Higher-ranking ministers take charge at COP30 as pressure mounts for urgent climate action

BELEM, Brazil (AP) — Higher-ranking government ministers took charge of negotiations during Monday’s United Nations climate talks, facing pressure to do more — and do it fast.

The summit, known as COP30, opened its second week with foreign and other ministers stepping in for the lower-level negotiators who handled the first week. They have far more power and leeway to make tough political decisions, and U.N. Climate Executive Secretary Simon Stiell told them to use it.

“The spirit is there, but the speed is not,” Stiell said. “The pace of change in the real economy has not been matched by the pace of progress in these negotiating rooms. As climate disasters wrecked millions of lives and hammer every economy, pushing up prices for food and other basic needs, we all know what’s at stake.”

Other speakers also urged quicker action.

“The time for promises is over,” Brazil Vice President Geraldo Alckmin said. “Each additional fraction of a degree of global warming represents lives at risk, greater inequality and greater losses for those who contributed least to the problem.”

U.N. General Assembly President Annalena Baerbock said recent disasters show how much needs to be done.

“The climate crisis is unrelenting,” she said. “We saw this when Hurricane Melissa barreled into the Caribbean two weeks ago. We saw it again last week at the Philippines … near back-to-back typhoons.”

“We have seen this movie before and we know how it goes,” Baerbock said. “Let us not wallow. All the solutions are all out there, all over the world.”

Adding to the pressure, late Sunday, the Brazilian presidency of the talks issued a five-page summary on how to proceed on several sticky issues. Those include pressing nations to do more in their new emissions-cutting plans, how to handle trade disputes and barriers involving climate and the need to deliver on last year’s $300 billion annual pledge for climate financial aid to poor nations.

Those difficult issues weren’t part of the original agenda nor the COP30 presidency’s plans, but several countries pushed for them.

Several nations — especially small island nations for whom sea level rise is an existential threat — have asked that the talks address the inadequacy of the emissions-cutting plans submitted by 116 nations so far this year. Collectively, the plans come nowhere close to cutting heat-trapping gases enough to prevent 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since the 1800s, which is the goal the world adopted in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

That issue may get combined with a call for a plan for phasing out fossil fuels — coal, oil and natural gas, the chief cause of climate change. That phaseout was agreed to after much debate at U.N. climate talks two years ago, but last year, little happened on the issue. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva earlier this month raised the issue anew.

Scientists and a group of former world leaders known as The Elders, including the Irish and Colombian former presidents, handed out flyers to delegates Monday, urging them to do more.

“Here in the Amazon, COP30 must ignite a global effort to protect life in all its forms,” the flyer read. “Countries must unite to deliver road maps to phase out fossil fuels, and to halt and reverse forest loss. This necessitates holding on to the COP30 mission” to keep warming to 1.5 degrees.

“Our very existence is at stake,” Mauritius Foreign Affairs Minister Dhananjay Ramful said. “A decade after the promises of the Paris Agreement, despite our good intentions, we realized that we have not done enough. … Our planet demands action now.”

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This story was produced as part of the 2025 Climate Change Media Partnership, a journalism fellowship organized by Internews’ Earth Journalism Network and the Stanley Center for Peace and Security.