Ninth Letter from the Presidency

In advancing our Global Mutirão against climate change, the Brazilian incoming Presidency of the 30th Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP30) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) presents its ninth letter to the international community. This letter addresses the decisive challenge of keeping 1.5 °C alive – responding to urgency through accelerated implementation and international cooperation. 

I invite the international community to confront the truth that awaits us in Belém. COP30 stands at a crossroads for fulfilling the ultimate objective of the Convention – the same purpose that guides the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. We must choose: allow business as usual to pull us toward breakdown, or unite in courage and cooperation to tip the world toward breakthrough. 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that the risks posed by climate change go far beyond the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. Each increment of warming increases the likelihood of abrupt and irreversible changes in the climate system, including those triggered when critical tipping points are reached. These shifts can erode the resilience of social, economic, and political systems, with devastating consequences. Simply put, tipping Earth’s life support systems could precipitate systemic collapse across economies, societies and institutions. 

At the crossroads of tipping points: Science joins our Global Mutirão

Launched at Pre-COP30 (Brasília, October), the Global Tipping Points Report 2025 confirmed that the world has entered a new reality. Global warming is on a path to exceed 1.5 °C, pushing humanity into a danger zone where multiple tipping points could cascade into self-amplifying change. As one system destabilizes another, the balance our lives depend on begins to unravel. 

Tipping pointsthusrepresent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system - precisely what the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement were designed to prevent. Science warns that minimizing overshoot of 1.5 °C is essential to avoid such cascades, yet the window to act is closing fast. Every fraction of a degree, and every year beyond 1.5 °C, matters.

The same science that alerts us of risks also reveals pathways to hope. It shows that we can trigger positive tipping points - thresholds where technological, behavioral, and social change accelerate toward low-carbon, resilient development. Rapid declines in renewable-energy costs already create self-reinforcing feedbacks that drive transformation faster than policy alone. By connecting these dynamics through cooperation and collective action, humanity can shift from crisis to regeneration. Key levers identified by the Global Tipping Points Report include digital public infrastructure, affordable finance for developing countries, nature regeneration, policy mandates for the energy transition, and community-driven transitions that fight hunger, poverty, and inequality. 

Positive tipping points are already beginning to cascade across sectors and regions. Though the window is narrowing, keeping 1.5 °C alive remains possible if we channel cooperation to catalyze virtuous cascades of exponential transformation. This is the moment to turn the risk of planetary tipping points into an opportunity for a global turn around.

From gaps to levers: Accelerating implementation, solidarity, and cooperation

As we approach Belém, we do so facing major implementation and ambition gaps in global climate action and ambition. The Synthesis Report on Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) issued by the UNFCCC secretariat, together with UNEP’s Adaptation Gap Report 2025 and the Emissions Gap Report 2025, reveal a sobering picture. 

Yet despite mounting challenges, the global climate transition has already unfolded as an irreversible trend and a key driver of sustainable development – demonstrating that the Paris Agreement is working. The task before us is to accelerate implementation to keep 1.5 °C within reach, while building resilience to mounting impacts and sharing the benefits of this transformation justly and equitably among and within nations. 

I applaud countries that have presented new NDCs in response to the first Global Stocktake (GST) and urge remaining countries to do so by COP30. 

Collectively, the new NDCs show an unprecedented reduction in projected emissions by 2035. Through international cooperation and national efforts, humanity is bending the emissions curve downward for the first time in history. But we are not yet moving fast enough. Our direction is improving, but we now face an undeniable truth: we need more speed. 

These findings underscore the urgency of transforming gaps into levers. The challenge ahead is not only to identify what is missing but to mobilize what can move - to turn deficits in ambition, finance and technology into forces of acceleration. 

Climate action can no longer be confined to a linear decarbonization agenda. It must be spearheaded by sustainable development in all its dimensions – social, economic, and environmental – toward non linear transformation that is exponential in both speed and scale. This multidimensional approach is key for the three interconnected priorities the incoming Presidency envisions for COP30: (1) reinforcing multilateralism and the climate change regime under the UNFCCC, (2) connecting the climate regime to people’s real lives and to the real economy, and (3) accelerating the implementation of the Paris Agreement.

