Climate adaptation should be a priority at COP30, says ambassador
Ambassador André Corrêa do Lago, president of the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30), said in São Paulo on Monday (Nov. 3) that he expects the issue of climate adaptation to be an “absolute priority” at COP30, to be held in the Amazon city of Belém later this month.
“Climate negotiations are generally divided into mitigation – which is the reduction of emissions – and adaptation, which had a lot of people think, ‘We’re not going to work on adaptation. That means giving up on mitigation!’ That wasn’t the case back then, but now it’s even less so, because with the acceleration of climate change, you need adaptation enormously, and the world’s population is much more sensitive to adaptation efforts because it affects people’s lives. So adaptation is an absolute priority for this COP,” he declared.
“I hope people will remember this COP as a COP of adaptation,” he told reporters after attending the COP30 Business & Finance Forum, hosted by Bloomberg Philanthropies in São Paulo.
Overall, COP uses two main strategies to address climate change – mitigation actions, which refer to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to slow down global warming; and adaptation, which is a way of adjusting to the existing or inevitable impacts of the climate crisis.
Now, a few days before the start of COP30, just over 60 countries had submitted their mitigation targets – i.e. their commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs). During the opening of the event, the ambassador said that this may be because nations want to present targets that are actually achievable.
“We didn’t expect this because the deadline [for submitting] NDCs was February, but the truth is that countries realized how complex it is to make a good NDC. And now that many people have the structure in place as well as the support and verification, countries want to submit NDCs that are credible, and they need to negotiate them within their respective countries to ensure that they are really proposing something feasible,” he noted.
Forest Fund
The ambassador also commented on the Brazilian government’s expectation of reaching USD 10 billion in public investments from countries for the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) by the end of Brazil’s COP presidency. The fund is aimed at protecting forests and stipulates that countries that preserve their tropical forests should be financially rewarded via a global investment fund.
“I think it’s a huge success because it’s an innovative mechanism,” said Lago.
Earlier, during the same event, Brazilian Finance Minister Fernando Haddad commented that this is an ambitious but possible proposal. “If we end the first year with USD 10 billion in public funds, it’d be a great achievement,” he said.
In the ambassador’s view, this proposal by the Brazilian government could be successful.
“It may help to address one of the most difficult issues in the economy, which is how to assign value to standing forests. For years, everyone’s been saying this has to happen, that it has to be done, but it hasn’t been achieved. So the idea is good, and the way it’s being prepared has been very careful precisely to win the world’s trust. I think the progress has been truly exceptional,” he said.
