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Opinion
Ginger Cassady is Executive Director, Rainforest Action Network
Credit: UN News/Felipe de Carvalho
BELÉM, Brazil, Nov 21 2025 (IPS) – Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon River, was always going to be a symbolic host for the UN COP30 climate summit, but the mood here has gone far beyond symbolism.
Indigenous Peoples, forest communities, women, workers and youth have set the tone in the streets and in the many grassroots spaces across the city. Their message has been consistent and clear — the Amazon cannot survive under the same financial system that is destroying it.
Inside the talks, however, governments are still trying to confront a planetary emergency while operating within a global economic architecture built for extraction. Debt burdens, high borrowing costs, reliance on extractive commodities, volatile currencies and investor-driven pressures all shape what is deemed “possible” long before negotiators put pen to paper.
This is the constraint the UN climate regime cannot escape: countries are expected to deliver climate action within a financial order that makes that action prohibitively expensive.
For wealthier countries, maintaining this structure shields their budgets and geopolitical leverage. For many developing countries, pushing for more ambitious outcomes means navigating the limits imposed by debt service and credit ratings. Emerging economies face their own entanglements, tied to commodity markets and large-scale extractive industries that remain politically powerful.
Overlaying this landscape is the relentless influence of lobbyists from fossil fuel companies, agribusiness conglomerates, commodity traders and major banks. Their presence across delegations and side events narrows the space for solutions that would challenge their business models.
What remains “deliverable” tends to be voluntary measures, market mechanisms and cautious language—steps that do not shift the structural incentives driving deforestation, fossil expansion and land grabs.
The Just Transition Debate Exposes the Real Fault Line
Nowhere is this tension more visible in the final hours of COP30 than in the negotiations over the Just Transition Work Programme. Many industrialized countries continue to frame just transition in narrow domestic terms: retraining workers and adjusting industries. For most of the G77, it is inseparable from land governance, food systems, mineral access, rights protections and—above all—financing that does not reproduce dependency and extraction.
The proposed Belém Action Mechanism reflects this broader vision. It could embed rights, community leadership, implementation support and a mandate to confront the systemic barriers that make unjust transitions the norm. But its language remains heavily bracketed — a sign of both political resistance and the pressure from vested interests uncomfortable with shifting power toward developing countries and frontline communities.
Debt-Based Forest Finance: The TFFF’s Structural Risks
The Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF), launched by Brazil ahead of COP30, has become a flashpoint for these concerns.