“For us, it’s very important,” says Guindani, an advocate of cooperative food systems who comes from a family of farmers. The shelves of Raízes’s modest showroom were stocked with the fruits of their labour: organic white rice, chocolate made from Bahian cocoa and coffee beans from the southern reaches of Brazil’s Minas Gerais state. Plus a trendy yellow ballcap boasting “Agroecologia” on the front for good measure.  

But nothing can compete with the international exposure of COP. Raízes received another boost thanks to famed Indigenous Brazilian chef Tainá Marajoara, who was in charge of catering for world leaders at the conference and had invited the start-up to showcase its products alongside her. “All the work and effort we’ve put so far into raising awareness around our brand really has been a drop in the ocean,” Guindani says.  

Guindani started the Raízes do Campo project in 2018 in an attempt to help transform the food supply model in Brazil, bringing small-scale producers closer to Brazilian consumers and creating a more equitable system to deliver fair earnings to farmers. The start-up officially launched in 2022, marketing products by hundreds of cooperative producers under a single brand. Its line includes coffee, chocolate, rice, beans, sugar and fruit juices. Three years later, it now represents some 3,000 producers. Along the way, Guindani has come up against myriad challenges, everything from needing barcodes in order to sell in supermarkets to understanding product placement in the aisles. She has learned that the one of the greatest challenge revolves around storytelling – how to help consumers understand the higher costs of sustainable products that abide by an agroecology ethos.  

“We couldn’t market this coffee as if it is any coffee from any hacienda,” Guindani says. So they created something called the “spiral of agroecology,” which assigns value along three pillars: social, economic and environmental. They meet with each cooperative to learn about their process, and then try to guide consumers to understand the attention that the producer places on each of those pillars. So, for example, if there are no women who are part of the management of the cooperative, it may rank lower on the social spiral. “The consumer has to understand that there is a difference,” says Guindani, who has long worked in the farming cooperative movement in Latin America. “At Raízes do Campo, our idea was to turn the families into the protagonists.” 

Proponents of agroecology took COP30 as an opportunity to showcase how small-scale and family farming can transform food systems and provide lasting solutions to climate change. It is the first time that family farming has occupied a formal space at the climate conference, says Paulo Petersen, a Brazilian special envoy for family farming at COP30.  

Petersen wants policymakers to recognize family farming as a “decisive actor” in restructuring food systems that are currently responsible for one-third of greenhouse gas emissions globally. In Brazil, family farming is the backbone of its food system, even if it is largely invisible. Family farms make up 77% of Brazil’s five million rural properties, according to the World Bank, and produce most of what more than 200 million Brazilians eat. While COP30 did not produce an agreement regarding agroecology, Petersen says, their voice was stronger than ever: “Our presence in different spaces at COP was about creating our own narrative.”  

The role that food systems play in the climate battle has only recently joined the global conversation. But it’s Big Ag that takes up most of the room, even now as the narrative shifts into technological advances that promote “regenerative” or “climate intelligent” agriculture. Industrial agriculture has sought to encompass family farming in its messaging and lay claim to practices that support biodiversity and equity. 

“Family agriculture is not part of Big Ag,” Petersen stresses. “What has happened in the last 50 years is that industrial agriculture has disconnected agriculture from its natural environment, production from consumption, and nutrition from health,” he says. Monoculture farming and commodities-based agriculture destabilize the ecological environment in a way that is then remedied with pesticides and chemical fertilizers, he says, which have their own detrimental effect. 

“Family agroecology is a recognition of the peasant farmer methods of doing agriculture, that is based on diverse production, biodiversity, culture and local markets,” Petersen says. Its principles are not just ecological but economic, since a large part of the production is to feed the families themselves. That which is meant for sale requires local markets – but the farmers are at the mercy of powerful middlemen.  

Guindani has seen this first-hand, and how those unequal power balances leave families with meagre returns. “Since they are small pieces of land, and small productive units, they don’t have enough of a volume to make it to the bigger market,” she says. So, it’s the wholesale buyer that ends up occupying an outsized role, scooping up the product, generating volume and leaving the earlier links of the value chain further behind.   

At Raízes do Campo, our idea was to turn [family farmers] into the protagonists.

– Carla Guindani, executive director, Raízes do Campo

In order to reap the benefit of the agroecological family-farming model, it has to be integrated into food distribution systems that reduce energy consumption in processing, packaging, refrigeration and transport and shorten the chain of intermediaries. That means that public investment can’t just be directed at the small farmer; it must be invested in the entire supply chain that creates the conditions for it to make a wider impact.  

