COP30 Isn't a Failure — It's a Farce
Why these climate summits can’t solve the crisis—and why we should support Indigenous land struggles instead.
Peter Gelderloos
BELÉM, BRAZIL — As the COP30 climate summit comes to a close here in Belém, in the Brazilian state of Pará, conference organizers have little to show after two weeks of highly publicized talks. This is bad for everyone. The United Nations Climate Change Conference desperately needed to restore its reputation. After all, last year’s COP29 took place in Azerbaijan, where fossil fuels make up 90% of the exports and where the government was being accused of carrying out genocide in the months leading up to the conference. The previous year, the COP28 was held in Dubai, capital of another petrostate.
This year, the marketing strategy for the climate conference began with a mea culpa for the historic exclusion of Indigenous peoples. A UN press release announcing the findings of a recent report on Indigenous peoples and the climate crisis put it this way: “From green energy projects imposed without consent to policy decisions made in rooms where Indigenous voices are absent, these communities are too often excluded from climate solutions, displaced by them, and denied the resources to lead the way.”
To address this, Brazil’s Ministry of Indigenous Peoples (MPI) invited 360 Indigenous leaders to participate in negotiations inside the COP, after a six-month process in which events were held with 80 Indigenous peoples whose territories are occupied by the Brazilian state. The goal was “to ensure the largest Indigenous participation in the history of the UN Climate Conferences,” according to the official COP30 website. In a sort of call and response, The New York Times and other mainstream media uncritically echoed these claims, with headlines like “Indigenous People, Long Sidelined at Climate Talks, Take the Stage.”
What these declarations assume is that, while there may be errors in the process, the solution is greater participation. None of these institutions — the UN, big media outlets, major NGOs and world governments — seem willing to face the truth that the COP process is not simply failing to solve the climate crisis: It cannot solve the climate crisis. And this farce is getting in the way of actual, active strategies to protect Indigenous peoples and address the ecocide.
The Times’ metaphor of a stage is an appropriate one, given the showy, spectacular nature of these efforts. Cities across Brazil have been covered in colorful advertising showcasing Indigenous peoples and Amazonian wildlife. And on Monday, when an Indigenous peoples march kicked off the second and final week of COP30, Indigenous representatives supportive of the government and the conference had their place at the front of the march, with big banners and a mobile sound system, while more critical groups talking about a lack of actual results were relegated to the back.
To condition Indigenous movements, governments use carrots and sticks. The carrots include promises of investment and funding, like the $1.8 billion that four European countries and thirty-five industry-supported philanthropies have pledged to Indigenous peoples over the next five years. Most of that money is destined for NGOs working with Indigenous peoples. Such investments have a dubious record when it comes to protecting the land or increasing Indigenous autonomy, though it is certainly a significant resource for propping up compliant Indigenous representatives who are often appointed by the states that occupy their lands.
The sticks, meanwhile, can range from hard to soft techniques of repression. The day of the march, human rights and environmental groups published an open letter accusing UN climate chief Simon Stiell of “creating a chilling effect and a feeling of unsafety for Indigenous peoples,” after Stiell called on Brazil to increase security forces around the COP venue.
The day before, gunmen attacked the Guarani Kaiowá Indigenous community of Pyelito Kue in the southern Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul, killing land defender Vicente Fernandes Vilhalva, injuring four other community members and burning down all the community’s homes and property. The assault, the fourth of its kind in two weeks, comes as the Guarani Kaiowá have engaged in a struggle to reoccupy some of their ancestral lands.
Of all the accomplishments the mainstream climate framework can boast, not one of them has to do with reducing greenhouse gas emissions or slowing deforestation and the devastation of wetlands around the world. When specific countries are able to claim a reduction in emissions, it’s thanks in part to carbon trading and carbon accounting systems that corporate lobbyists have made sure are included in climate agreements, as I’ve reported on previously here, here and here. On the contrary, the COP’s accomplishments have to do with securing investments and funding. Companies that can claim a green label are enjoying a growing market and the profits that come with it, but the benefit to Indigenous communities or the broader movement to stop the ecological crisis is doubtful.
Indigenous peoples across Brazil have made their greatest advances in recovering their territory not with investment plans but through direct action. The Ka’apor of the Amazon have been burning logging trucks. The Guarani of the Atlantic Forest used protests and blockades to force the government to return a small part of their lands that had been stolen. Gah Te Iracema, a spiritual leader in the Kaingang community from Porto Alegre in the state of Rio Grande do Sul who had travelled to Belém for COP30, tells me that “we have recovered a part of our land, but it’s not recognized by the government. So, we are here to speak about our fight. We call it land reclamation, but it’s like coming back to our house.”
The Guarani Kaiowá, mentioned above, were violently expelled from their lands in the 1980s. Major cattle ranching interests then moved in and took over. The Guarani Kaiowá have been trying to reclaim some of their lands, but FUNAI, the Brazilian government agency assigned to protect Indigenous peoples, has not followed through with official demarcation. A report by Survival International, an organization that advocates for the rights of Indigenous peoples around the world, called the stalling “a violation of Brazilian and international law” that has forced “the Guarani to endure violent attacks and killings at the hands of the ranchers and police backed by local politicians who act with impunity.” The report goes on: “An official agreement made between public prosecutors, FUNAI, and the Guarani in 2007, and recent land demarcation promises by [Brazilian] President [Luiz Inácio] Lula [da Silva] — have not been upheld.”
The Guarani Kaiowá are facing food shortages and poisoning from agricultural chemicals. Meanwhile, those ranchers and plantation owners have a less publicized but far more effective voice at the COP30: the agricultural lobbyists, more than 300 of whom have descended on COP30, where some have been granted “privileged access” to key negotiations. Currently, cattle ranching and cropland expansion, largely for soy plantations to feed cattle, is the main driver of deforestation across the Amazon biome. Brazil’s President Lula has proposed a shift to another profitable industry, and one with a greener reputation: biofuels that can replace fossil fuels. However, the plantations that grow biofuels also drive deforestation. A recent study by the thinktank Transport and Environment found that, when their impacts are tallied up, biofuels can cause 16% more emissions than fossil fuels.
This points to an incorrigible flaw in the mainstream climate framework. For all key participants — government ministers, industry lobbyists and even the directors of major NGOs — the unquestionable foundation of a climate solution is a growth-based economy organized by governments. The fundamental question at COP30 and all the previous climate conferences is not, “how do we stop climate change?” The question they are working with is, “what responses to climate change are compatible with state power and growth-based economies?” And the answer they refuse to admit is that effective responses are not compatible with the present system, because this system itself — its acceptable forms of political and economic organization — are the root causes of the crisis.
Investors are not in the business of giving money to programs they can’t profit from. Fully empowering cultures that are eco-centric and communal, that do not treat land as a commodity, is the real solution — but that would be bad news for business and for all the governments worldwide that peg their power to economic growth. It doesn’t matter how many representatives of marginalized peoples are at the table: Economic growth is at odds with life on this planet. We can’t have both.
For all of us trying to survive amidst cascading catastrophes on this beleaguered planet, the choice between profit and life should not be a difficult one.
Peter Gelderloos is an independent researcher, writer, gardener, and social movement participant. He is the author of The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below, How Nonviolence Protects the State, Anarchy Works, Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation, and They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us. His works have been translated into fifteen languages.
