Belem opportunity – draft outcome 2025-0319
Political preferences do not make climate change a non-problem. In fact, evidence shows global heating and climate disruption are accelerating, while damages and costs are proliferating. Since the middle of last year, the U.S. has experienced two shock events that will eventually cost more than $250 billion. Without urgent action, climate breakdown is coming—to food and water supplies, to the everyday economy, to whole nations.
The 2023 State of the Climate Report: Entering Uncharted Territory, issued this stark warning:
“By the end of this century, an estimated 3 to 6 billion individuals — approximately one-third to one-half of the global population — might find themselves confined beyond the livable region, encountering severe heat, limited food availability, and elevated mortality rates because of the effects of climate change (Lenton et al. 2023).”
The 30th annual Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP30) will take place in November in the city of Belém, on the coast of Pará State, in Brazil, at the edge of the Amazon Basin. All nations are expected to update and upgrade their national decarbonization and adaptation plans.
2025 is a highly pressurized environment for diplomacy in nearly all areas. The global economy is still facing costly ripple effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Climate disruption has gotten worse and more costly, faster than anticipated. Polluting interests have sought to capture international negotiations around energy, climate, trade, and finance, and key countries are pulling back on their commitments to a climate-resilient future.
On Wednesday, March 12, Climate Civics International hosted a special Earth Diplomacy Leadership event on the complicated geopolitical dynamics surrounding The Belém Opportunity. The event featured key leaders in economics, international finance, and climate diplomacy. Guest presenters included:
- Sandra Guzmán Luna – GFLAC
- Selamawit Wubet – Global Center on Adaptation
- Nfamara Dampha – UMN Institute on the Environment
- Mizan Khan – LUCCC
Interventions and the wider discussion were invited to address five core questions:
- What obstacles stand in the way of major forward progress on climate crisis response?
- How are these obstacles relevant in specific local and regional cases?
- What might be the risks and costs of losing access to best quality climate science observations?
- How does the much-touted finance need translate into investable opportunity?
- Does 2025 present unique conditions that make mutual gains possible, in new ways?
The first obstacle we heard about was the barrier to action created by governments depending on revenues from fossil fuels. In much of the world, fossil fuels are treated as mineral resources that are owned by the public, or the regime, and which are either sold by state-owned enterprises or deliver significant revenues from fees paid by private commercial entities.
Without an off-ramp for governments that have a high rate of dependency on fossil fuel revenues, they will naturally prioritize protecting or increasing those revenues. Work toward a new convention on taxation was cited as one area where there is significant opportunity for improving this dynamic. Climate-sensitive debt relief can also be used to drive public investment toward activities that maximize resilience value and build a strong foundation for a climate-smart economy.
It was also noted that leadership in the development of revenue transition strategies (off-ramps from fossil fuel revenue dependency) can come from outside of government. Here, the question becomes one of how best to incentivize resource mobilization and innovation, so that new business models can be developed that attract major investment and generate replacement revenues. CCI and the Climate Value partners will explore answers to this question in upcoming events on advancing climate-smart trade and finance, data systems integration, climate banking innovation, and city-level food systems finance.
Fossil fuel dependency directly affects the diplomatic process surrounding cooperative climate action and setting global ambition. So, the diplomatic process needs to include levers of cooperative action that remove the incentive to prioritize fossil fuel revenues. Article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement specifically provides for cooperative multilateral support for raising ambition and accelerating decarbonization and resilience-building investments. It also calls for working “across instruments and institutional arrangements”, so that climate action strategies are more actionable, durable, and effective.
Another core insight of the discussion was the need for quality finance. A simple way to think about this is that if you add a lot of new finance, but all of it is high-cost debt, then you might be working against progress and weakening already vulnerable countries, rather than supporting progress and building opporutnities for sustainable shared prosperity. Quality finance means financial arrangements that reduce overall indebtedness, create fiscal space, support value-building investment from public, private, multilateral, and philanthropic sources, and prioritize adding new capacity where the investment happens, rather than extracting value and transferring it back to the original funder.
With official development assistance being cut back and intense new pressures on governments to respond to security threats, these expanded opportunities for investment that builds climate resilience will have to be cooperative approaches that create win-win scenarios. The African Climate Summit will look at the security implications of climate change, and is expected to produce important insights into how both wealthy and vulnerable countries can protect and expand value creation by strategically investing to reduce the risk of armed conflict and other modes of destabilization.
The business case for strong, coordinated climate action was raised, with presenters and discussants citing infrastructure, de-risking support for investors and entrepreneurs, and co-financing arrangements as vehicles attuned to solid returns on investment.
