Amb André Aranha Corrêa do Lago, President-designate of 2025 UN Climate Change Conference #COP30

Informal meeting of the plenary on the priorities and preparations for the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) - Informal meeting of the plenary, 79th session

Your Excellency Philémon Yang, president of the General Assembly,

Excellencies,

Dear friends,

This is my first formal address as incoming COP30 President. The choice of the General Assembly as my first official trip outside of Brazil is not a coincidence, but a clear sign that the defense of multilateralism will be at the very core of the Brazilian presidency of the COP.

Respect for science will be another pillar of our presidency.  In 1988, we, the United Nations, identified climate change as a “common concern for humankind” and created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. Our leaders listened to scientific alerts and came together four years later in around the ultimate objective of preventing dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. At the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the Rio ‘Earth Summit,’ world leaders signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the UNFCCC, defining principles and the five building-blocks for the multilateral response to climate change: mitigation, adaptation, finance, technology, and capacity-building.

Similarly to the UNFCCC’s role in inaugurating multilateral climate governance, Brazil’s Federal Constitution binds the country to be governed in its international relations by principles that include “cooperation among peoples for the progress of humanity.” This fundamental principle will guide the incoming presidency of COP30, not only because our diplomacy is constitutionally bound by it, but because Brazil has the firm conviction that there is no future progress for humanity without deep, rapid, and sustained cooperation among all countries.

Brazil will host and preside over COP30 in November 2025 against the backdrop of several landmarks: the 80th anniversary of the United Nations, 20 years since the entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol and 10 years of adoption of the Paris Agreement. Much has been learned throughout the three decades of our multilateral regime. Through achievements and shortcomings, the UNFCCC has provided a mirror of humanity’s greatest qualities and limitations. It has shown us how our societies, economies, and politics should work – and how they do in practice.

We now enter 2025 with another landmark, an unfortunate one: the confirmation that 2024 was the warmest year on record globally, and the first calendar year that the average global temperature exceeded 1.5°C above its pre-industrial level. Now, not only do we hear about climate risks, but we also live the climate urgency. Climate change is no longer contained in science and international law. It has arrived at our doorsteps, reaching our ecosystems, cities, and daily lives.

Facing climate urgency, the complexity of our task ahead is to strengthen climate governance and provide agility, preparedness, and anticipation in both decision-making and implementation. To achieve this, Brazil hopes COP30 can provide a decisive impulse in three dimensions: (1) to protect and expand the institutional legacy we built together over three decades; (2) to connect to real life the abstraction of negotiations and of COP decisions; (3) to accelerate the implementation of the Paris Agreement through structural solutions and levers beyond the multilateral climate regime, including in global governance and financial architecture.

We need a new era beyond negotiating talks as we continue to reinforce the regime. We must help put into practice what we have agreed. COP30 must represent a decisive transition from the regime’s negotiation phase. The Paris Agreement is working, but we need to move faster. As negotiations emanating from COP21 are now concluded, we must refocus our efforts on action and implementation, while considering approaches and initiatives to “increase the efficiency of the UNFCCC process. We are pursuing this objective nder the Subsidiary Body on Implementation of the UNFCCC, the SBI. Words and text must be translated into actual practice, and transformations on the ground. The credibility and strength of the regime hinge upon it.

We must decisively pull the levers of our regime’s processes, mechanisms, and bodies towards aligning efforts within and outside the UNFCCC with the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement on temperature, resilience, and financial flows. That includes ambitious NDCs that are aligned with Paris long-term goal. National leaders must honor their resolve to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C. Human lives depend on it, future jobs depend on it, healthy environments depend on it.

There is a high expectation of taking stock at COP30 of nationally determined contributions, the NDCs. As we all know, NDCs are nationally determined and hence not subject to multilateral negotiations. We will nevertheless stimulate a frank collective reflection on bottlenecks that have been hampering climate ambition and implementation.

Ever since Brazil received the trust of Latin America and the Caribbean as our region’s COP host, the path to COP30 has been successfully paved by the COP28 and COP29 presidencies – our troika partners in the Road Map to Mission 1.5. In 2023, under Emirati leadership in Dubai, we adopted the UAE Consensus, which included a breakthrough on loss and damage, following the Egyptian COP27 leadership. We also concluded the first global stocktake (GST). Unprecedentedly, the GST launched global calls for efforts towards halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation by 2030. We also accelerate the global energy transition, including by tripling renewable energy capacity globally, by doubling the global average annual rate of energy efficiency improvements, and by transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly, and equitable manner.

Based on equity and science, the GST is already the unanimous reference that informs international cooperation and Parties in enhancing actions and support. The GST stands as our guide to Mission 1.5, as our collective project to implement the vision of the Convention and the Paris Agreement, the vision of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty.

Having COP28 as a steppingstone and then COP29 under the Azerbaijani leadership, we finally completed in 2024 the Paris “Rulebook” by finalizing the rules under Article 6. We further adopted the “Baku Climate Unity Pact,” which includes the cornerstone decision around the new collective quantified goal on climate finance (NCQG). The incoming COP30 presidency looks forward to working with the COP29 presidency in guiding the “Baku to Belém Roadmap to 1.3T” to scale up climate finance to developing country Parties. Together, we will be producing a report summarizing our work by COP30. The Roadmap must serve as a fulcrum for leveraging finance to low-carbon and climate-resilience pathways in developing countries. If climate goals are to be achieved, both adaptation and mitigation financing will need to be increased manyfold.

