COP30 at the City at the Mouth of the Green Ocean
- yadvindermalhi
- 1 minute ago
- 11 min read
Belém, November 2025
A UN COP (“Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change”) is never a single world. It is a collection of overlapping realities: huge plenaries, back-room negotiations, exhausting final nights of geopolitics, but also a global bazaar of presentations, panel discussions, protests, and conversations. In Belém, in a country with a vibrant tradition of social movements and open protest, these worlds seemed to coexist more vividly than they have for several years, layered against the heat, the wide brown pulse of the world’s greatest river system, and the green pulse of the mighty ocean of leaves stretching out for thousands of kilometres to the west.
Coming back to Belém after more than a decade was an emotional return to a formative place in my career and thinking, and back to old bonds, memories and relationships that have been quiet for so long but which I discovered have never withered. I spent a fair bit of time in this city in the early 2000s, conducting research and training workshops in the magnificent pristine rainforest of Caxiuanã, a mesmerising day’s journey by river-boat to the west, and also the stunning mangroves of Ajuruteua to the east, where the Amazon finally disgorges its mud-brown nutrients as a vast plume into the Atlantic Ocean, rimmed by bright white beaches and tides that pulse through tall mangrove forests. Descending into Belém felt like a welcoming descent back into a forest of memories and sensations. The rivers snake and spread like bronze ribbons laced through a dark green blanket, the clouds rise in towering and sometimes threatening cathedrals, and the air carries a familiar weight that is humid, fragrant and alive.
Belém is no glossy host city polished up for international visitors. No Dubai or Sharm El-Sheikh COP here. She is more like a beloved, slightly dilapidated aunt, full of stories, a little chaotic and dishevelled, but ultimately hospitable. Her edges are frayed but her welcome is generous. The city appears as a weathered patchwork of histories: elegant buildings and tiled rooftops from the 19th century masking a history of dispossession and exploitation during the colonial and post-colonial rubber-boom eras, modern tower blocks, ramshackle patches of dilapidation, and some areas newly spruced up for COP. And in the historic centre, boulevards lined with huge mango trees shower their soft fruity gifts after the rain, to the concern of drivers nervous for their windscreens and pedestrians nervous for their heads. Messy, contradictory and exuberant.
Over cracked pavements and under dripping mango trees, a strong regional identity flourishes, rooted in the city’s unique Amazon-derived culture and cuisine. It is a place that cannot forget where it is: near the Equator and at the mouth of the greatest river system on Earth, enveloped by wide waters and a great green ocean of leaves, at the threshold between forest and sea. A sparkling new Museum of the Amazonias by the city docks celebrated this magnificence through a stunning exhibition of photographs by Sebastião Salgado. Meanwhile, upstairs, a powerful audiovisual display on the threat of Amazonian fires, crafted by local researchers and my Oxford colleague Erika Berenguer, reminded visitors of the threats that climate change and deforestation are placing on this ancient splendour.
Holding a COP here was politically ambitious but logistically challenging. This is an Amazonian city, breathing its humidity, green vitality and heartbeat into the conference. Each afternoon the rains arrived in an intense downpour, drumming on the roofs of the Blue Zone and drowning out the multitude of pavilion presentations and debates. Nature and climate were not only the context to these negotiations but active participants.
Inside the negotiation halls, the atmosphere seemed calm in the first week but will no doubt become more tense and concentrated as negotiations progress. Delegates prepared to negotiate clauses word by word, while at the other end of the Blue Zone Pavilion, national stands buzzed like a marketplace of ideas. Every few metres, a new presentation or announcement unfolded, speakers battling the background din. Some sessions attracted barely a dozen listeners, while others spilled out of the pavilions, people leaning in to catch a glimpse or a phrase. The noise and clutter were exhausting, but they also carried undeniable energy. Geopolitics was very much at play. The Chinese Pavilion occupied a particularly prominent position and unveiled a series of talks on green energy and ecological civilisation, no doubt taking advantage of the conspicuous absence of the USA. Though tucked away, I did find a pavilion representing a collection of individual US states committed to action, and California Governor Gavin Newsom emphasised that much of the USA at state level remained committed to tackling climate change.
Beyond the core Blue Zone, which required a special pass to access, the Green Zone was an exuberant popular fair: open, musical, crowded with food and craft stalls, public displays and conversations, rich in colour. Further away, down at the university campus, the People’s Summit added a sharper note of activism and solidarity rooted in long histories of persecution, inequity and dispossession. There was both hope and anger in those gatherings, but they also played an important role in maintaining the conscience of the event.
This was billed as the Rainforest COP, situated in a symbolically powerful but logistically challenging city, and my own reason for being here centred on tropical forests, on presenting and discussing the scientific evidence and arguments for their importance, on centring their value, and exploring pathways toward new models of development for forest regions. Three science reports were publicised, each focusing on a major tropical forest region, for the Amazon, the Congo Basin and Borneo. These are the most comprehensive regional syntheses yet produced, with hundreds of researchers, the vast majority from the regions themselves, working together to connect the ecological, economic and social dimensions of tropical forests.
Taken together, the three reports reveal how these vast forest regions, so different in their histories and geographies, are now experiencing strikingly similar pressures. They show that the great tropical forest regions sit at the core of planetary function and stability, serving not only as climate stabilisers but as the living systems that generate so much of the atmosphere, water and biodiversity on which the world depends. They contain the overwhelming majority of the Earth's rich biological heritage, a heritage far older than our young species and woven from evolutionary lineages that reach back tens of millions of years. Yet this ancient complexity is entering a period of accelerating ecological decline, with connectivity across landscapes, rivers, species and cultures beginning to fray. Extractive models of development and weak governance create parallel patterns of degradation, while the communities who most reliably safeguard these ecosystems, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, remain undervalued and insufficiently protected. The reports argue that recovery will depend on a bold new vision of development, one that embraces the rich and still largely unrealised bioeconomy of the tropics rather than the old model built on clearing forests and extracting raw commodities. Such a shift requires strengthening institutions, improving cooperation across borders, aligning climate and biodiversity finance, restoring degraded forests and reconnecting ecological corridors. In short, they contend that these regions sit at a planetary crossroads, and that global climate resilience will depend on the choices made now about how the world’s last great tropical forests are governed, valued and supported.
These ideas are beginning to resonate politically. Across the COP, multiple forest finance mechanisms were proposed. Most prominent was Brazil’s plan for a Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), an ambitious plan to pay countries for keeping forests standing and slowing rates of loss. Other proposals, from reforestation-linked bonds to sovereign guarantees for conservation, are equally experimental. I do not have unqualified support for any single mechanism and get hazy when trying to understand the details of financial mechanisms and the risks and trade-offs involved. Each proposal carries risks and trade-offs, but the willingness to experiment in itself feels like a breakthrough. For years, forest finance has been trapped between philanthropy and carbon offsetting; now it seems to be becoming a space for innovation.
One of the most heartening shifts is how these mechanisms are beginning to recognise the people who live within and depend on these forests. The TFFF and similar initiatives are pledging that at least 20 percent of funds will go directly to Indigenous peoples and local communities, a remarkable change from a few decades ago when community rights and Indigenous stewardship were treated as marginal or quaint. The understanding that forest protection works best when led from within has moved from the periphery to the mainstream.
That recognition was everywhere in Belém. Outside the Blue Zone, Indigenous presence was visible and powerful: bodies decked in paint and bold feathered headdresses, flotillas of boats gathering from across the Amazon, demonstrations through the city, songs and banners lifted under the intense equatorial sun. There is understandable suspicion about what happens behind the security barriers around the Blue Zone, but many of us on the inside share the same purpose. I think much of the work within and the popular movement outside are two sides of the same struggle.
The research evidence reinforces this point. Empowering Indigenous peoples and local communities is often the most effective way to ensure thriving ecosystems. Where land rights are secure, forests tend to stand; where communities are disempowered, they are far more likely to fall, and even if they remain standing, it often comes with a heavy shackle of injustice. The future of tropical forests depends as much on justice and governance as it does on technology and finance.
Throughout the week, I kept returning to an animation I created several years ago with my colleague Ben Hennig, a visualisation of the Earth’s productivity that pulses like a living heart. It features in my recent TED talk and is based on satellite data, showing the planet’s seasonal breathing, but it has also become a metaphor, the heartbeat of the planet driven above all by the magnificent metabolism of tropical ecosystems. I have used it for years in lectures, but somehow this year it caught fire. I showed it half a dozen times at COP, and people kept asking for it again. Each time, it drew attention, perhaps because it made something abstract, the centrality of tropical ecosystems to a viable planet, feel alive. For me, it is a way of centring the tropics, not as landscapes peripheral to economic power to be exploited, managed or protected, but as the beating heart of Earth’s metabolism and health. That was the message I tried to land again and again throughout the week.
Meanwhile, the data coming out of Brazil this year showed some grounds for hope. Ane Alencar from the Amazon Research Institute, IPAM, showed that deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has dropped sharply, reaching its lowest level in several decades. It has been dropping for several years, but last year this good news was offset by a surge in forest wildfires. This year, fires have also plummeted, partly due to wetter weather, but also due to improved fire governance and policy action. Together they show that with political will and social momentum, the ongoing loss of tropical forests is not inevitable. It was wonderful to see so much science and policy being delivered by powerful Brazilian voices, many of whom I have known since my early Amazonian research days in the late 1990s. Brazil is a superpower of ecological science and policy, and much of this science has much to teach the rest of the world.