High-quality science is crucial for unlocking the brightest possible financial and economic future. High-quality science can prevent costly climate disasters, or make response measures more proactive and efficient, and help to avoid maladaptation. It is also vitally important for understanding with precision and detail where climate-related value-creation is happening, and what it will be worth, for how long.
In the end, it is as simple as this: Good data informs good decisions; if you want to make good decisions, you need good data.
National Adaptation Plans require means of implementation. It is time to stop debating whether “means of implementation” entails delivery of financial support. Obviously, all means of implementation require investment of some kind; it is time to start prioritizing the mobilization of resources, not just planning and negotiation around what that might look like.
Meanwhile, the work will continue in the formal negotiating process to identify critical indicators of progress on adaptation. Nearly 10,000 indicators have been submitted and considered, and there is recognition of both 1) the need to preserve fine-grained detail about real-world risk and lived experience and 2) the value of having a more streamlined list of universal metrics that allow for evidence-based cross-referencing and reporting of best practices and clear returns on investment.
There is a push to reduce the universal adaptation indicators down to around 100, though some advocate for a layered approach—with 50 to 100 as universal standards, and an unspecified additional number considered as uniquely valuable measurements that may provide insight into only a select number or even one local or regional circumstance. One possibility is that the UNFCCC process narrows down universal indicators, while national governments and subnational jurisdictions collaborate to determine how best, with what level of detail, they translate local experience into national reporting.
A key priority is that adaptation needs to become more investable. That suggests universal standards linked to measurable value-creation, and which public authorities can incentivize and support with specialized financing.
It also calls into question whether Transformational Adaptation is appropriate for some vulnerable countries. For the most vulnerable—those facing potential annihilation, like small island states—transformational adaptation is needed. For others, there is the risk that with too much economy-wide disruption and not enough funding, an array of new problems will arise that make it still harder to achieve the safety and security sought by climate adaptation.
Sharing of insights becomes critical, including the sharing of best practices, effective metrics, and layered climate resilient development strategies, between lower and middle income countries, so-called “South-South” cooperation. As Prof. Mizan Khan said, during the workshop, “Local wisdom must lead.” We cannot afford, at this late stage, to make costly mistakes that impose undue additional burdens on local communities; nor can we ignore the local insights that will allow for the most fine-tuned, durable, and effective climate crisis response.
Levers of Action
A week ahead of the session, we published a brief by CCI Executive Director Joe Robertson, outlining key levers of action that can make Belém into an opportunity to enhance trade and finance and avoid costly economic breakdown. The brief is available through the Climate Value Exchange:
It offers five areas that provide diverse, flexible, and scalable opportunities for harnessing the climate value economy:
- Trade – In a world where arbtirary tariffs are being put in place, it is much easier for countries large and small to join climate cooperative groups, to set border adjustments that are aligned with climate progress.
- Food – Nutrition security and food supplies are strained in all regions; climate-smart food production, storage, and distribution practices create opportunities across whole economies, bolstering economic stability and progress in multilateral climate cooperative groups.
- Nature – The biggest untapped opportunity in global business is the consistent delivery of economic value that is safe and healthy for ecosystems and for clean air and water. The easiest way to create new added value at scale is to improve whole industries’ or national economies’ performance on restoration and conservation of nature. Doing so can build local economies, improve livelihoods, reduce health expenditures, and increase overall producitity.
- Data – Money is pouring into artificial intelligence, largely from the hope that computational language games might provide real value someday. Earth systems data already provides immense everyday economic value; refining and expanding Earth systems data platforms, connecting them to each other and to financial data systems, can diversify local economies and improve livelihoods, while expanding returns on investment and making trade relations more valuable on both sides.
- Finance – Inflation, tariffs, conflict, unsustainable debt, and worsening income inequality, are putting economic progress and financial returns at risk. Financial innovation should include climate-sensitive debt relief, an emphasis on added value creation linked to climate and nature, and delivery through new, smaller local ventures, like soil ecology finance corporations and finance-data cooperatives.
In 2025, stark choices stand before political and business leaders. As climate disruption spreads and complicates, new modes of finance, trade, development, and innovation, need to take root and start building new kinds of value. When leaders dither and delay on effective climate crisis response, food insecurity, spillover pathogen risk, and the seeds of conflict spread and induce forced displacement and destabilization.
The costs of inaction are too dire to contemplate. No political institution is set up to deal with such costs. Whether clumsily or with confident cooperative innovation, humankind must come to terms with the climate challenge, and get to work.
We also offer several other relevant policy briefs, as additional background:
