Myron Mendes
Executive Director, Indian Network on Ethics and Climate Change

In the Heart of the Amazon, COP30 Whispered When It Needed to Speak Boldly

There are climate conferences where the host city feels like a backdrop. And then there is Belém, where the host city feels like a warning. You step out of the airport and the Amazon does not politely appear in the distance. It surrounds you. It breathes on you. It quietly says, “No pressure, but this entire conference is about whether places like me live or die.”

Which is why COP30 should have felt bolder. Sharper. Braver. Instead, it felt like the world arrived in the heart of the Amazon and still found new ways to speak softly around the edges of a burning problem.

Let’s talk about the good, before we talk about the missing courage

Under the Mutirao decision, countries agreed to triple adaptation finance by around 2035, landing on a political handshake of about 120 billion dollars per year based on 2025 levels. It is a significant acknowledgement that adaptation is not a footnote but a frontline necessity. It is also, frankly, late. Communities needed this ten years ago, not a decade from now.

The Loss and Damage Fund finally walked out of its infancy. It moved from promise to operation, launched its first call for proposals, and will start sending grants into places that have already paid the price of climate inaction. Multilateral development banks doubled their adaptation financing to more than 26 billion dollars for low and middle income countries in 2024. This is still far beneath the needs identified by UNEP’s Adaptation Gap Report, but at least the dial moved from static to slow motion.

The new climate finance goal took shape too. Countries floated a floor of around 300 billion dollars a year in public finance by 2035 inside a larger climate finance architecture of roughly 1.3 trillion dollars annually. Numbers are numbers, but the world finally admitted that the old one hundred billion promise was nowhere close to reality.

The Global Goal on Adaptation also grew teeth, or at least baby teeth. The 59 indicators under the Baku roadmap were advanced, giving the world some way to measure resilience beyond PowerPoint optimism.

So yes, progress happened. But here is the uncomfortable part. Progress is not the same as courage.

The fossil fuel question: the world’s longest running whisper

Belém had the Amazon as witness. It had science screaming in every direction. It had 60 plus countries pushing for a fossil fuel phase out. And still, the final decision avoided the one phrase that actually matters.

No clear, time bound phase out.
No firm commitment etched into the UNFCCC text.
No signal strong enough to shift markets at the pace required.

Petrostates held the line. The negotiations softened the language. And the world walked away with a voluntary roadmap signed by around 90 countries, living outside the formal decision because consensus could not survive inside it.

Imagine being in the middle of the largest rainforest on Earth and still refusing to say the words “we must leave fossil fuels behind.” If irony could sweat, it would be in Belém.

Forests: present in spirit, missing in text

Brazil pushed hard for forests. The Tropical Forest Forever Facility is an ambitious idea with multi billion potential. The Amazon deserved this level of imagination. But the ambition did not fully migrate into the negotiated outcome. Another reminder that political courage can evaporate somewhere between plenary sessions and drafting rooms.

India’s voice: direct, grounded, and refreshingly clear

India reiterated what many developing countries feel in their bones. Adaptation is not optional. It is survival. The mutirao spirit of collective effort resonated well with our Indian realities. Our communities do not have the luxury of waiting for ideal timelines. They adapt because the climate has already jumped ahead of policy.

While countries negotiated commas, people back home navigated changing coastlines, failed monsoons, crop losses, heat waves, and shifting livelihoods. Every time I heard the phrase “by 2035,” I could almost hear a farmer in Maharashtra mutter, “By next month would be more helpful.”

Reading COP30 through my work

For me, the question is always simple. Do the billions on paper reach the women cultivating seaweed along the Maharashtra coast? Do they reach the young people turning solid waste into new income streams in Kerala? Do they reach tribal communities restoring traditional water systems because the new ones cannot cope with monsoon unpredictability?

That is the heartbeat of climate justice. Not the final paragraph of a COP decision, but the first ripple of impact in a village or a coastal hamlet or an urban poor settlement.

COP30 gave us numbers, but not the delivery mechanisms. It gave us ambition in finance, but not in the fossil fuel transition. It gave us indicators, but not enough accountability.

Why this COP30 matters even with its shortcomings

For the first time in a long time, adaptation sat at the centre of the global agenda. Not as a polite cousin, but as the main character. Climate finance discussions were no longer theory; they had urgency, scale, and some humility. Loss and damage moved from a demand to a functioning mechanism. And justice showed up everywhere, not as a slogan but as a structural demand.

That shift matters. Because communities cannot keep carrying the climate burden alone.

But the hesitation on fossil fuels reminds us how far global politics still is from the science of climate change. Every half sentence avoided in the negotiating room translates into a harder season for people on the frontline.

Walking away from Belém with mixed feelings

Belém was stunning. The people were generous. The forest was alive in all its complexity. But the negotiations did not rise to the height of the place.

We saw movement, yes. But bravery would have looked like a real fossil fuel exit ramp. Bravery would have meant pulling adaptation finance timelines closer to the realities on the ground. Bravery would have meant embedding forest protection in binding text. Bravery would have meant telling the truth plainly.

Instead, we got progress with caution tape wrapped around it.

But I will say this. For all its hesitation, COP30 made one thing impossible to deny. The era of pretending that climate action is something that trickles down from global halls is over. The real action is happening upward from communities. Quietly. Creatively. Relentlessly.

And if the world listened carefully to Belém, it would have realised that the Amazon was not asking for perfection. It was just asking for courage.

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