One morning my friend, local researcher Joice Ferreira, showed me around an educational trail she had created through 80-year-old capoeira forest. Capoeira is a word with Indigenous Tupi origins meaning scrub, from ka'a ("forest") paũ ("round"). The martial arts dance form of the same name comes from escaped Afro-Brazilian slaves secretly practising this form in shrubland as a way of resistance and physical training. Resistance and resilience found in nature. Capoeira is secondary forest, growing on formerly cleared land. Joice’s trail showed how rich the forest is in biodiversity and ecological function, how much carbon it stores, and how nature can come back if left alone and given space and time. There are 169,000 square kilometres of capoeira land in the Amazon, an area roughly equal to England and Wales, but often this forest is cleared again after ten years of growth. If this land can instead be left to recover, or shifted into biodiverse agroforestry as part of a new bioeconomy, a social ecological system, it provides enormous potential to help meet Brazil’s biodiversity and climate targets. Halting and reversing the decline in biodiversity is not just about stopping ongoing destruction but also about recovery and repair. There is now so much potential for that in marginal and poorly used lands, despite the ongoing need to feed the world and support development.
Still, the task remains vast. Progress is fragile; markets, politics and climate itself can turn quickly. But for now in Belém, the pieces seem to be aligning in favour of maintaining and restoring vibrant tropical forests, with science, finance, activism and culture converging around a shared sense of purpose.
COP30, in the end, is never a single story, even though the short and often negative headlines at the end of an event can make it seem so. It is many worlds and many hopes meeting, some loud, some quiet. There may well be better multilateral ways to address the challenges of climate change and nature loss, and they should be explored, but this imperfect thing is what we have. For those of us passionate about preserving and restoring rainforests, it was a reminder that the path we are fumbling forward with is not coming from one voice or one zone alone but from a chorus of local communities, scientists, activists, businesses, governments and ideas.
On my last evening in Belém, I joined a fireside conversation with Frances Seymour, a foundational figure in developing new approaches to conserving tropical forests. We were hosted by TED’s Lindsay Levin at the TED Countdown House, a graceful old building turned into an artistic gathering space for ideas and stories of progress in the old Nazaré district with its avenues shaded by giant mango trees. The theme of our conversation was Where Science meets the Soul, and it felt like a good note to end on. After a week of data, debate and declarations, this was a space for reflection.
At the end of the conversation we were asked about optimism and pessimism, how we felt about the COP, about the world’s fractured politics, about the chances of meaningful change. I spoke about hope, not as a mood but as a discipline, citing the American activist Mariame Kaba. Hope is something that needs practice. It is a state of action rather than a state of being.
I recalled Antonio Gramsci, writing while imprisoned by Mussolini, describing himself as a pessimist of the intellect but an optimist of the will. His intellect told him how serious things were, that realism mattered more than rose-tinted naivety, but that this clarity should feed courage and the will to act, not despair. To see the world clearly and still choose to act, that for me is the essence of hope.
Hope makes space for grief, for sadness, for disagreement and for doubt, but it refuses paralysis. It is not about certainty; it is about motion, continuing to believe that what we do can matter even when outcomes are uncertain.
Last week, at Oxford, I heard Jules Pretty give a seminar on the power of storytelling in the climate and nature crises. He spoke of how environmental scientists and activists are good at telling stories of crisis, of decline, of how we have fallen. These are sometimes important stories, but we are far less skilled at telling credible yet inspiring stories of recovery, ascent and flourishing. The stories we tell shape the futures we can imagine. We need stories of agency, of resilience, of repair, stories that do not deny the gravity of our times but remind us that we can still choose how to respond.
This shapes my definition of hope: clear-eyed, grounded and stubbornly alive and active. It is the hope embodied in the scientific reports we launched this week, seeking to tell grounded stories of flourishing new possibilities for tropical rainforests. It is the kind of hope I kept seeking and finding in Belém inside and outside the Blue Zone. Thousands of people, each fighting in their own way against the enormity of the challenge, against vested interests, powerful egomaniacs, complacency, cynicism and cognitive dissonance. Voices for progress in civil society, in science, in business, in government, in diplomacy, and voices on the streets protesting at the gates of the event, calling for justice and demanding to be heard. This is what hope looks like in motion, imperfect, noisy, sometimes contradictory, but determined and alive. What is happening now, this great, uneven, continuing and collective effort is hope as a discipline being practised in real time.
