The Baku to Belem road map has a crucial hurdle: The missing leaders

The reluctance of developed nations like the UK to foot the climate bill and the US withdrawal among key challenges to mobilise $1.3 trillion by 2035

Swarms of leaders last week descended on Brazil for the two-day World leaders’ Summit, ahead of Monday’s formal launch of the world’s biggest climate summit, to kickstart a flurry of negotiations and backroom talks that countries, including India, hope will loosen purse strings of Western nations to help the developing world adapt to global warming.

 

While the heads of government in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom (UK) made their presence felt in Belem, located on the edge of the Amazon, a tropical rainforest with snaking streams, dense foliage and a wide variety of species that acts as a giant carbon sink or as “lungs of the earth”. The leaders of the world’s biggest polluters failed to turn up. Instead, China sent Vice-Premier Ding Xuexiang and India its Ambassador to Brazil Dinesh Bhatia. American President Donald Trump, a climate sceptic, has boycotted the event.

 

Participation by heads of state or government is not a COP (Conference of Parties) tradition, as R R Rashmi, distinguished fellow at The Energy and Resources Institute, pointed out, but something that began in the beginning of this decade. That was not always the case. Ireland’s Prime Minister Micheál Martin, speaking in Belem, attributed thinning attendance by top leaders at climate summits since COP26 in Glasgow — where Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on the global stage India’s “Panchamrita” strategy to net zero by 2070 — to geopolitical turbulence and economic pressures. “At a time when political leadership has never been more vital, there are fewer of us here in Belém, fewer leaders ready to tell it as it is — temperatures are rising and the clock is ticking,” he said.

 

Indian Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav is scheduled to attend the concluding week of the November 10-21 event, an improvement over the previous COP in Baku, Azerbaijan, where Minister of State for Environment Kirti Vardhan Singh attended briefly.

 

“When you don’t send a leader or a really senior delegation there is a risk that you might lose out on some of the political capital and stature that you would otherwise get but as long as India continues to support the COP’s objectives and closes deals it’s fine,” said Hisham Mundol, chief advisor - India, Environmental Defense Fund, which works on carbon pricing and sustainability projects.  

 

China will arrive in Brazil with a large national delegation, using Belem to promote its soft power as a climate leader while trying to avoid taking leadership of the meeting, or committing itself to large-scale financing, UK market intelligence service Energy Intelligence said. Over 1,000 officials from China are expected to be in Belem.

 

COP of implementation

 

Climate experts in India have said that this will be a COP of implementation, creating a road map for funding adaptation and mitigation programmes, and detailing procedures for a United Nations-supervised global carbon market. Brazil and India are strong natural allies, they said.

 

“This year’s COP is unlikely to be about pledges. It is supposed to be more about plumbing,” Mundol said.

 

United Nations Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell, in an address on November 6, said: “It’s no longer time for negotiation. It’s time for implementation, implementation and implementation.’’

 

Brazil is pushing three priorities at Belem, said Túlio Andrade, who is director of Strategy and Alignment, COP30 Presidency, and who served as head for climate negotiations, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Brazil, at a recent webinar. The first one is multilateralism, the second accelerating implementation in response to climate urgency, and the third connecting “our process to people”.

 

Besides implementation, Brazil is leveraging COP 30 to create a global fund to save tropical forests, and, in partnership with last year’s host Azerbaijan, launched “The Baku to Belém Roadmap”, charting a path from $300 billion a year to $1.3 trillion by 2035.

 

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva launched the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), outside the framework of UN climate talks, to save rainforests globally. This is despite facing criticism that his administration has given licences to drill for oil in the Amazon. With a startup capital of $125 billion — $25 billion coming from governments and $100 billion from private investors like pension funds and asset managers — and the World Bank as a trustee, the fund plans to disburse an annual $2.8 billion for rainforests. Barring Norway’s $3 billion pledge in the form of loans over 10 years provided others chip in, there are no major commitments as yet —with the UK declining to use taxpayer’s money for the initiative. Brazil and Indonesia, which house the world’s biggest rainforests, have pledged $1 billion each to the fund.

 

“There probably won’t be a lot of big-bang announcements besides the one that was done, which is the TFFF, which was announced by Brazil,’’ said Shantanu Srivastava, an analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a US think tank.

 

“Otherwise, I think what’s more keenly followed is what's going to happen with the Baku to Belem road map.’’

 

Foot the bill

 

The reluctance of developed nations like the UK, responsible for accelerating global warming, to foot the climate bill, and US withdrawal will be the biggest hurdle to the “Baku to Belem road map’’ to mobilise $1.3 trillion by 2035, climate experts say.

 

Chinese President Xi Jinping has asked Western nations to “take the lead in fulfilling emission-reduction obligations” and offer financing and technology to the Global South.

 

Stiell said over $2 trillion flowed into renewables last year. That is twice as much as what went into fossil fuels.

 

“We got from nearly nothing to $2 trillion in little more than a decade, and that’s with over two-thirds of the world’s countries still struggling for the financial agency to take climate action at scale,” he added. 

 

“The current boom could go from $2 trillion to many multiples of that, and fast,’’ Stiell said. “Developed countries must take the lead in mobilising $300 billion annually — delivering affordable, predictable finance at the agreed scale.’’

 

Delay in funding could be catastrophic for climate as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who opened the leaders summit last Thursday, said. Even after nationally defined contributions are in, the world remains in a “well above” 2 degrees Celsius warming trajectory, he added. The UN Environment Programme’s newly released “Emissions Gap Report 2025” came to the same conclusion.

 

Celeste Saulo, head of the World Meteorological Organization, said that the past three years were the warmest on record and this would be either the second or third warmest.

 

“The hard truth is that we have failed to ensure we remain below 1.5 degrees Celsius” (of global warming compared to pre-industrial levels),” Guterres said, warning that a temporary overshoot in the early 2030s is “inevitable”.