Credit: UN News/Felipe de Carvalho
By Ginger Cassady
BELÉM, Brazil, Nov 21 2025 – Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon River, was always going to be a symbolic host for the UN COP30 climate summit, but the mood here has gone far beyond symbolism.
Indigenous Peoples, forest communities, women, workers and youth have set the tone in the streets and in the many grassroots spaces across the city. Their message has been consistent and clear — the Amazon cannot survive under the same financial system that is destroying it.
Inside the talks, however, governments are still trying to confront a planetary emergency while operating within a global economic architecture built for extraction. Debt burdens, high borrowing costs, reliance on extractive commodities, volatile currencies and investor-driven pressures all shape what is deemed “possible” long before negotiators put pen to paper.
This is the constraint the UN climate regime cannot escape: countries are expected to deliver climate action within a financial order that makes that action prohibitively expensive.
For wealthier countries, maintaining this structure shields their budgets and geopolitical leverage. For many developing countries, pushing for more ambitious outcomes means navigating the limits imposed by debt service and credit ratings. Emerging economies face their own entanglements, tied to commodity markets and large-scale extractive industries that remain politically powerful.
Overlaying this landscape is the relentless influence of lobbyists from fossil fuel companies, agribusiness conglomerates, commodity traders and major banks. Their presence across delegations and side events narrows the space for solutions that would challenge their business models.
What remains “deliverable” tends to be voluntary measures, market mechanisms and cautious language—steps that do not shift the structural incentives driving deforestation, fossil expansion and land grabs.
The Just Transition Debate Exposes the Real Fault Line
Nowhere is this tension more visible in the final hours of COP30 than in the negotiations over the Just Transition Work Programme. Many industrialized countries continue to frame just transition in narrow domestic terms: retraining workers and adjusting industries. For most of the G77, it is inseparable from land governance, food systems, mineral access, rights protections and—above all—financing that does not reproduce dependency and extraction.
The proposed Belém Action Mechanism reflects this broader vision. It could embed rights, community leadership, implementation support and a mandate to confront the systemic barriers that make unjust transitions the norm. But its language remains heavily bracketed — a sign of both political resistance and the pressure from vested interests uncomfortable with shifting power toward developing countries and frontline communities.
Debt-Based Forest Finance: The TFFF’s Structural Risks
The Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF), launched by Brazil ahead of COP30, has become a flashpoint for these concerns. Despite political appeal, its reliance on long-term bonds and private capital ties forest protection to the expectations of bond markets rather than to the rights and priorities of the Peoples who live in and protect the forests.
Civil society groups have warned that the TFFF risks locking forest countries deeper into market volatility, exposing them to investor-driven conditions, and prioritising investment returns toward creditors over Indigenous Peoples or forest communities.
By treating forests as financial assets within debt markets, the model risks repeating the very dynamics that have fueled deforestation: inequitable power relations, external control and dependence on private capital.
As the talks wind down, negotiators should be frank about the stakes: debt-based climate finance will entrench, not ease, the vulnerabilities that climate action must confront.
Food, Land and the Weight of Finance
The financialization of land and food systems also looms over COP30’s final outcomes. Agribusiness giants, asset managers and commodity traders have reshaped agriculture into a global investment sector, consolidating land, driving forest loss and sidelining small-scale producers.
Draft texts now reference agroecology and Indigenous knowledge, but the political space for transforming these systems remains limited. Without addressing how speculative capital and global supply chains dictate land use, any agreement will fall short of what climate resilience truly requires.
Rights and Human Safety Under Threat
In the closing days of the talks, attempts to dilute gender language, weaken rights protections and sideline environmental defenders have drawn strong backlash from civil society and many governments. These are not isolated disputes; they reflect the political economy of extraction. Where industries rely on weak rights protections to expand, rights language becomes a bargaining chip.
The Indigenous Political Declaration: A Blueprint for Structural Change
As negotiators haggle over bracketed text, the Amazon-wide Indigenous Political Declaration stands out as one of the most coherent and grounded climate agendas to emerge at COP30. It calls for:
- • Legal demarcation and protection of Indigenous territories as a non-negotiable foundation for climate stability.
• Exclusion of mining, fossil fuels and other extractive industries from Indigenous lands.
• Direct access to finance for Indigenous Peoples — not routed through state or market intermediaries that dilute rights or impose debt.
• Recognition of Indigenous knowledge and governance systems as central to climate solutions.
• Protections for defenders, who face rising threats across Amazonian countries.
This is not simply an agenda for the Amazon; it is a structural map for aligning climate action with ecological reality.
The Divide That Now Matters
As COP30 closes, it is clear the old frame of North versus South cannot explain the choices before us. The more revealing divide is between those defending an extractive financial order and those fighting for a rights-based, equitable and ecologically grounded alternative. Many of the interests blocking climate ambition in the North are aligned with elites in the South who profit from destructive supply chains.
Indigenous Peoples, women, workers and small-scale farmers share more in common with one another across continents than with the financial interests influencing their own governments.
Belém has forced the world to confront the limits of incremental change within an extractive order. Whether the final decisions reflect that reality will determine not just the legacy of this COP, but the future of the Amazon itself.
IPS UN Bureau
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Excerpt:
Ginger Cassady is Executive Director, Rainforest Action Network
