It has barely made the headlines, but the UN’s COP30 climate summit is now underway in Belém, Brazil. COP—the Conference of the Parties under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change—has met annually for three decades, each gathering framed as another decisive moment for the planet.
More than 100 American environmental leaders are in attendance. Missing, however, is President Trump, who still calls climate change a “hoax.” His absence is symbolic, but not surprising: it reflects a larger political reluctance to acknowledge the crisis unfolding around us.
Even among nations that accept the science, there is growing tension between the high costs of climate mitigation and the competing pressures of social needs. Yet this framing—climate action versus human welfare—is a false narrative. Climate disruption is already degrading food systems, water security, economic stability, and public health. Inaction is the costliest option of all.
COP’s central mandate is clear: limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, as pledged in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Countries submit national climate plans (NDCs), augmented every five years. But despite the Agreement’s “ratchet mechanism,” current projections put us on track for 2.5°C to 3°C of warming by century’s end.
At those levels, the world becomes unmistakably harsher: failing crops, drying rivers, rising seas, disappearing species, and regions becoming uninhabitable under extreme heat. And nowhere is the alarm more urgent than in the Amazon Basin.
I’ve been studying this region for years, most recently through an eight-week online course under the auspices of the University of São Paulo.
The Amazon is not merely a forest—it is one of Earth’s greatest climate regulators. Spanning more than seven million square kilometers and home to an extraordinary share of the planet’s animals and plants, it stores 150–200 billion tons of carbon in its intact ecosystems. It cools the continent, generates rainfall, and sustains the livelihoods of millions.
But the Amazon is weakening under relentless human encroachment: logging, mining, agribusiness, hydroelectric projects, roads, railways, and shrinking indigenous territories. Fourteen percent of its pristine forest has already vanished; another seventeen percent is degraded.
Scientists warn that if deforestation—now around 14–17%—reaches 20–25%, the forest may tip into irreversible decline, releasing vast stores of carbon and destabilizing global climate systems, including the Atlantic ocean currents that moderate Europe’s weather.
This would be more than a regional tragedy. It would be a global catastrophe.
The people with the most to lose are those who have protected the forest the longest. When Europeans arrived in 1500, 8–10 million indigenous people lived throughout the Basin. Today, only about 2–2.5 million remain, yet they still speak 300 languages across more than 400 groups. Their 12,000-year history of sustainable land management is one of humanity’s greatest environmental achievements—and one of its least respected.
Meanwhile, fossil fuel interests continue drilling and recording historic profits. Their influence hangs heavily over every climate summit, often shaping negotiations more than science does.
This is the dangerous paradox at the heart of COP30: we gather each year to declare urgency, even as our actions fall fatally short of what the moment demands.
The Amazon is nearing a threshold from which we cannot retreat. The window for preserving a habitable planet is still open, but narrowing fast. What we need now—what COP30 must deliver—is not another set of distant promises but a global commitment to end deforestation, accelerate renewable energy, and center indigenous stewardship.
The science is clear. The stakes are overwhelming. What remains uncertain is our political will.
If the world cannot act decisively now, in Belém—on the doorstep of the very forest that helps stabilize the Earth—then when?
—rj
Brimmings: up from the well 