From 10-21 November, world leaders, scientists, activists, negotiators, diplomats, Indigenous Peoples and other affected communities will gather in Belém, Brazil for COP30, the annual UN climate conference.
COP30 arrives at a critical moment. It’s the first conference since the news that the world passed the 1.5°C threshold of heating above pre-industrial levels, a limit long considered vital to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. This milestone underscores the urgency of bold, coordinated action.
Putting human rights at the heart of climate policy is crucial for achieving climate justice. Leaders can stand up to corporate interests, push for a fast and just phase out of fossil fuels. COP also presents an opportunity to ensure environmental human rights defenders on the frontlines of climate change are protected and are allowed to meaningfully participate in climate decision making.
Leaders also have an opportunity to agree on how to scale up climate finance in the form of grants, not loans, to help those most impacted by climate change, rather than pushing countries the least responsible for climate change further into debt.
The science is undeniable. Climate change is getting worse and human activities, particularly the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, are the main cause. But if we work together, united by our shared humanity, we can create a future that delivers climate justice.
What is a COP meeting?
COP, or the Conference of Parties, is an annual meeting where states work together to make concrete commitments and come up with solutions to address climate change. Working together is essential; as the atmosphere is a shared global public good.
COP serves as the main decision-making body for the UN Framework for Climate Change (UNFCCC), an international environmental treaty that was established in 1994 to create a mechanism for climate negotiations and for the 2015 Paris Agreement.
COP is hosted in a different location every year. This year, the 30th meeting is being held in Bélem, Brazil.
Why is this year’s meeting so important?
Every COP meeting is important, but the stakes are higher than ever this year.
At previous COP meetings, leaders emphasized a shared goal to keep the increase in global average temperatures from pre-industrial levels to less than 1.5°C. However, it’s been confirmed that the world breached that threshold in 2024. Due to geographic and other factors, some areas of the world are heating at even faster rates.
According to climate science experts, the world is on course to be 2.8°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100. This will have catastrophic implications for billions of people and ecosystems.
While the climate crisis is fast deepening, many key governments have doubled down on fossil fuels over the past year. For example, an effort to secure critical sustainability legislation in the European Union is under threat. Other governments, such as Canada have loosened their regulations around fossil fuel extraction and processing. The United States is pressuring other countries to slow down climate action and to purchase US fossil fuels.
Governments must mitigate the climate crisis by rapidly phasing out fossil-fuel emissions. This must be done now.
Spotlight on Brazil
This year’s meeting will also provide an opportunity to shine a light on the devastating effects of climate change and fossil fuel extraction in Brazil.
The government of Brazil is expanding fossil fuel extraction across the country. On 20 October, the Brazilian environmental agency granted the state-owned oil company Petrobras a license to drill in the mouth of the Amazon. This will have serious negative impacts on the climate, as well as on the local environment. It poses a direct threat to local water and soil and to the ecological balance. This oil extraction will also cause serious harm to the Indigenous People and traditional communities in the region, like the Karipuna, Palikur-Arukwayene, Galibi Marworno and Galibi Kali’na peoples, who have not been consulted about the project at all.
As the country prepares to host COP30 in Belém this year, the efforts to accelerate the license approval of fossil fuel projects at the mouth of the Amazon reveals a clear contradiction between the Brazilian government’s domestic actions and its desire to be a global leader in climate action.
How is climate change relevant to human rights?
Everyone has the right to live in a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. As the climate crisis intensifies, this right, and others, are under growing threat.
For instance, climate change causes disasters like prolonged droughts, which damage harvests and lead to food scarcity and rising food costs. After decades of steady decline, world hunger has risen again. This scarcity increases resource competition and can cause displacement, migration and conflict, leading to other human rights harms.
Global warming affects everyone, no matter where they live. It makes air pollution, often itself caused by burning fossil fuels or wildfires, worse. Disease carrying insects are spreading to new areas. Extreme heat causes deaths among outdoor workers and increases mortality rates in care homes and health facilities. Devastating floods after more intense storms also impact the rights to health, life and housing.
The damage caused by fossil fuel extraction, processing and transporting falls disproportionately in “sacrifice zones” where often already marginalised individuals and groups are subjected to harmful pollution. Lack of investment means public infrastructure is ill-equipped to survive extreme weather events.
Climate action runs on people power, and yet governments and the fossil fuel industry often work together to criminalise protest and stand by while human rights defenders are subjected to intimidation and threats. Attacks against our rights to free expression, association and peaceful assembly severely hamper activists’ ability to demand action from their governments to prevent fossil fuel pollution and climate harms.
What are “frontline” and “fenceline” communities?
“Frontline” communities are whose who bear the brunt and indirect impacts of the climate crisis. Some of these areas are more likely to experience rapid or slow onset events that are caused by climate change. In many cases, people living in these communities are already marginalised and experience intersecting forms of cultural, economic, social and racial discrimination.
“Fenceline” communities are made up of people who live near industrial infrastructure, including locations where fossil fuels are extracted, processed and burned. These often already marginalised and racialized people directly experience the adverse impacts of pollution and environmental degradation caused by extractive industries and live in areas that are “sacrificed” to the impacts of pollution. This is a form of environmental racism, that sacrifices people’s human rights and wellbeing for the sake of profit.
Spotlight on Pakistan
Pakistan contributes less than 1% of global emissions, but its population – particularly very young children and older adults – are suffering some of the most severe harms from climate change. Pakistan is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate disasters.
In 2022, Pakistan experienced record heatwaves, with much of the country reaching 50°C. These above-average temperatures fuelled greater rainfall during the monsoon season, with some parts of the country receiving more than 700% of their average monthly rainfall. The Indus River that runs the length of the country, burst its banks and flooded communities. In 2024, the people of Pakistan faced the same combination of excessive heat and rain again.
Such events demonstrate the acute climate vulnerability that Pakistan faces, as well as the importance of preparedness for communities and populations most at risk. Other countries – especially high-income countries that have emitted the most greenhouse gases – have not done enough to support Pakistan to respond to climate change. Pakistan requires about USD 16 billion to recover from the losses and damages of the 2022 floods. Almost all the money it has received is in the form of high interest loans, but it is not reasonable to expect that Pakistan would generate a return on adaptation investments, such as climate resilient health, education, and public transit infrastructure. The situation of Pakistan is not an isolated case but is emblematic of lower income countries that contributed the least to climate change and are the most impacted by it.
What needs to be agreed at COP this year to limit global warming and protect human rights?
With enough ambition, there is a lot that parties to the UNFCCC can do to advance climate justice. Governments can and must do more to halt the growth of the fossil fuel industry, which is compatible with states’ human rights obligations and the goal to limit global warming to below 1.5°C.
States and parties must also urgently submit their own national climate plans. These plans were originally due in February 2025, but even by late October 2025, only 61 countries had submitted one. Plans need to be framed around the protection of human rights. This means they need to include specific commitments, goals and timelines to:
- Phase out fossil fuels – committing to a full, fast, fair and funded plan to stop producing and using fossil fuels like coal, gas and oil.
- Protect civic space – elevating the voice of activists, human rights and land defenders in the push for climate action, protecting them from the intimidation, harassment and criminalization they too often experience.
- Massively scale up non debt creating climate finance from high income polluting countries – enabling lower income countries to phase out fossil fuels and to protect their populations from the inevitable harms climate change is already causing.
Phase out fossil fuels
To protect human rights and our future, we need a full, fast, fair and funded phase-out of coal, oil and gas. This won’t happen unless we end the billions of dollars in fossil fuel subsidies that keep this deadly industry alive. Only then can we limit the worst impacts of climate change and ensure everyone’s rights are protected.
We know that humans are the main source of greenhouse gases, by burning fossil fuels that concentrate in our atmosphere. These gases trap the sun’s heat, leading to a long-term rise in planet’s average temperature and causing shifts in weather patterns as well as sea-level rise that will wipe out small island states and much low lying coastal land.
There are many alternatives to fossil fuels, like wind and solar power, that will enable us to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. This energy transition should be driven by the need to defend human rights, with materials and infrastructure produced and constructed in a way that respects human rights.
Protection of civic space
Civil society organizations, children and youth, older persons, women, people with disabilities and Indigenous Peoples have an important role to play in pushing for ambitious COP outcomes. Yet there remain challenges in access and inclusion in UNFCCC negotiations. This is particularly concerning in the context of shrinking civic space in countries all over the world; COP should be a place where affected communities are able to speak and to be heard.
Globally, there is growing repression of climate activists, land and environmental defenders, journalists and other voices critical of governments’ climate inaction. Many defenders face human rights abuses, including intimidation, crackdowns on their rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association, enforced disappearances, criminalization and smear campaigns, arrest and arbitrary detention, among others.
In recent years, there have been worrying crackdowns on climate activism around COPs, including intensified clampdown on civil society in Azerbaijan in 2024 and fears of unlawful digital surveillance of participants in Dubai in 2023.
To combat this, we need to see public recognition of the important work of environmental human rights defenders. There should also be efforts to prevent reprisals against anyone participating in the conference.
Equitable climate finance
At COP29 last year, states and parties agreed on a new annual climate finance target of USD 300 billion by 2035, which is meant to help lower income countries respond and adapt to the effects of climate change. This is less than a quarter of the minimum demanded by many lower-income countries and activists and many governments have failed to follow through on their pledge. In addition to providing USD 300 billion, they also agreed to “mobilize” USD 1.3 trillion. This target includes private finance, which can be debt-creating for its recipients.
High income countries are continuing to shirk their obligations to provide climate finance, but there are plenty of ways in which additional finance could be raised. For example, ‘polluter pays’ taxes on fossil fuel companies could raise USD 941 billion. Redirecting fossil fuel subsidies (taxpayer support to fossil fuel companies) would raise USD 1.3 trillion.
COP30 needs to conclude with a clear plan and timeline for delivering on last year’s targets and for scaled up provision of grants-based finance. High income countries also need to contribute much more to the Fund for responding to Loss and Damage, which remains woefully underfunded.
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