Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has set clear expectations for the upcoming U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP30) his country is hosting in November. Nations represented at the meeting, to be held Nov. 10-21 in the Amazon River port of Belém, must not only strengthen their climate-protection commitments, but also implement those they’ve already made, the president says.

“COP30 will be the COP of truth, the moment for world leaders to prove the seriousness of their commitment to the planet,” Lula said in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 23.

President Lula’s vision is overshadowed by some hard realities, however—two in particular. One is the insufficient progress many countries, Brazil included, have made in meeting the voluntary greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions-reduction targets they set in previous climate conferences. The other is the ongoing proliferation of development projects that run directly counter to the goal of cutting carbon emissions and weaning the world from fossil fuels.

When it comes to the latter problem, Brazil offers a stark case in point, Lula’s critics say. The president strongly supports plans for two infrastructure projects that experts forecast will set off a surge of land-clearing—and thus carbon emissions—in the Amazon basin. One involves repaving 254 kilometers (158 miles) of a major western-Amazon highway, BR-319, and the other calls for the construction of a 933-kilometer (578-mile) railway through the eastern Amazon to bring foreign-bound soybeans to deepwater ports.

A third project the president has pushed, to drill for oil and gas in an area of seafloor off the northern coast known as the Mouth of the Amazon basin, is causing a particular stir on the eve of COP30. Conducted by the state oil giant Petrobras, the project on Oct. 20 won an exploratory-drilling license from Ibama, the enforcement and permitting arm of Brazil’s Environment and Climate Change Ministry.

The decision has drawn heavy criticism of Lula from many environmental experts. Among them is Suely Araújo, Ibama’s president from 2016 to 2019 and now public-policy coordinator for the Climate Observatory, a network of nonprofits that monitors Brazil’s greenhouse-gas emissions.

“The issuance of the [Ibama] license is a double act of sabotage,” Araújo said in a recent Climate Observatory statement. “On one hand, the Brazilian government acts against humanity by encouraging further fossil-fuel expansion, defying science and betting on further global warming. On the other hand, it disrupts COP30 itself, whose most important and deliverable goal is to implement the [COP28] decision to gradually phase out fossil fuels.” Added Araújo, whose group has joined other organizations to challenge the drilling license in court: “Lula has just buried his claim to be a climate leader at the bottom of the [Atlantic] Ocean at the Mouth of the Amazon Basin.”

The government rejects such criticism, citing the clear progress it has made in reducing Amazon deforestation rates and its lead role in designing the Tropical Forest Forever Facility. (See accompanying article.) They also argue the oil and gas exploration off the mouth of the Amazon aims to offset production declines in other offshore locations. “The Ibama license doesn’t in any way compromise Lula’s leadership role in COP30,” says Rodrigo Agostinho, Ibama’s president. “Brazil has greatly reduced its GHG emissions in the last three years, perhaps more than any other country, mainly by combating Amazon deforestation.” (See Q&A—this issue.)

Globally, scant progress has been made to fulfill the early promise of the Paris Agreement, the 2015 treaty that requires signatory countries to update their 10-year voluntary greenhouse-gas-reduction goals every five years. Just 15 of the 194 U.N. member nations that ratified the agreement—under 8%—are on track to meet their targets for 2025. And countries that have submitted new targets, known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), have not set sufficiently ambitious goals, experts say.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calculates greenhouse-gas emissions must be cut 60% below 2019 levels by 2035 to achieve the Paris Agreement goal of preventing long-term average surface temperatures from consistently exceeding their pre-industrial level by 1.5° Celsius. Last year marked the first calendar year on record in which the global average temperature exceeded that level, registering 1.55° Celsius above the 1850-1900 average, says the World Meteorological Organization. “The chances that most countries will submit robust NDCs at COP30 are very low, considering their track record since 2015,” says Alexandre Prado, climate change expert at WWF Brasil. “Technically, and based on what science indicates, new NDC targets are frustratingly not expected to reach the level the world needs to limit global warming to 1.5° Celsius.”