At COP30, keeping 1.5 °C alive must therefore remain our North Star. To achieve it, we must leverage all five dimensions of climate action – mitigation, adaptation, finance, technology, and capacity building – guided by the Southern Cross, our compass for cooperation and equity. 

Let us make the stars align in Belém. Let us make hemispheres meet toward transformation. North and South, East and West – one humanity, one planet.

From illusory silver bullets to an ecosystem of solutions

COP30 will not deliver a single response to the world’s implementation and ambition gaps – because no single response can meet the scale or diversity of this challenge. Instead, Belém will bring together a collection of responses, woven across negotiations, the Action Agenda, the Leaders’ Summit, and a global mobilization – all aimed at accelerating implementation and strengthening international cooperation. 

Accelerated implementation must become our new measure of ambition in response to climate urgency. We call on all actors to work together to significantly accelerate and scale up action worldwide, across all sectors, stakeholders, and levels, as part of a global mobilization against climate change. 

At COP30, our response to urgency must come through accelerated implementation, solidarity, and international cooperation. These actions will further give us confidence, resources and capacity for more ambitious targets. Finance, technology, and capacity-building must evolve from instruments of negotiation into levers of transformation, enabling developing countries to move faster and further. From mobilizing climate finance to mainstreaming climate in finance, we must advance in both the provision of financial resources and the alignment of finance flowsto low-greenhouse-gas and climate resilient development. Together with the COP29 Presidency, the incoming Presidency hopesthe “Baku to Belém Roadmap to 1.3T” can serve as a pathway to unlock this potential and a bridge between climate ambition and systemic change in our international financial architecture. 

In my sixth letter, of 19 August, I launched early COP30 Presidency Consultations that would otherwise be left for the two weeks of the COP. These included several virtual convenings and in person meetings on the margins of the 80th United Nations General Assembly (New York, September) and Pre-COP30. I was both humbled and inspired by what I heard. From all Parties, I listened an unwavering commitment to multilateralism, to the Paris Agreement, and to successful outcomes at COP30 that send a strong message of unity in celebration of the Paris Agreement’s tenth anniversary. We all recognize that the climate transition is the trend of our time, as China’s President Xi Jinping noted. There is so much more that unites than divides us. 

I also heard determination from Parties to face implementation and ambition gaps at COP30 by accelerating implementation and enhancing international cooperation particularly on means of implementation, as part of continued efforts to limit global temperature increase to 1.5 °C – mindful of different national circumstances, pathways, and approaches, as well as the legal provisions, principles, and long-term goals of the Paris Agreement. 

I equally listened from Parties that we are all proud of the architecture of the Paris Agreement we have built together. I invite countries to come to COP30 with their heads held high: the progress and institutional legacy achieved since the adoption of the Paris Agreement at COP21 (Paris, 2015) is a monumental feat. Following completion of the Paris Rulebook at COP29 (Baku, 2024), COP30 will mark the first COP in which the Paris Agreement policy cycle is fully in motion. Periodic NDCs, NAPs, GSTs, and the Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF) – including the first cycle of Biennial Transparency Reports (BTRs) and the Facilitative Multilateral Consideration of Progress (FMCP) – are not bureaucratic processes but an undeniable display of the institutional sophistication of climate multilateralism. Beyond the UNFCCC, the policy cycle signals and guides actors and institutions for alignment with multilateral decisions and stack of resources. 

I urge all Parties to use our work under the negotiating agenda as a Mutirão for shifting the Paris policy cycle from design to delivery. COP30 can signal the maturation of the regime – from negotiation to coordinated implementation – anchored in equity, science, and cooperation. 

An Agenda of Accelerated Action

Connecting ambition with implementation across six axes – from forests, oceans and food systems to energy, transport, cities, finance, jobs and technology – the Action Agenda has been conceived as a platform for channeling global cooperation and coordination for positive tipping points guided by the outcome of the first Global Stocktake (GST), agreed at COP28. 

Beyond a repository of tools, the granary of solutions is now an integrator of solutions. Combined, existing and emerging solutions can become more than their sum. While building accountability to initiatives launched in previous COPs, the transition acceleration plans will similarly serve as action plans for positive tipping points. It will connect initiatives across sectors and regions, enabling them to compound and cascade transformation rather than compete for visibility. 

