In the Amazon city of Belém, COP30 was supposed to renew the Paris dream. Instead, it became a summit on edge: absent leaders, street protests and a climate conference that literally short-circuited.

By Carlos Taylhardat | November 20, 2025

Morning in Belém should feel like a promise. From the Guajará Bay, the United Nations compound for COP30 looks almost staged: banners about climate justice, delegates with lanyards, the Amazon rainforest sitting just beyond the waterline.

This was meant to be the conference that proved Paris was not just a line in history but a living contract. Brazil branded it the “Amazon COP” and the “COP of truth,” a summit held inside the world’s largest rainforest to show that climate diplomacy could finally match the scale of the crisis.

Instead, the story of Belém now sounds very different: a U.S. president who has called global warming a “con job” sending no senior delegation, a Canadian prime minister who stays home, Indigenous protesters blocking the main entrance and accusing organisers of speaking about them without them, and a jolt of panic when a short-circuit and small blaze at the venue forced evacuations and repairs before talks resumed.

Good intentions are still here: pledges, speeches, draft texts. But the gap between promise and delivery has never been more visible.

To understand why this matters, especially after a decade of broken climate headlines, it helps to see Belém through three different lenses.

Context: From Paris to Belém, and a Summit Under Strain

COP30 marks ten years since the Paris Agreement. Back then, leaders pledged to keep global warming well below 2°C and ideally near 1.5°C. In Belém, negotiators were supposed to show that those words still meant something: tougher national plans, real money for poorer countries, and concrete protection for forests like the Amazon.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva put enormous political capital into the event. His government promised to end illegal deforestation by 2030, revive the Amazon Fund and turn Brazil into a “climate leader,” not a reluctant participant. Hosting COP30 in Belém was the visual proof: the world would meet not in a European capital, but on the rainforest’s edge.

Yet even before delegations landed, the storyline was fraying. As we reported in “Amazon Climate Conference and the War Before Peace: Belém & Rio COP30”, a massive police operation in Rio’s favelas killed more than a hundred people in what authorities called a security sweep. Lula apologised and insisted that “the Amazon deserves peace, and the world deserves action,” but the contrast between the summit’s moral language and the violence at home was impossible to miss.

Then came the absences. Donald Trump, back in the White House and on record calling climate commitments a “very expensive hoax,” sent no senior officials to Belém, signalling that Washington would not anchor any new climate finance deal. Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, stayed in Ottawa, leaving his climate minister and officials to represent the country. Several other leaders from major emitting nations opted for pre-recorded messages or late, brief visits instead of full participation.

On the ground, Indigenous leaders and community groups from across the Amazon basin organised their own marches and assemblies. Many complained that their role had been reduced to ceremony while real decisions were taken behind glass. One banner outside the venue read simply: “Another COP without us?”

The mood darkened further when protesters later forced their way into part of the official “blue zone.” A short-circuit and small fire near one entrance triggered an evacuation, visible smoke and a temporary closure of the main doors while firefighters and engineers checked the damage. Negotiations resumed, but the symbolism was hard to ignore: a conference about averting catastrophe momentarily halted by its own infrastructure.

Against this backdrop, the three narratives below tell the story of Belém as it was meant to be, how it went off script, and what remains beneath the noise.

Narrative 1: The Summit That Had to Succeed

In the first worldview, Belém is the one climate summit the world could not afford to squander.

From this perspective, Brazil did almost everything right. It brought the talks to the forest itself, not a distant hotel ballroom. It arrived with stronger national commitments, sharper promises on deforestation and a message that the Amazon is not just Brazil’s problem but the planet’s lungs. Lula’s speeches echoed that line:

“We will not allow the Amazon to be a graveyard of promises.”

Inside the halls, negotiators could point to progress, at least on paper. There were new pledges to replenish climate finance, more detailed discussions of the “loss and damage” fund for countries already hit by floods and drought, and stronger language on protecting forests, including the Congo and Southeast Asian rainforests alongside the Amazon. City leaders and governors announced subnational deals on transport, building codes and methane, often moving faster than national governments.

For many delegates from vulnerable states, Belém was also a rare moment of visibility. Leaders from small island nations spoke of disappearing coastlines; African ministers described the costs of both drought and sudden, violent rain. Youth activists from across Latin America framed the talks as a justice issue, demanding that rich emitters finally pay into funds they helped design.

In this narrative, the Amazon COP is a flawed but necessary machine. Progress is incremental, not cinematic. Draft texts are painstakingly improved, year by year. Even a modest strengthening of pledges and finance is counted as success, because the alternative is a world with no common plan at all.

Seen from here, the story of Belém is not “disaster,” but fragile achievement: a summit that bends the trajectory a little closer to the promises of Paris while buying time for technology and domestic politics to catch up.

Narrative 2: Good Intentions, Fractured Summit

The second worldview starts from a colder place: Belém as a case study in how climate diplomacy can look impressive and still fail where it matters.