Petersen points to policies in Brazil’s semi-arid region in the northeast that helped turn around an area that is home to half the country’s family farms, and is particularly vulnerable to droughts. The policies provided public services and social protection to farming families, including a cistern system with access to potable water. And it devised local chains of supply and demand that supported small-scale farms. The result is an area that is now more resilient and better able to withstand the shocks of droughts that have become more extreme.  

“What we’re saying is that there isn’t a policy for the climate,” Petersen says. “There are policies for food sovereignty, and it’s those policies that generate mitigating effects around greenhouse gas emissions, that promote adaptation, food security, women’s empowerment and local economies. It’s a win-win effect.”  

For Guindani, the focus continues to be on telling the story of Brazil’s family farmers, who are key to a more sustainable future.

Natalie Alcoba is a Buenos Aires-based journalist and senior editor at Corporate Knights. 

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But that doesn’t mean the project is dead.

Climate action groups, governments, development agencies and even some banks and investors are holding out hope that the trail-blazing fund – known as the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) and spearheaded by COP30 host Brazil – can become a reality, providing billions of dollars annually to halt tropical deforestation.

“This is a landmark moment for nature and climate finance,” Kirsten Schuijt, director general of the World Wildlife Fund, said in a statement. Ani Dasgupta, CEO of the World Resources Institute, said the fund “has real potential to be a breakthrough for the world’s forests.”

Yet only a handful of COP countries pledged to invest in the fund, totalling $6.6 billion in initial capital, well short of the $25-billion target for government contributions set by Brazil. Brazil is aiming to raise a further $100 billion in private money from asset managers, investment funds, private investors, philanthropic organizations and corporations, for a total fund size of $125 billion. (All funds in U.S. dollars.)

The initial contributors included Norway, Brazil, Indonesia, Germany, France, Colombia and Portugal. These countries pledged to invest in the all-important first tier of TFFF’s capital, money that would be used to provide first-loss guarantees to cushion private investors against losses.

Despite the small initial contribution, 53 countries endorsed the concept, suggesting there could be more public money to come. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Asian Infrastructure and Development Bank – two of the world’s largest development banks – are also considering investment in the fund, according to the Devex media platform on international development.

And Daniel Hanna, head of sustainable and transition finance for Barclays, said the British-based bank is looking to support the fund through bond underwriting services. Underwriting is a critical part of the process to sell bonds to institutional investors. “I remain very optimistic around the TFFF moving forward,” Hanna said.

Forests are ‘worth more standing than felled’

The fund was one of the signature projects announced by Brazil at this year’s COP, which was held in the Amazon rainforest city of Belém. The concept was held out as a way for private finance to ramp up support for forest and climate protection while addressing inequalities between the Global North and South.

Tropical forests are suffering severe deforestation from commercial agriculture (particularly from beef, soy and palm oil), logging, mining and infrastructure development, moving the forests from carbon sinks to carbon sources. The fund would be an endowment to provide permanent funding to tropical nations to keep their existing forests intact. “It is an unprecedented initiative,” said Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in launching the fund at COP. “Forests are worth far more standing than felled.”

The fund plans to invest in government and corporate bonds (excluding bonds in fossil fuels and environmentally destructive sectors) primarily in developing countries.

The fund is also based on a “blended finance” model. The sponsor money from governments would provide a reserve against losses by private investors, mitigating the risk of placing capital in higher-interest investments. This would enable the fund to attract capital from a broad range of market players such as pension funds, asset managers and investment funds.

Brazil’s balancing act at COP30

The total target return is 7.6%. Investors would receive the lion’s share of this income (targeting a 4.9% return), and the remaining 2.7% would be used to pay developing countries a fee for maintaining tracts of tropical forest within their boundaries. Penalties would be incurred for deforestation. Indigenous communities on those lands would receive at least 20% of the funds to manage the forests.

At the target level of capitalization of $125 billion, the fund would generate $3 to $4 billion annually to be disbursed to about 75 tropical countries and their Indigenous communities. The World Bank estimates this would work out to about $4 per hectare of protected forest land.

TFFF is “quite unique and quite pioneering” in the world of blended finance, says Nick Zelenczuk, a researcher with the Toronto-based Convergence blended finance think tank. Blended finance models typically use public capital to cushion losses by private investors in higher-risk impact ventures. But rather than generating a direct return from the project, TFFF shares the proceeds of the bond fund between the forest and the investors. “Using the return from the fund to drive the incentive scheme is novel in the [blended finance] market,” Zelenczuk says.

Forest payments versus carbon markets

One of the reasons there is high interest in making TFFF work is that it is considered a more promising climate finance model than carbon markets, the option that has commanded much attention at recent COP meetings.

