Former United Nations climate chief Christiana Figueres has expressed confidence in Brazil as host of this year’s United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP) talks, despite the Latin American nation’s oil expansion plans.
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There is a “substantial difference in intention and integrity” between a COP presidency that comes out of a petrostate and one that represents a country that is home to the Amazon rainforest, known as the largest green lung in the world, Figueres said in an online press briefing held by the Oxford Climate Journalism Network on Thursday.
“We all know that the past COP presidencies that have taken place in petrostates have been not just heavily influenced by oil and gas lobbyists, but the governments themselves have undertaken behaviours and activities before and during the COP that were not protective of climate change and of global people’s interests,” said Figueres, when asked if an approval of Brazil’s proposal for oil drilling in the mouth of the Amazon River would make the country any different from previous petrostate COP hosts.
“That is not something that is going to happen in Brazil and that’s why I think it is really important where COPs take place.”
COP30 will be hosted by a responsible government with one of the highest performing foreign services in the world, and a presidency with long years of experience in multilateral diplomacy, putting the conference in “very good hands”, she added.
Christiana Figueres speaks to journalists from the Oxford Climate Journalism Network in an online press briefing on 27 March 2025. Image: OCJN
COP30 president-designate André Aranha Corrêa do Lago is a veteran climate diplomat who has served as Brazil’s chief negotiator in global climate talks, unlike previous climate summit presidencies helmed by oil and gas executives.
Holding a COP in the Amazon, the world’s largest tropical rainforest, has raised hopes that this year’s conference will be free from the shadow of fossil fuels, after the last two were held in major oil-producing countries, Azerbaijan and the United Arab Emirates.
But Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been contradicting his climate leadership stance ahead of COP30 by signaling that he wants to extract more climate-warming oil in the Amazon. He has argued that funds could finance the country’s transition to green energy.
Apart from oil drilling, tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest has been cut through to build a highway in preparation for the COP30 summit in the Brazilian city of Belém.
The highway aims to ease traffic to the city, which will host more than 50,000 people, composed of dozens of world leaders and hundreds of the biggest companies and nonprofits, at the conference in November.
The Amazon plays a crucial role in absorbing carbon for the world and as a home to high biodiversity, and the forest clearance to build the road has drawn scrutiny for contradicting the very purpose of a climate summit.