Through this networked approach, COP30 will embody the transition from governance by negotiation to governance by activation – where decisions translate into deployment, and commitments evolve into collaboration. The Action Agenda will operate as a living ecosystem of implementation, linking actors, resources, mechanisms and processes with solutions. 

Over the Action Agenda thematic days, the COP30 Presidency will announce with partners flagship initiatives aimed at responding to climate urgency through accelerated implementation and enhanced international cooperation. Methane reduction and the restoration of forests and ecosystems represent a fast-acting measure with outsized impact. They can serve as humanity’s emergency brakes, slowing global warming in the critical decade ahead, keeping 1.5°C within reach while protecting the world’s most vulnerable. 

COP30 also offers a historic opportunity to merge the digital and climate transitions into a single planetary transformation. Digital technologies can provide the missing speed and scale to accelerate low-carbon and climate-resilient development worldwide. India’s G20 Presidency in 2023 demonstrated that well-designed digital public infrastructure (DPI) augmented by artificial intelligence can enable the use of data for accelerated progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through inclusive digital transformation. Within just a few years, Brazil’s PIX digital payment ecosystem radically changed the Brazilian economy and society, driving financial inclusion, entrepreneurship and bringing prosperity to business and individuals. Against climate change, DPI applications could span from real-time data sharing for early warnings and disaster response to income generation to smallholder farmers receiving sustainable agriculture payments and households selling energy they produce through decentralized systems. Open data and interoperability can help us create an unprecedented network of planetary intelligence for accelerating implementation and connecting it to people.

Leveraging DPI’s radical transparency, modularity, scale, and speed, the incoming Presidency has also been working closely with partners to promote institutional strengthening and build state capacities. Stronger institutions – particularly in developing countries – are key not only for the design and implementation of NAPs, NDCs, and BTRs, but also for long-term planning, responsiveness, and preparedness in whole-of-government, whole-of-society, and whole-of-economy transitions to the future. Supported by international cooperation, strong national planning and implementation institutions can enable developing countries to tap into climate transition opportunities, making NAPs and NDCs country-owned investment plans connected to international finance, capital markets, and cutting-edge technologies.

The world comes to the Amazon: When we turn the tide together

COP30 will take place in the heart of the Amazon, an ecosystem that sustains life – and one now standing on the edge of an irreversible tipping point. The Global Tipping Points Report 2025 warns that climate change and deforestation together put the Amazon rainforest at risk of widespread dieback over 1.5°C and below 2°C, with consequences that could devastate biodiversity, destabilize rainfall systems across South America, and endanger the lives of over one hundred million people who depend on the forest for water, food, and culture. 

The Amazon embodies the truth that awaits us in Belém: the future of humanity and the health of the planet are inseparable. The forest is not a distant frontier; it is a living center of the global climate system, the beating heart of hydrological cycles, and a guardian of the world’s carbon balance. If the Amazon crosses its tipping point, the planet will struggle to recover equilibrium. 

Yet there is hope in recent data. In 2025, Brazil recorded its third consecutive year of declining deforestation in the Amazon, reaching the third-lowest rate in the historical series. Since the beginning of President Lula’s administration, deforestation in the biome has fallen by 50 % in cumulative terms. The Cerrado saw a second consecutive year of reduced deforestation. 

As efforts to combat deforestation advances, the Tropical Forests Forever Fund (TFFF) inaugurates a new way to finance the protection of tropical forests – a results-based mechanism that will reward tropical forest countries for each hectare of forest conserved, helping to correct the market failure that still makes forests worth more destroyed than standing. Brazil has pledged USD 1 billion to the TFFF, welcomes commitments already announced, and invites other countries and partners to put forward equally ambitious contributions. 

As President Lula said, COP30 must be the COP of Truth. In Belém, truth must meet transformation, and science must become solidarity. We can turn our climate fight from breakdown to breakthrough. COP30 can be the COP we turn around our climate fight. 

Let us pull the levers. Let us move the world. Changing by choice, together.

André Aranha Corrêa do Lago
COP30 President Designate