The idea of carbon markets is that corporations or financial institutions buy “carbon offsets” that are linked to specific volumes of carbon avoided, reduced or removed through activities such as reforestation or renewable energy. The system of accounting for these carbon volumes is not well established. The value of carbon credits is based on estimates of future carbon reductions, estimates that may be wrong to begin with or fail to meet projections. A study last year of more than 2,000 carbon-credit projects found that only 16% of the projects achieved the carbon savings claimed. As a result, corporations and investors are losing interest in carbon markets, and money for projects is drying up.

The TFFF represents an alternative focused on forest lands – not estimated carbon – which can be transparently and accurately tracked over time. If the lands become deforested, the annual payments will stop or be reduced.

“Offsets have too often been used as a license to pollute,” Australian billionaire businessman Andrew Forrest said in a statement announcing a $10-million investment in TFFF. “They categorically do not work the vast majority of times they have been independently measured. This is the opposite. The TFFF makes forest protection a strong economic choice in favour of our environment – rewarding countries that actually keep their forests intact.”

But will there be enough money?

With such a disappointing start, however, will the fund be large enough to create lasting impact? After the British government signalled early on at COP that it would not be supporting the TFFF, the project lost some momentum.

At the current level of capitalization, tropical forest nations will receive only 16 cents per hectare per year, a far cry from the $4 projected by the World Bank. But the Brazilian government believes the fund is well positioned to attract more funds. Finance Minister Fernando Haddad called the initial investment “auspicious,” anticipating that “after this first investment . . . we will have a very good start.”

Launch of the TFFF fund has come at a timely moment. The U.S. government under Donald Trump has slashed development assistance and decimated its international development agency, USAID. Other countries like the United Kingdom are also cutting assistance to poor countries. At the same time, market-based approaches like carbon credits have fallen out of favour.

A third way is needed. TFFF represents a new approach, one that uses the financial power of the markets to create a very non-market outcome, the survival of the world’s tropical forests.

Eugene Ellmen writes on sustainable business and finance. He is a former executive director of the Canadian Social Investment Organization (now the Responsible Investment Association).

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The Brazilian president’s forceful remarks at the outset of negotiations in the Amazonian city of Belém were meant to set the stage for a new chapter in international climate diplomacy. On the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, the time had come, according to Lula, to stop arguing about what the historic agreement requires and instead focus on implementation – actually taking the steps required to both reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect countries against the coming economic and public health consequences wrought by climate change.

In the same speech, Lula called for a “road map” for the world’s phaseout of fossil fuels. This was intended to make good on an international agreement made two years ago at COP28, when UN member countries reached consensus on the need to “transition away” from coal, oil and gas. The so-called UAE consensus, named for the host country of that year’s conference, marked the first time a blanket transition away from fossil fuels was ever officially mentioned in the Paris Agreement framework.

But the Brazilian delegation, which was responsible for overseeing COP30 negotiations and ultimately brokering a new deal, was confronted by a different truth than the president envisioned. The viability of the planet may come down to a few degrees Celsius of warming, but in Belém’s fluorescently lit negotiating rooms, everything ultimately came down to dollars and cents.

In the end, it may well have been a more honest COP than those that preceded it – just not in the way President Lula intended.

The most substantial new agreement negotiated at the conference reflected this realism. The delegations agreed that, by 2035, the world would triple international funding provided to help developing nations adapt to the consequences of a warmer world.

To many, however, the list of missed opportunities spoke louder than the victory on climate adaptation. Brazil’s proposed road map did not make the official ledger. Indeed, there were no new agreements to wind down fossil fuel use or curb deforestation. The latter omission appeared to be either an intentional accident or a diplomatic blunder: the COP presidency had put the new, controversial language on fossil fuels in the same sentence as the comparatively benign clause on halting deforestation, dooming it by association.

The Paris Agreement’s temperature targets, which aim to keep global warming “well below” 2°C and ideally below 1.5°C over preindustrial levels, remain as abstract as ever after COP30. A detailed plan to help nations meet emission-reduction goals that would comply with the Paris Agreement was axed from the final decision.

Just before the conference began, the UN put out its annual “emissions gap” report, which found that the world is on track for warming of between 2.3 and 2.8°C this century. The agreement made in Belém seems unlikely to change that math. Ten years after the Paris Agreement, its champions still have not found a way to get the world to live up to the landmark deal’s most famous goals.

This year’s summit took place at the edge of the Amazon, a symbolic decision meant to uplift the rainforest and the Indigenous Peoples who live in it. Though the conference was rocked by protests and demands for greater Indigenous participation and protections, a collegial air took root among the official negotiators for the first half of the two-week conference. With U.S. President Donald Trump thumbing his nose at the proceedings by refusing to send an official delegation, other world leaders were keen to prove that international progress on climate change could continue in the absence of U.S. cooperation.

