Spectating from afar during the Cop30 UN climate summit in Belem on the edge of Brazil’s Amazon forests, it is easy to despair. Despite 30 years of concerted global diplomacy and exhaustive scientific evidence of the gravity of global warming, carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise, as do global temperatures. Brazil’s rainforest continues to burn. Global oil and gas production remains robust. Governments procrastinate and funding promises still fail to materialise.
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Worst of all, the world’s second worst carbon emitter – the United States – has turned its back on the entire process, with President Donald Trump calling climate change a “con job” and trying to browbeat allies into following suit.
But Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva remains uncowed. Both Lula and Cop30 president Andre Correa do Lago are calling for a mutirao: community mobilisation. Recognising the challenge of getting nearly 200 economies to shift from generalisation to gritty detail, they are pushing for delegates to move on from negotiation to implementation.
With global temperatures almost certain to rise by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, a crucial threshold triggering catastrophic climate effects, Lula is pressing leaders not simply to focus on controlling emissions but to pay increasing attention to how we adapt to a hotter world.
This implies a shift from top-down diplomacy towards more bottom-up action, with individual countries taking direct responsibility for local initiatives. Prioritising adaptation will pivot action from abstract, long-term aims of cutting carbon emissions towards a focus on floods and typhoons, heatstroke deaths and wildfire damage.
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While it would be unforgivable to reduce efforts to curb carbon emissions, a focus on adaptation may help to overcome problems in galvanising local action – because of what psychologists call global warming’s problem of “psychological distance”.