UNFCCC. There is no specific negotiating track on health. It has largely been treated as a ‘cross-cutting’ issue or something that is of implied importance or an implied outcome of successful climate negotiations.
But recently, health practitioners and advocates have been strident in getting health to be discussed more explicitly within the UNFCCC.
It was Dubai’s COP28 in 2023 in which a whole day was themed ‘health’ – the first time in UNFCCC’s history. COP28 also saw the launch of the ‘COP28 UAE Declaration on Climate and Health’, the first UNFCCC declaration on health, signed by 151 members.
Whilst this was a largely symbolic step, it largely remains merely rhetoric and no financial support has been dedicated to achieving anything in the declaration.
Internationally, there has been discussion about health at COP, including by the Presidency, who has said that health should not be a “footnote” at COP30.
In September, 20 World Health Organization Western Pacific Member States gathered in Singapore to address the healthcare sector’s role in contributing to, and tackling, the climate crisis, agreeing on a new coalition on the topic.
Domestically, activists are looking for Australia to be more ambitious with its climate negotiations in the hope that it will be indicative of more ambitious action at home.
This comes off the back of Australia’s National Climate Risk Assessment, which Marie McInerney reported at Croakey as outlining the “cascading, compounding, concurrent” climate risks for health and healthcare in Australia.
Dr Kimberly Humphrey on behalf of Doctors for the Environment Australia told me that the DEA “approaches COP30 with the expectation that health will be recognised as the most compelling lever for urgent climate action”.
She said: “We must be far more ambitious: fossil fuel phase-out must be rapidly accelerated and commitments strengthened, as without this, adaptation cannot meet the escalating impacts of climate change.”
As they prepare for their People’s Blockade in Newcastle, 27 November – 2 December, Rising Tide volunteer Lanthe Daly, echoes this sentiment, telling me that “the climate crisis is the greatest health threat to Australia’s future, and yet the Albanese Government continues to turbocharge the climate crisis by shoring up the profits for multi-national corporations, while everyday Australians face the brunt of unnatural disasters”.
Get involved
Due to the tireless advocacy done by young people, gender advocates, Indigenous representatives and climate researchers alike, I am happy to say that the UNFCCC is more transparent than ever. Whilst this may be in comparison to a relatively low bar set at other UN conferences, it still means that there are some ways that you can engage with COP30 from your own home.
If you do not have a badge, you will be unable to view the negotiations but, as mentioned, many of the major plenary events will likely be live streamed on the UNFCCC YouTube page. This is where you will be able to hear the overarching positions of parties. This is where a lot of the politics are revealed and can be a lot of fun to watch in a group.
A lot of people ask me how they can influence the negotiations and it is unfortunate to say that at COP there is not much you can do. Negotiators have their positions decided months in advance so I often tell people that they should use COP to build networks and learn the language so they can influence negotiators in the interim times before and after COPs.
Finally, I would suggest checking out AlterCOP30, a Singapore-based summit aimed to make climate discussions more accessible. This year there is a whole suite of events for AlterCOP30 hosted in Australia.
I’ll leave you with the words of Amy Blain from Bushfires Survivors Australia and the Chair of Peoples Climate Assembly, to underscore the importance of an ambitious and participatory COP30:
Our homes, communities, and environments are being destroyed. Our resilience, survival, very existence, depends on all governments taking responsibility. We all lose if not.”
Read full comments provided to Croakey here.
This article originally appeared on Croakey.org.
Isabelle Zhu-Maguire is a PhD Candidate at the Australian National University’s School of Regulation and Global Governance where she researches the geopolitical causes and implications of climate security agendas in the Pacific region.
The statements or opinions expressed in this article reflect the views of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official policy of the AMA, the MJA or InSight+ unless so stated.
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