Prior to Lula’s statements at the beginning of the negotiations, the expectation was that the discussions would largely focus on finding a path toward reducing deforestation, mobilizing US$1.3 trillion in climate financing that nations had agreed to during last year’s COP29, ensuring that worldwide decarbonization occurs in an equitable manner, and strengthening countries’ “nationally determined contributions,” or NDCs – national plans produced every five years that detail exactly how countries aim to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.

As the conference stretched into its second and final week, momentum for Brazil’s fossil fuel transition road map seemed to grow, especially among Latin American countries, the United Kingdom and the European Union. André Aranha Corrêa do Lago, vice minister for climate, energy and environment at the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the official leader of COP30, rapidly got more than 90 nations to support putting a shift away from fossil fuels at the heart of the deal coming together in Belém. (The final agreements at each COP are adopted by consensus among negotiating parties, which include career diplomats, former ambassadors, environment ministers, and large teams of supporting staff for each country; the United Kingdom, for example, had about 70 people officially involved in their negotiations.)

On Tuesday of last week, when the first draft of the deal was released, the language was a more forceful commitment to a global energy transition than most attendees were expecting. The agreement – several pages of proposed commitments that do Lago termed the “Global Mutirão,” using a word belonging to the Tupian languages of South America that signifies collective work – included a line indicating that the agreement “decides to establish” a “Belém Roadmap to 1.5,” a reference to the most ambitious temperature target adopted at Paris in 2015. The word “decides” turned heads, as it suggested legally binding authority.

Brazil’s balancing act at COP30

“It would have been crazy,” said Felix Finkbeiner, founder of a conservation organization called Plant for the Planet who has been attending COPs since 2010. “Transitioning away from fossil fuels was set as a vague goal at COP28, but this would have been an actual process that initiated a massive step forward.”

Just days later, however, do Lago’s dream of making the first Amazonian COP a historic success was on the verge of falling apart. A new draft, published on the last official day of the conference, included no mention of a fossil fuel road map at all, triggering a flurry of new negotiations that stretched late into the night on Friday. Two cruise ships housing some 4,000 COP attendees, including many delegates, needed to depart on Saturday morning no matter what. A deal had to be struck.

As the conference stretched past its official ending time, the parties negotiating behind closed doors became increasingly frustrated with the lack of movement on the fossil fuel road map. The obstacles to success, said Peter Wittoeck, one of the negotiators for Belgium, were the same oil-rich countries that had been blocking more ambitious action on climate change at COPs for decades.

“The major pushback is coming from the Like-Minded Developing Countries and the Arab Group,” Wittoeck said, referring, in the former case, to a coalition of large emerging economies that includes China, India and South Africa, as well as a group of 20 Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Those nations, he said, “represent fossil fuel interests, obviously, and the fear of being limited in their economic development.”

The countries that had coalesced around the road map in the preceding days were enraged. “We are being silenced here,” said Irene Vélez Torres, director of the Colombian National Environmental Agency and one of the negotiators working on behalf of Colombia.

“I am saying it with a heavy heart, but what is now on the table is clearly no deal,” said European Union Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra. But some developing nations, including those on the front lines of destructive climate impacts, said that agreeing to a road map away from fossil fuels would unfairly limit their economic growth. “Countries that have used all sources of energy in the last 200 years and have achieved the pinnacle of industrial growth and yet not stopped using all those sources of energy are telling us ‘stop growing,’” Aisha Humaira, the head of the delegation for Pakistan, told The Guardian.

At the height of the drama on Friday night, members of the European Union suggested they might have to walk out of negotiations over the road map. “It’s not possible to have less ambition than we had 10 years ago,” said Petr Hladík, environment minister for Czechia, outside the negotiating rooms. U.K. Energy Minister Edward Miliband called the process “painful, difficult, and frustrating.”

The European Union and the United Kingdom talked a big game, and Latin American countries like Colombia put up a fierce fight, but when the conference ended, new language on fossil fuels was nowhere to be found in the final document. The UN climate talks operate on consensus, and with the United States absent from negotiations, proponents of stronger language against fossil fuels faced a stronger, more organized bloc of countries, including two of the world’s largest economies in China and India, who also represent more than a third of the world’s population.

So what did survive the heated negotiations? To everyone’s surprise, the biggest agenda item to come out of COP30 was a plan for rich countries to help poorer nations strengthen themselves against the consequences of hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and other climate impacts – an idea that has long lingered around the edges of COP negotiations. But even that win didn’t come easy.