The Brazilian president’s goal of implementing existing climate targets appears a long way off, too, experts contend. “Although Lula has framed COP30 as a climate summit to implement the NDC targets reached at earlier COPs, including the most recent ones at COP28 and COP29, no roadmap exists or is planned for doing so at COP30,” Stela Herschmann, a climate-policy specialist at the Climate Observatory, told EcoAméricas.

Just 64 countries, meanwhile, have submitted updated greenhouse-gas emissions targets for the coming 10-year period. Brazil’s target for 2035, experts say, falls far short of ambitious. Environmentalists note that while the government has pledged to reduce GHG emissions by 59% to 67% by 2035, the baseline year it uses for the reduction is 2005. In that year, the country’s CO2 emissions were significantly higher due to intense deforestation than in 2019, the baseline year the IPCC used in recommending a 60% reduction. The result, they say, is that Brazil’s target is nowhere near being in line with the IPCC’s, asserting the cause was pressure from the country’s agribusiness and energy sectors.

Low expectations

Updated NDCs of some of Latin America’s other large carbon emitters are also expected to be weak. “I don’t expect Argentina’s updated NDC for 2035 to improve on its current one because the current economic policies of Argentine President Javier Milei promote investments in extractive industries, from mining to oil and natural gas production,” Enrique Maurtua Konstantinidis, a Buenos Aires-based climate policy consultant, told EcoAméricas. (See "Green worries on rise as Argentina ramps up fracking " —EcoAméricas, September 2025.)

Nor is there confidence Colombia will make a significantly stronger commitment, even though that country has developed strong positions and policies on climate change.

Mexico, however, might provide a bright spot. Maurtua Konstantinidis says “expectations are high” that Mexico, the second-largest greenhouse-gas emitter in Latin America after Brazil, will present a more ambitious updated NDC for 2035. That’s partly because Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is a climate scientist and former co-author of IPCC reports.

With U.S. President Donald Trump pulling the United States out of the Paris Agreement process for a second time, describing climate change in a U.N. address as a “con job” and cancelling renewable-energy funding, serious emissions-reductions commitments by other countries are only growing more important, analysts say. “I’m doubtful even more ambitious COP30 NDCs can close the GHG emissions reduction gap created, in part, by increased U.S. emissions under Trump,” André Castro Santos, technical director of LACLIMA, a Brazilian environmental think tank, told EcoAméricas.

Climate-finance help

Latin America and other developing regions will be looking for financial help to fund mitigation and adaptation. A COP29 pledge by high-income countries to “take the lead” in mobilizing US$300 billion annually in such assistance by 2035 has been criticized as vague and insufficient.

A plan to generate $1.3 trillion in international climate finance a year for developing nations by 2035 is expected to be discussed in Belém, with some analysts hopeful that this time the route will be well-marked. Says WWF’s Prado: “What is expected from COP30 is an agreement on the path to be taken, with clear milestones and stages, although the details regarding contributions will come later.”

A key feature of COP30 will be the Action Agenda, a framework for accelerating climate efforts. Developed primarily by Brazil with input from public- and private-sector climate leaders around the world, the agenda comprises six thematic pillars. One, concerning the transition to renewable energy, faced headwinds during a preparatory meeting in Brasília in October. At the meeting, China, India, Bolivia—a big natural-gas producer and exporter—and Middle Eastern oil-producing countries reportedly resisted efforts to commit to an acceleration of the transition to renewable energy.

Another Action Agenda pillar addresses deforestation, following up on a COP26 declaration to halt or reverse deforestation by 2030. Pre-conference groundwork has encountered resistance on that front, too. During an Aug. 2023 summit in Belém, eight Amazon Basin nations failed to agree to end land clearing in the rainforest biome by 2030. (See "Indecisive Amazon forest summit irks activists" —EcoAméricas, August 2023.) The meeting’s concluding document did not set quantitative targets or deadlines for reducing Amazon deforestation.

