From 10 to 21 November, representatives from 191 countries are meeting in Belém, Brazil, for COP 30. Ten years after the Paris Agreement, climate and environmental issues have been largely sacrificed in recent months by armed conflicts, economic divisions between the West and emerging powers, and Donald Trump’s aggressive diplomacy. The American president and his ultra-liberal nationalist counterparts have also done everything in their power to discredit the environmental cause and deny global warming. For its part, on 5 November, the European Union painstakingly reached an agreement on a climate law that commits to a 90% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2040.

On the eve of this COP, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva called on world leaders to ‘assume their multilateral responsibility to act with the urgency that the climate crisis demands’ in order to translate the commitments made at recent summits into concrete action and bring the climate crisis back to the forefront of attention.

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