For years, one of the foundational planks of international climate negotiations has been the notion that the rich countries most responsible for causing climate change have a responsibility to help poorer developing countries prepare for problems that they have done comparatively little to cause. This preparation might include infrastructure projects like seawalls, levees, flood control measures, water preservation systems and home-hardening initiatives. The so-called Least Developed Countries, a negotiating bloc of nations including Bangladesh, Chad, Haiti and Tuvalu, call this “survival funding.”

But this financing, known as adaptation funding, has always taken a back seat to financing for mitigation, which is typically the work of building out renewable sources of energy. That’s generally because those who fund mitigation have a clearer path to earning a return on their investments than those who fund adaptation. In other words, it’s less obvious how to make money off of sea walls and flood control systems than it is from green energy.

Still, adaptation aid for developing nations is one of the pillars of the original Paris Agreement – not just a charitable notion. The European Union, Japan and other donor countries have a legal responsibility under the agreement to send money through this pipeline.

But how much money, how quickly it’s delivered and what kinds of projects it should fund has always been a matter of debate. This year, it stormed into the spotlight, and it’s not hard to see why. The consequences of climate change have begun to spill into plain view, and countries are starting to feel serious economic pressure as a result. Gallagher Re, a global reinsurance broker, estimates that the direct cost of natural perils around the world in 2024 totalled a staggering US$417 billion. Public and private insurance companies covered more than $150 billion of that, meaning the rest of the balance was covered by governments, policyholders, taxpayers and everyday people.

The Least Developed Countries and the Africa Group, a bloc of African nations, don’t always have the same set of priorities, despite having some of the same member countries. But a member of Kenya’s negotiating team, who spoke on the condition of anonymity given the ongoing nature of negotiations, told Grist that the two groups combined forces to push for more adaptation financing. That strategy apparently paid off. As the conference entered its frenzied final week, this mega-coalition of countries pushed the European Union, the United Kingdom and other developed countries to up their adaptation financing commitments.

European negotiators told Grist that the focus on adaptation put them in a tough spot. In the absence of a U.S. presence at COP, Europe has sought to position itself as the de facto global leader on climate action by trying to force the fossil fuel road map language into the final text. But its negotiators quickly found that the developing countries they were trying to align themselves with were laser-focused on adaptation financing.

“The situation now seems that we are not able to gather critical mass around the balance between high mitigation and being reasonable toward developing countries on adaptation,” Wittoeck said in the midst of negotiations.

But increased international aid is a tougher sell than it was even just a few years ago. Over the past several years, European leaders have been trying in vain to tamp down the slow creep of far-right parties in the union’s member states while simultaneously trying to salvage the European Green Deal, a plan to reach carbon neutrality by mid-century. Russia’s ongoing war with Ukraine has further complicated matters. The European Union and the United Kingdom recently repurposed climate resilience aid for military spending.

“The world has changed,” said Joe Thwaites, a senior advocate for international climate finance at the U.S.-based Natural Resources Defense Council. “They are feeling the political strain back home and are very sensitive to headlines about how much money is being spent internationally.”

The final deal on adaptation, reached in the early hours of Saturday morning, stated that developed nations must at least triple their adaptation financing by 2035. The language is either historically ambitious or epically subpar, depending on who you ask. A previous deal reached at COP26 in Glasgow dictated that adaptation finance would double by 2025 to US$40 billion per year, a number countries have not been able to reach. That deal expires this year, and members of the Africa Group and others hoped to include language in the text specifying that the tripling of adaptation funding should be based on that $40 billion number, meaning a new goal of $120 billion per year. Plus, they wanted the tripling to occur by 2030, not 2035.

The final version of the deal does not specify what the baseline number is, which means different countries might use different figures for their calculations. “I find it a bit vague,” the Kenya negotiator told Grist, adding that “the current needs are so huge that even the $120 billion is a drop in the ocean.” (The UN estimates that countries need as much as US$400 billion per year to properly respond to climate change.)

The COP of the truth cannot support an outcome that ignores science.

– Daniela Duran Gonzalez, Colombian Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development

Still, the boost in adaptation funding was a welcome development for many countries at the conference. “This was our priority and we made it a red line,” said Evans Njewa, chair of the Least Developed Countries group.

With the fossil fuel road map off the table and a deal on adaptation financing inked, the exhausted COP boss do Lago affirmed the COP30 consensus agreement on Saturday afternoon to loud applause. But the final conference plenary was engulfed in drama again just moments later, when Colombia’s Daniela Durán González, head of international affairs for the Colombian Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, registered an objection. In his haste to end the conference, do Lago had inadvertently passed over a point of order raised by Colombia during the gavelling of the main agreement text. Gonzalez, and representatives of many other nations, wanted the final agreement to include language around fossil fuels.

