The United Nations climate conferences are one of the key elements of the UN’s mechanism to mitigate, reverse, and address the issue of climate change. They began in 1996, and in 2025, the thirtieth multilateral meeting will be held in Belém, Brazil, where the Amazon river flows into the Atlantic Ocean.
In those 30 years, emissions have continued to rise year after year, environmental damage continues to increase, biodiversity loss is increasingly documented, and the evidence of climate destabilization is already clear to any citizen with new extreme events every month. The facts are surpassing, in some cases, the predictions of scientists.
Until now, the COPs – designed to contribute to the global collective care of the planet – have been manipulated and controlled by economic interests that continue to benefit from industries that are contributing to planetary damage. To make matters worse: in the last 3 years the COPs were held in oil-producing and autocratic countries. In 2024, given the irregularities of COP29, a group of former leaders and climate experts from around the world sent an open letter to all COP countries, highlighting their ineffectiveness and calling for decisive changes in several aspects of their organization and structure.
Read the open letter from former world leaders and climate experts to the COP countries (2024)
Then it looks like these meetings are kind of useless, right?
We felt the same way in 2021 when the Forest of Hope went to COP26 for the first time. It was a great sadness to perceive up close how much sham, how much investment, how many kilometers of aviation gasoline were spent, for so little concrete result in defense of life on Earth. Above all, how corruption is part of the fabric of the COP process and how many representatives of economic interests are in the private meetings inside the event.
Read more about corruption and oil interest’s presence at COP 29
COP29 is for oil deals, globalwitness.org
The environmental movement is over 50 years old, predating the UN’s international diplomacy movement, but we haven’t made progress. However ordinary people are moving, there are changes at the roots of society. That’s why we are inviting you to join our Call to Stitch for 2025.
Call to stitch! Let’s create a textile ecosystem
NOTE: COP stands for Conference of the Parties. It’s used in many UN processes. Currently, there are at least 4 processes that use the same acronym but have different numbering systems. In 2024, three coincided in time within a month and a half:
- COP29 on climate change in Baku, Azerbaijan, November 2024
- COP16 on biodiversity in Cali, Colombia, November 2024
- COP16 on combating desertification in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, December 2024
The one that gets the most press coverage – which is still very limited – is COP29 on climate change, but the other two are also important and should contribute to achieving agreements that favor the regeneration of the planet’s ecosystems.