“It’s not a party; it’s fight,” says Marina Silva on COP30 in Belém
Brazil’s Minister for the Environment and Climate Change Marina Silva on Tuesday (Apr. 15) reiterated that global warming should be tackled with planning in order to replace fossil fuels with renewable and less polluting energy sources. During the symposium Connecting Climate and Nature: Recommendations for Multilateral Negotiations, in Brasília, she stressed the seriousness of the commitment to the environment made 32 years ago at the Earth Summit, ECO 92, in Rio de Janeiro.
“We’re going to have a lot of planning to do if we’re ever to make a just transition away from fossil fuels—otherwise we’re going to be changed. And we’re already being changed,” she said.
This planning, she said, requires the delivery of the Nationally Determined Contributions by the signatory countries of the Paris Agreement by the next United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30), to be hosted by Brazil in Belém, Pará state.
“It’s not a party; it’s fight. It’s not the World Cup; it’s not the Olympics; it’s COP, which we could say comes while we are experiencing the pedagogy of mourning and pain for many things, including the threat to multilateralism, solidarity, and collaboration between nations,” she stated.
Planning, the minister argued, can help promote the transition while preventing problems such as climate extremes, which cause storms, drought, fires, and unemployment.
“I like the idea of planning for change. It allows us to do things gradually, without the undesirable effects of change,” she remarked.
Minister Marina Silva stressed that climate talks need sobriety to bear the weight of the fact that, last year, the planet reached a temperature of 1.5ºC above the pre-industrial period.
“Climate is part of nature, but we’ve done something so terrible that now we have to reconnect climate and nature, as if they were two separate things,” she noted.
