The forthcoming COP30 meeting in Brazil later this year needs to be a “moment of hope and possibilities through action – never paralysis and fragmentation”, COP30 president André Corrêa do Lago has said.
In a letter to mark his nomination as president delegate, Corrêa do Lago drew parallels between the climate challenge and the Brazilian football concept of ‘virada’ – “fighting back to turn the game around when defeat seems almost certain,” he said.
“Together, we can make COP30 the moment we turn the game around, when we put into practice our political achievements and our collective knowledge to change the course of the next decade. COP30 can be the COP we align efforts worldwide: from national to local governments, from international capital markets to local bazars, from major technology actors to local innovators, from academic to traditional knowledges.”
‘Epicentre of the climate crisis’
Corrêa do Lago was nominated by Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to take on the COP30 presidency, with this year’s conference taking place in Belém, “at the epicenter of the climate crisis” in the Amazon.
The event marks ten years since the drafting of the Paris Agreement, and while said agreement is “working”, Corrêa do Lago noted, “there is much more to do.
“In view of climate urgency, we need a new era beyond negotiating talks: we must help put into practice what we have agreed. We must decisively pull the levers of our 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.”
Working together
In the letter, Corrêa do Lago also cited a concept inherited from Brazil’s native indigenous people: mutirão, or coming together to work on a shared task.
“By sharing this invaluable ancestral wisdom and social technology, the incoming COP30 presidency invites the international community to join Brazil in a global ‘mutirão’ against climate change, a global effort of cooperation among peoples for the progress of humanity,” he said.
“Let us pull the levers together. Let us move the world.” Read more here.