“The COP of the truth cannot support an outcome that ignores science,” González said.

Do Lago had to pause the plenary to confer with Colombia and other nations. After 30 minutes of haggling, the parties came back to the table to finish the conference with an agreement to continue conversations in the future. Do Lago also promised to launch two road maps of his own, one aimed at phasing out fossil fuels and the other in service of ending deforestation. Those efforts will take place outside the binding authority of the Paris Agreement, however, and are essentially opt-in endeavours.

Nevertheless, do Lago’s promise to continue fighting for a fossil fuel phaseout, paired with an announcement that Colombia and The Netherlands will host a first-ever international conference on a fossil fuel phaseout in 2026, proves that the mitigation conversation soldiers on.

“Today was a good day for multilateralism; it was a mixed day for the climate,” Jennifer Morgan, a former climate envoy for Germany, told Grist.

“Clearly the decisions here don’t put us on track for 1.5, but they accelerate implementation,” she added. “Gosh, we have so much more work to do.”

Editor’s note: The Natural Resources Defense Council is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This article originally appeared in Grist at grist.org/international/cop30-brazil-paris-agreement. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. 

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It’s the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, that lofty climate pledge that has helped push – in some cases reluctantly – countries toward carbon-cutting measures. COP30 organizers are determined to make this year different, shifting from “ambition to implementation,” and they’re making the point with a backdrop of stark inequality.  

“We cannot hide the fact that we are in a world with lots of inequalities and where sustainability and fighting climate change is something that has to get closer to people,” André Aranha Corrêa do Lago, president designate for COP30, said in an interview with the Associated Press. “President Lula wants this to be the COP of truth. He wants people to be told the truth about how climate change will affect their countries,” he added in September.  

Brazil proved to be its own study in contradictions in the lead-up to Belém, which has made headlines for a dearth in accommodations for the influx of thousands of delegates, as well as a controversial new highway cutting through rainforest to facilitate the conference. South America’s largest country, with a population of more than 212 million, Brazil has sought to regain environmental bona fides that were left in tatters under the previous administration of Jair Bolsonaro, when deforestation ran rampant in the Amazon.  

Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, former union leader turned president, assumed his third term in office in 2023 with bold pledges to end deforestation in the Amazon by 2030, boosting the use of satellite monitoring and other mechanisms to guard against illegal logging and mining in the so-called lungs of the earth. He also established a dedicated ministry for Indigenous Peoples as a way to protect their rights, setting out to demarcate their territories. In the lead-up to COP30, Brazil launched a tropical-forest conservation fund that aims to raise US$125 billion. Hosting COP30 was an important show of his government’s environmental commitment. Brazil has pledged to reduce its emissions by 59% and 67% below 2005 levels by 2035. But various activists and organizations have drawn attention to the cracks in Brazil’s narrative, not least for its plan to continue to exploit its oil reserves.  

Lula has pushed for Brazil to drill in the mouth of the Amazon, arguing that the development will help the country complete its energy transition. The Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources approved the drilling of an exploratory well in an offshore oil field in the Amazon, a site that had long been in the sights of the national oil company, Petrobras. The petroleum giant had previously been denied rights to explore, in large measure because of doubts over its ability to respond to oil spills or other accidents in the ecologically sensitive area. In its October approval, the environmental watchdog said the company had made various improvements to its emergency response plan, which led to the green light. 

Brazil is also pushing ahead with new mining projects for critical minerals, with as many as 800 mining companies exploring in the Amazon. “There is no energy transition without mining,” Alexandre Silveira, minister of mines and energy, said in early 2024. 

“Brazil cannot lead the world to a cleaner, healthier future by loosening environmental regulations, promoting a fossil fuel build out, and allowing mining projects that violate Indigenous sovereignty and destroy carbon sinks like the Amazon,” Patricia Rodriguez and Jan Morrill wrote in a commentary for Earthworks, an organization that advocates against oil, gas and mining pollution.   

The question of environmental regulations has exposed fault lines within Lula’s administration. Environment and Climate Change Minister Marina Silva, an internationally acclaimed environmentalist, slammed a decision by the Brazilian Senate in May to approve a bill that loosened environmental licensing rules, calling it a “death blow” to important protections in Brazil. Her position in turn drew the ire of industry and other sectors. The legislation was later modified, earning Silva’s support. 

But the showdown underscored the powerful forces that are at play in Brazil, which has taken an even more prominent role on the international stage as President Lula presents one of the clearest voices of opposition to U.S. President Donald Trump and his trade war tactics.  