Side bar: New fund to harness market for the benefit of tropical forests

While hosting November’s U.N. climate conference, Brazil plans to launch what President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva hopes will be a powerful market-based fund for tropical forest conservation around the world.

Lula proposed the fund, called the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), at COP28, the U.N. climate conference held in Dubai in 2023. The TFFF aims to collect public and private capital from high-income countries by issuing bonds, invest the capital internationally, and earmark a large portion of the returns for forest conservation in developing nations with tropical and subtropical forests.

The TFFF will be formally rolled out at the Nov. 10-21 COP30 climate conference in Belém. Lula said in September that Brazil will “lead by example” by making a US$1 billion investment in the fund.

The facility aims to raise US$125 billion in capital and deploy it in world financial markets to generate above-market returns. A portion of the earnings will be used to pay interest to investors. The bulk of the rest of the earnings—an estimated US$4 billion annually—will go to eligible countries with tropical forests to further conservation efforts. The goal, Brazilian officials say, is to create a long-term source of income for tropical countries engaged in sustained forest protection.

To qualify for these payments, the countries must have forest-canopy coverage of at least 20 to 30% and annual deforestation rates that can be shown via satellite monitoring to be at or below 0.5%. Brazilian Amazon deforestation currently amounts to 0.19% annually.

The most recent TFFF Concept Note, an outline of the fund’s objectives and inner workings, says the fund will provide “annual, large-scale payments to up to 74 countries that collectively hold more than 1 billon hectares of tropical and subtropical forests, based on their hectares of eligible forest cover which meet the performance requirements.” It added that payments “will be discounted for each hectare of forest loss and for each hectare degraded by fire.”

The TFFF fund will pay eligible countries an annual fixed amount estimated at US$4 per year for every hectare of still-standing tropical or subtropical forest that they preserve during the year. This figure is based on using the estimated $4 billion per year in net revenues from the fund to protect 1 billion hectares (2.47 billion acres) of eligible rainforests in these 74 countries. The recent Concept Note added that 20% of these payments must be channeled to Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) for use in protecting their forests.

The key distinguishing characteristic of the TFFF is that as a blended finance instrument that attracts investment capital, it marks a departure from conventional conservation funds, which rely on grants and donations.

“[It] instead provides a strong value proposition to sponsor-country investors, generating competitive market returns,” Garo Batmanian, director-general of the Brazilian Forest Service (SFB), told EcoAméricas in a recent interview.

Adds Batmanian, whose agency is an arm of Brazil’s Environment and Climate Change Ministry, which is a main architect of the fund: “[T]he fund’s estimated 4% in annual profits will allow [recipient countries] to keep receiving and using this capital to maintain their investments to control deforestation, a market-based solution that eliminates the need for new sponsor country capital. This is why these TFFF investments are long-term ones.”

To help develop the fund, Brazil has established an informal Interim Steering Committee (ISC), comprising members from six tropical forest countries—including Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Indonesia—that represent an estimated 52% of the world’s rainforests. The ISC will also include five potential TFFF bond-buying sponsor countries—Norway, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates.

On Aug. 22, implementation of the TFFF was endorsed by the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO), an organization of eight Amazon basin countries that stand to receive payments from the fund—Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela.

Independent experts applaud the TFFF initiative, though in some cases acknowledging doubts about whether it will be able to perform as advertised.

“The TFFF is an innovative global mechanism for keeping tropical and subtropical forests standing. And, for many countries with such forests, rules for qualifying for its funds are attainable because the fund has set a low bar for eligibility,” said Dan Nepstad, senior scientist and executive director of the Earth Innovation Institute (EII), a tropical forest research nonprofit. “But institutional investors, managers of sovereign wealth funds or pension funds will be reluctant to buy bonds issued by the TFFF at a much lower return [an estimated 4% per year] than they could get from investments made by their own top-notch investment teams. That makes such investments more like donations. Also, the TFFF’s ability to raise $125 billion could take many years.”