As we step into 2025, we go from COP29 to COP30 not only with a complete Rulebook for the Paris Agreement but also with its policy cycle fully in motion, including in terms of NDCs and the enhanced transparency framework (ETF). We do have pending issues to solve at COP30, notably the UAE dialogue on implementing the GST outcomes and the just transition work programme (JTWP). The GST is an invaluable legacy that unites us. We must all continue to subscribe to it as the ultimate benchmark for climate implementation. Just transitions are central for leveraging climate action towards sustainable development and addressing structural inequalities between and within countries, including in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity.

Parties have recognized in Baku we must double-down efforts to support just transitions across all sectors and thematic areas, and cross-cutting efforts, including transparency, readiness, capacity-building, and technology development and transfer. As countries prepare and communicate their next NDCs and Biennial Transparency Reports (BTRs), we need to build the capacity of developing country Parties to transition from ad hoc reporting approaches to government-led, systematic, and institutionalized processes for preparing and submitting national reports under the ETF.

In 2025, we will continue and strengthen the Sharm el-Sheikh dialogue on the scope of Article 2, paragraph 1(c) of the Paris Agreement. The Paris Committee on Capacity-building (PCCB) will develop a work plan, whilst its focus for the year relies on capacity building for designing holistic investment strategies, bankable projects, and stakeholder engagement to strengthen the implementation of NDCs and National Adaptation Plans (NAPs) in developing countries. The 62nd session of the subsidiary bodies, in Bonn, next June, will also initiate the development of a new gender action plan, taking into account the review of the enhanced Lima work programme. Brazil is honored to build on the legacies of previous Latin American COP presidencies with a view to advancing the agenda on gender and climate.

At COP30 we also have the unique opportunity of amplifying the invaluable legacies from the British COP26 and the Egyptian COP27 leaderships, including under the Sharm el-Sheikh mitigation ambition and implementation work programme (MWP). Instead of suspicion in polarized negotiations, the MWP has the vocation of becoming a platform for breakthroughs and trust-building through action and cooperation when leveraging opportunities, overcoming barriers, and exploring actionable solutions.

As we face and recover from extreme climate events around the world, we must ensure 2025 is equally a landmark for climate adaptation and the delivery of National Adaptation Plans. Adaption is no longer a choice, nor does it compete with mitigation. Building on progress on the global goal on adaptation (GGA) at COP28 and COP29, we must fulfill our legal mandate on indicators under the United Arab Emirates–Belém work programme. Advancing the “Baku Adaptation Road Map” and the Baku high-level dialogue on adaptation will be essential, side by side progress on the work on the Santiago network and the Warsaw International Mechanism.

The more ubiquitous our fight against climate change becomes, the more we need to incorporate synergies between climate, biodiversity, desertification, and our Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The 1992 Earth Summit was the cradle of the Rio Conventions on climate change, biodiversity and desertification, as well as the Rio Declaration and Agenda 21. Back to Brazil, these agendas need to be integrated through strong public participation. It is urgent we address, in a comprehensive and synergetic manner, the interlinked global crises of climate change and biodiversity loss in the broader context of achieving the SDGs. In doing so, we must continue to acknowledge and expand the role and contributions of Indigenous Peoples and of local communities in nature stewardship and climate leadership, while recognizing the disproportionate effects they suffer from climate change.

The incoming presidency will continue to engage and count with the Mission 1.5 Troika and the UN Secretary-General on raising climate awareness and political momentum around NDCs, including in the context of the partnership between Secretary-General Guterres and President Lula.

Finally, the incoming presidency will seek to bring to the Action Agenda a new dynamic that focuses on key issues for the full implementation of the GST and of NDCs. We will bring together negotiators, national and subnational governments, civil society, private sector, and other stakeholders to engage in an exercise on how to translate the 10 years of Paris into palpable achievements and incentives to continue to act and strengthen the multilateral regime.

Our multilateral institutions can and will deliver results commensurate with the scale of the climate challenge. Climate multilateralism boasts the wisdom and achievements from each of the past twenty-nine COPs. Standing on the shoulders of our predecessors, the incoming presidency of COP30 is humbled by the legacies of COP21 to COP29, legacies that we must preserve, consolidate and build upon.

President Lula’s choice of bringing for the first time to the Amazon the center of global climate decision-making enshrines a vision combining realism and hope. His vision reflects realism because issues that have long been associated as problems in the climate fight can now be turned into powerful solutions. After years of continuous deforestation, the biggest source of Brazil’s emissions, the Amazon, is now fast becoming a major source of climate solutions, from innovation and bioeconomy to traditional knowledges. The vision of bringing COP30 to the Amazon also reflects hope because the regeneration of the region can spearhead the beginning of a global regeneration towards a future of collective prosperity. Brazil looks forward to welcoming our United Nations to Belem. Let’s build together our common future, let’s embrace our shared destiny.

Thank you.