In opening remarks at COP30 last week, Lula stressed the need for true climate commitments, to “take the scientific warnings seriously” and “face reality.” He closed by thanking people for coming to the Amazon.

“Many people did not believe that it was possible to bring a COP to an Amazonian state, because people are more used to parading around big cities,” he noted. “We wanted people to come here to see what the Amazon really is.”

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“There is no solution to the climate crisis without the recognition and protection of our territorial rights,” they wrote in a statement that called on the government to demarcate more Indigenous territories in the Amazon.

The gathering of an estimated 8,000 people from across the country, other parts of South America, the Pacific Islands and Australia came at a critical juncture, as Brazil’s Supreme Court considered a proposal that would strip Indigenous Peoples of the right to veto projects that have an impact on their ancestral lands, including mining. It also would make it easier for non-Indigenous settlers to temporarily remain on demarcated Indigenous territory.    

“The UN has already warned that this proposal weakens Indigenous sovereignty and violates international human rights law,” the Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil, a major Indigenous rights advocacy group in Brazil, said in a statement. “It represents a serious threat to environmental protection, given that Indigenous territories are critical to mitigating climate change and preserving biodiversity.”  

The proposed legislation is tied to the “time frame thesis” law in Brazil that states that Indigenous Peoples have rights only to land they occupied in October 1988. Communities say that law disregards the history of violence they suffered that made it impossible for them to occupy their traditional territories. The law was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court but was passed by the government anyway last year. It is now undergoing a “conciliation” process, in which Indigenous Peoples have a minority voice, and a new bill is being drafted.  

Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, has placed climate and Indigenous Peoples at the centre of his third term as leader of the largest country in Latin America. Reversing course from his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, whose aggressive deregulation saw rates of deforestation in the Amazon surge, da Silva is trumpeting the arrival of the UN climate conference, COP30, in the northern city of Belém in November. He has reinstated climate funds, brought back stricter greenhouse gas controls and vowed to end deforestation of the world’s largest rainforest by 2030. He has also prioritized the rights of Indigenous Peoples, naming the country’s first Indigenous minister and, after significant delays, demarcated 13 new Indigenous territories. “We are an administration that respects the Indigenous Peoples, recognizes their rights, and works day and night to protect them,” da Silva said in April.  

But many first peoples note that the pace of change is too slow, and they don’t want it to go unnoticed as the country prepares to welcome international delegates for the climate conference. The rally in Brasília included tense encounters with security forces, who on one occasion lobbed tear gas at protesters as they marched toward the congressional building.  

Kari Guajajara, a lawyer, told Al Jazeera at the Brasília gathering that Indigenous communities have made significant strides in reclaiming territory. But they have also suffered more invasions from illegal miners, poachers and loggers. “It’s a never-ending struggle,” she said.  

Take the plight of the Yanomami, one of the largest tribes in Brazil, who live in relative isolation in remote forest outposts. Numbering some 30,000 people, the Yanomami have suffered the devastating impacts of rampant illegal gold mining, which has polluted their riverways. A study in 2023 found that 84% of the nearly 300 Yanomami people from which researchers took samples had levels of mercury high enough to cause health problems. Mercury, which is commonly used to process gold in illegal mining, was also found in fish in the river the Yanomami rely on for food. “Our people are being poisoned and our women are afraid to bear children,” Dario Kopenawa, a Yanomami leader, said at the Indigenous gathering.    

Da Silva stepped up efforts to combat illegal mining with dedicated teams sent in to patrol the deep crevices of the Amazon waterways. But Kopenawa says that protection has come and gone. “As soon as the armed forces left, the illegal miners returned,” he said. “Every day we see their planes coming and going. Sometimes 15 per day.”  

Indigenous leaders such as Kopenawa plan to bring these and other urgent issues to the forefront at COP30, stressing that their “significant” participation in decision-making processes is essential to environmental protection efforts. 

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Research by Global Witness found that US asset managers BlackRock and Vanguard are among six firms holding over $11 million in active bonds issued by JBS and its subsidiaries via funds with “environmental, social and governance” (ESG) in their name.

While most of the funds’ documentation analysed explicitly cite exclusions relating to fossil fuels and controversial weapons, none outright exclude companies linked to deforestation in their screening process.

This is despite forest loss contributing to up to 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions, with agricultural clearance driving more than 90% of global tropical forest loss.

More than half of financial institutions with the largest exposure to deforestation, including BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, are yet to publish a single policy on deforestation, according to Forest 500’s 2024 annual report. This suggests overall levels of engagement from the financial sector with forest-risk companies are minimal.

