Can the Amazon breathe life into climate diplomacy?
From 10 to 21 November 2025, world leaders will gather in Belém, Brazil, for the 30th UN Climate Conference (COP30). The choice of venue, at the mouth of the Amazon, gives both symbolic and practical weight to a crucial moment for global climate diplomacy. Ten years after the Paris Agreement, countries are expected to show whether ambition can still match reality. The setting highlights both the promise and paradox of climate action: the world’s largest rainforest, vital to stabilizing global temperatures, is also a frontline of economic pressure and competing claims for justice from the Global South. In that sense, Belém mirrors the world’s dilemma: how to fund a fair transition without fracturing global trust.
What’s at stake: turning promises into policy
COP30 is not just another climate conference; it’s the first where Paris Agreement signatories will submit new or updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) extending targets to 2035. These updates will be the litmus test for whether the 1.5 °C goal remains viable.
Beyond targets, three intertwined priorities dominate the agenda:
- Finance: Brazil’s “Baku to Belém Roadmap” proposes scaling up climate finance for developing economies to around $1.3 trillion per year by 2035, an aspirational jump from the long-delayed $100 billion goal finally met in 2023.
- Fairness: Emerging economies are urging reforms to multilateral development banks to lower borrowing costs, and to mobilize private capital. The EU, for its part, is expected to propose 70% emissions cut from 1990 levels by 2035 and pledge €31.7 billion in international climate finance. Yet with developing country investment needs reaching $2.4 trillion annually by 2030, the gap between ambition and affordability remains the central fault line.
- Forests: Brazil is putting forests, biodiversity, and Indigenous stewardship at the center of talks, promoting a just transition that reconciles growth with ecological integrity.
Together, these priorities define what’s at stake: not just whether countries promise more, but whether they can trust and afford to deliver.
The money question
If Paris was about promises, Belém will be about payment plans. Climate finance remains the bottleneck of global action. Developed nations hit their $100 billion annual target only in 2023 years late and unevenly distributed. Now, discussions are shifting from billions to trillions and toward reforming the financial plumbing that determines where and how green capital flows.
Negotiators will focus on blended finance mechanisms, multilateral development bank reforms, and de-risking tools to make private investment viable in emerging markets. These discussions may sound technical, but their implications are vast: they’ll decide which sectors attract capital, how energy systems evolve, and who benefits from the low carbon transition.
As depicted in Figure 1, despite record pledges, actual climate finance flows remain far below what’s needed for a 1.5 °C pathway. In simple terms, overall development finance is rising, but climate tagged funds, are lagging.
Figure1 : Multilateral development finance vs. climate finance (2013–2022). OECD Climate Finance Dashboard, 2024 data.
The Amazon effect
Hosting COP30 in the Amazon is more than symbolic, it’s strategic. Forests are both casualties and solutions in the climate story, and Brazil aims to turn that narrative into leverage. By linking forest preservation with economic opportunity through bioeconomy investment, carbon markets, and technology transfer, Brazil hopes to show that environmental protection and development can coexist.
If Belém delivers even modest progress on forest finance, biodiversity protection, or transparent NDC implementation, it would represent a meaningful step. In climate diplomacy, momentum often matters as much as megawatts.
After thirty COPs, the science has never been clearer, and the economics never tougher.
Belém may not deliver a breakthrough, but it could restore trust in the global process. The measure of success will be whether countries leave with credible plans that blend climate urgency with fiscal realism.
At Ortelius, we help bridge the gap between climate ambition and economic reality.