Critics here point first to geopolitics. The United States, still the world’s second-largest emitter and the issuer of the dollar, arrived in minimalist mode. A president who has called global warming “bullshit” and a “con job” signalled that he does not trust the science, let alone the process. Without U.S. leadership or long-term finance commitments, ambitious language about phasing out fossil fuels looks, to this camp, like theatre.

They then turn to the contradictions in Brazil’s own story. How can a government promise climate justice in Belém while Rio’s favelas are still processing one of the deadliest security operations in recent memory, as we detailed in “Amazon Climate Conference and the War Before Peace: Belém & Rio COP30”? How can Indigenous communities be described as “guardians of the forest” from the podium while many of their representatives camp outside the fences, accusing the process of sidelining their voices?

The conference centre’s own scare becomes part of the metaphor. A short-circuit, some smoke, a rush of people toward the exits and suddenly the carefully choreographed agenda is at the mercy of building inspectors and fire crews. If the summit can be disrupted by faulty wiring, critics ask, what happens when whole regions are hit by cascading droughts, floods and fires that no one can pause with a safety announcement?

Belém exposes a climate process that is stretched thin by expectation. Every COP is sold as a turning point; every final text is watered down by late-night compromises. Leaders declare “historic” outcomes while emissions continue to rise. Activists feel obliged to call for ever more radical language just to hold the line. The danger, they warn, is that each round of over-promising and under-delivering pushes ordinary people further into cynicism.

In Narrative 2, Belém is not a villain so much as a symptom: a summit trying to carry more moral weight than its design can bear.

Lives Along the River

Beneath both narratives runs a quieter story: the lives of people in and around Belém who will never read the final declaration but will live with its consequences.

For a riverboat captain from an Amazon community upriver, the summit is mostly traffic. He weaves his vessel past patrol boats and conference ferries, wondering if the promised money for forest protection will ever reach the co-ops that keep logging crews at bay. If it does not, he knows what happens next: more chainsaws, more cattle, more fires.

For an Indigenous leader sleeping in a tent outside the venue, the experience is more intimate. She has travelled for days to be here. Her community has watched river levels swing wildly, fish stocks fall and illegal miners poison streams with mercury. Inside the conference centre, officials speak her language only in slogans; outside, she is asked to perform it for cameras. Her question is simple: who will still be standing here when the cameras move on?

For a teenager in Belém itself, COP30 is a mix of pride and distance. The city feels suddenly international: languages on the tram, badges at the café. But the heat is harder each year, rains arrive more violently, and smoke from distant fires occasionally drifts in. He will never attend a plenary, yet his adulthood will be shaped by what was and was not decided this month.

And for readers far from the Amazon, the silent story is about trust. You may never see Belém, but you can feel the pattern: summits that promise transformation, headlines that declare near-misses, and seasons that feel slightly less familiar than the last. The question is not whether one conference can “save” the climate. It is whether these rituals still build enough shared belief to move politics at home.

In the end, the Belém conference is at once a failure, a warning and an imperfect step forward. It reminds us that good intentions are not enough, but also that walking away is worse. Between the river and the negotiation hall, the real work begins where the cameras are thin and the promises finally have to meet the ground.

Key Takeaways

• COP30 in Belém was billed as the “Amazon COP” and “COP of truth,” a chance to show the Paris Agreement was still alive by holding the summit inside the rainforest region itself.
• The United States sent no senior delegation under a president sceptical of climate commitments, while other major leaders, including Canada’s Mark Carney, stayed away, weakening expectations of big new finance or fossil fuel agreements.
• The conference was shaken by Indigenous protests at the gates, continued scrutiny over Brazil’s deadly Rio security operation and a venue scare after a short-circuit and small fire forced an evacuation and temporary closure of the main entrance.
• Supporters still see Belém as a step forward: stronger language on forests, incremental movement on climate finance and a rare moment of visibility for vulnerable countries and youth activists.
• Critics argue that the summit exposed deeper problems of trust, representation and over-promising — and that the lives of Amazon communities, Indigenous peoples and ordinary citizens will be the real measure of whether any of Belém’s words matter.

Questions This Article Answers

1. What was COP30 in Belém supposed to achieve, and why was it framed as a decisive follow-up to the Paris Agreement?
2. How did absent leaders, especially from the United States and other major emitters, affect the credibility and ambition of the summit?
3. Why did protests by Indigenous groups and events in Rio de Janeiro cast a shadow over Brazil’s effort to present itself as a climate leader?
4. What actually happened with the venue scare in Belém, and why did it become a symbol of a summit under strain?
5. How do people living in and around the Amazon experience the gap between dramatic climate pledges and the slow pace of real change?

For earlier coverage of how this summit was framed and the violence that preceded it, see “Belém COP30: Con Job or the Truth?” and “Amazon Climate Conference and the War Before Peace: Belém & Rio COP30.”