“Simply incorporating the ‘ESG brand’ in fund names is often far too vague, failing to exclude climate-destructive companies like JBS,” said Global Witness’s US Senior Policy Advisor, Ashley Thomson.

“One of the clear issues with relying on self-reporting, self-managed ESG funds is the lack of standardisation on what exactly ESG means.”

Analysis by Global Witness of Eikon Refinitiv data obtained in June 2024 shows that 15 ESG-labelled funds held $11.6m in 16 JBS bonds.

“The fact that a company like JBS is included in an ESG-focused fund should speak volumes about the limitations of regulations governing these funds, and the dangers of allowing companies to grade their own homework,” Thomson added.

One of the clear issues with relying on self-reporting, self-managed ESG funds is the lack of standardisation on what exactly ESG means.

– Ashley Thomson, Global Witness’s US Senior Policy Advisor

Similar concerns have also been raised by Tariq Fancy, BlackRock’s former sustainable investment chief, who criticised the firm for “misleading investors” by using the ESG label, calling it a “dangerous placebo”. He argued that BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink made hollow promises about ESG, which were quickly abandoned when it was becoming politically controversial.

JBS is widely regarded as an ESG pariah. From 2021 to May this year, 22 investors, including banks and pension funds, have divested from JBS or its subsidiaries, citing its links to biodiversity loss and governance issues, according to the Financial Exclusion Tracker project.

Earlier this year, Global Witness published a report linking JBS, along with other meatpackers Marfrig and Minerva, to more than 80,000 football fields of deforestation in Brazil.

In addition to well-documented environmental and social concerns, JBS has faced governance issues in the past, with the executive of its parent exposed for their involvement in a widespread corruption scandal in Brazil in 2017. The executives also pleaded guilty to US foreign bribery charges in 2020 as part of a plea deal.

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Deforestation levels are down a dramatic 55.8% from 2022 to 2023, according to the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP). The largest declines occurred in the Brazilian-controlled part of the jungle, which dropped 59%, and in Colombia, which plunged 67%. Peru’s forest loss dropped 37%. “Compared to the peak year of 2020, forest loss has dropped by over two-thirds, or 67.7%,” MAAP said in a press release.

The political backdrop is impossible to ignore. President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, Brazil’s left-wing leader, has been rehabilitating the country’s environmental reputation after the tenure of Jair Bolsonaro, who created the conditions for open season on forest districts. Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, has also made the energy transition and environmental protection a cornerstone of his mandate.

The eight Amazon nations that gathered for a summit in Belém, Brazil, in August agreed to adopt more aggressive conservation methods, although they fell short of committing to stop deforestation altogether. Brazil has the largest share of the Amazon, with 60% stretching out across its territory.

An estimated 20% of the Amazon has already been cut down, driven largely by aggressive agricultural expansion, illegal mining, logging and fires. A record-setting drought this year has also primed the Amazon for forest fires, in particular in the swaths that have degraded and are in poorer health, which amounts to 40% of its surface.

Agriculture is a particular threat to the preservation of crucial carbon-capturing forest stocks around the world. In Brazil, the area occupied by agriculture grew 50% between 1985 and 2022, according to MapBiomas, gobbling up 95.1 million hectares. Much of that growth occurred in the Amazon. In its latest report card on corporate deforestation, the non-profit Ceres assessed 53 major companies, including Cargill and Procter & Gamble, facing “the greatest risks” from sourcing soy, timber and palm oil. “Most of them lack robust no-deforestation policies, despite recognizing the importance of deforestation action,” Ceres reports. Adidas and Amazon got failing grades.

U.S. food giant Cargill announced in November that it would speed up its promise to eliminate deforestation and land conversion from its supply chain of key crops, including soy, corn, wheat and cotton, in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. The company had already pledged to produce deforestation-free commodities and conversion-free soy across South America by 2030 but now says it will do so by 2025 in those three countries.

Mighty Earth, a global environmental advocacy organization, called Cargill’s announcement “important but incomplete,”  noting that it is one of the “top drivers of ecosystem destruction in Latin America.”

“Bolivia experienced a 32% increase in primary forest loss between 2021 and 2022 – four times the rate of Brazil. This is, in part, due to Cargill’s continued willingness to buy from suppliers engaged in deforestation,” Mighty Earth CEO Glenn Hurowitz wrote in November. “We’re calling on Cargill – along with the signatories of the COP27 Agribusiness Roadmap – to agree to a cut off date of 2020 to ensure this incomplete policy does not spark a ‘race to bulldoze’ in biomes such as the Grand Chaco and the Chiquitano ahead of 2025.”

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