COPing Out In Brazil.
Despite being held in Brazil, a nation with the largest Black population outside of the African continent, COP30 has continued a thirty-year pattern of sidelining the specific climate threats to Afro-Descendant communities, while also failing to address the links between militarism, ecocide, and the climate crisis.
Belem, Brazil – The 30th Conference of the Parties (COP) held this year in Belem, Brazil – a nation where 56% of the population identifies as Black or brown, global Black/Afro Descendant movements believed there could have been opportunities to center and prioritize the specific and nuanced ways the climate crisis impacts their communities. A study conducted by Brazilian based, Geledés – the Black Women’s Institute and the Center for Applied Research in Law and Racial Justice at the Fundacao Getulia Vargas School of Law indicates, “The specificity of the Afro-descendant experience in the Americas lies at the intersection of structural racism, colonial legacies, and erasure attempts through ideologies of miscegenation and racial democracy.”
For thirty years the United Nations along with the governments of nation states, global financial institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, and even Civil Society Organizations (non profits and so-called non governmental organizations) have treated Black/Afro Descendant communities and their specific material conditions in the context of climate change as tertiary and, too often ineffable. For instance, the Geledés study analyzed 115 resolutions, technical reports, and documents on racial justice issues drafted and/or approved by United Nations institutions and global bodies such as the G20 between 1992 and 2025 and found that only 23% of them mention Afro Descendants, and, specifically within documents produced by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
This pattern of erasure and dehumanization for Black/Afro Descendant people continues at COP 30 where the United Nations via the COP30 Presidency, a position held each year by the conference’s host nation, indicated that it would not prioritize the myriad and specific ways Afro Descendant populations are adversely impacted by climate change, nor recognize Afro Descendant peoples as a formal constituency within the UNFCCC – a demand that has been articulated by Black/Afro Descendant movements for years. This denial of human rights, self determination and agency of Black/Afro Descendant peoples confirms and demonstrates how the psychopathology of white “supremacy” continues to contaminate global bodies like the United Nations in the same way fossil fuels, toxic pollution, and toxic emissions continue to contaminate the planet, while warming it at an accelerated rate that will surely blow past targets set by the Paris Climate Agreement 10 years ago. And this has massive implications for the ability of Black/Afro Descendant populations to navigate a racialized climate crisis driven by racial capitalism.
Yet the human rights of Black/Afro Descendant people were not the only issue perambulated at COP 30. The first week of the conference also saw the UNFCCC and nation states’ refusal to seriously incorporate the effects of militarism on the climate crisis by making the connection between warmaking and climate destruction, nor the specific instances of devastating environmental destruction such as the tactic of ecocide that has been utilized by Israel against Palestinians for decades – most recently pronounced during the ongoing genocide against Gazan people.
Israel’s military operations have contributed to elevated emissions of greenhouse gases, including, but not limited to, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, methane, and other hazardous air pollutants originating from missile strikes, fossil fuel combustion, and resulting fires. Nonetheless, this issue was not deemed as viable enough to be centered at a global climate conference. In fact, were it not for programing offered by institutions closely associated with the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Government, such as the House of Diplomacy and Mayors’ Forum, the issue of ecocide in Gaza and its connection to genocide as a whole would have been absent from COP 30 altogether. And the fact that the pollution generated by Israel’s genocidal war machine has not been prioritized at COP 30, despite the health risks that will be ongoing and will cause higher rates of respiratory illness, especially in children, further proves that climate and environmental justice is not a priority for the UNFCCC and, further, demonstrates the need for people of the global majority to embrace and facilitate a basis for climate and environmental liberation.
The omission of both Black/Afro Descendant self determination and agency along with the intentional exclusion of the nexus between ecocide, genocide, militarism and the climate crisis elucidates the fact that the United Nations and its associated agencies, as well as nation states and the vast majority of civil society organizations are counterfeit and null sets when it comes to affirming, considering, or even acknowledging the humanity of non white populations through a lens of peoples centered human rights.
This much is compounded by the fact that around the same time that the United Nations and the COP 30 presidency proclaimed that Black/Afro Descendants would not be included as a UNFCCC stand alone constituency this year, the United Nations Security Council voted to approve President Trump’s so-called 20 Point Peace Plan, that all but eliminates any chance for Palestinians to be the architects of their own futures and destinies. A “peace plan” that makes no mention of Israel’s perpetual campaign of slaughter, its bombardment of urban areas in Gaza that’s created over 50 million tons of debris – much of it contaminated with asbestos, heavy metals, and fuel residues – is as Orwellian as it gets.
All has not been lost at COP 30 and the need for a peoples centered human rights framework in the context of climate change has been embraced by many who may not be a part of the “official” negotiations but who have made their presence known. Just as valiant Indigenous communities local to the Amazon region burst through security check points to take their demands directly to decision making bodies on the first day of COP 30, other people of conscience and their formations also refused to let the pressing issues of our time fall by the wayside, nor be subjected to obscurity.
In addition to the programming held in the COP 30 “Green Zone” space by the Iranian House of Diplomacy and Mayors’ Forum where young activists that attended their programs were introduced to new publications such as Earth Alarm Ecocide: Israel’s Environmental Crimes Across the Region that was released during COP 30, a separate People’s Summit, developed and administered by global grassroots formations and movements was held at a local university in Belem. The conclusion of the summit included a declaration showcasing the interlinked crises of fascism, militarism, genocide, and climate change while also naming the capitalist mode of production that exacerbates them. The references to Palestine and the connections made between the racist genocide in Gaza and the issue of imperialism and war in the final declaration of COP’s people’s summit represents an important development that deserves special recognition as it serves as a necessary alternative to the perfunctory and insouciant declarations and agreements that will emerge out of COP 30.
Additionally, global Black/Afro Descendant movements are not taking the UNFCCC’s invisibilization of their communities and humanities lightly as, under the leadership of formations such as The Chisholm Legacy Project, The Black Hive, the Black Alliance for Peace, and the larger Global Afro-Descendant Climate Justice Collective produced a letter, expected to be signed by numerous allied organizations and formation, to the UNFCCC demanding that Afro Descendants be recognized as a formal constituency.
COP 30 will certainly not reduce emissions at a requisite scale to prevent the worst impacts of climate change that disproportionately and adversely impact Black/Afro Descendant communities the world over, nor emerge with a global agreement that centers and advances climate and environmental liberation. Yet in failing to recognize and affirm the people’s centered human rights of Black/Afro Descendant people while also perambulating and omitting the current ecocide of Palestinian lands, air, and water, as well as the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people from the 30th COP conferences agenda, the United Nations has successfully reduced its legitimacy and made clear that it’s nothing more than a willing agent of racial capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and white “supremacy” ideology.
Yet, for all the current and anticipated failures of the United Nations and COP 30 to eviscerate interlinked calamities of the Global South as a result of the parasitic relationship established and maintained by the Global North, it’s clear that an increasing number of people of the global majority understand Paulo Freire’s assertion that, “the more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality, so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it.” A contemporary Pedagogy of the Oppressed is emerging from the embers of failed global policies at the hands of the United Nations, the Conference of Parties, and the controlled opposition of bourgeois civil society organizations – transformation is inevitable and alternative systems are emerging, which should be celebrated far more than the resulting detritus that will emerge out of COP 30.
No Compromise
No Retreat
