\n– COP30 seeks more ambitious global targets to reduce emissions and curb global warming<\/a>
\n– Ane Alencar: Climate change affects everyone<\/a>
\n– Large trees consume and store more carbon<\/a>
\n– How tourism affects climate change and vice versa<\/a>
\n– Ghanaian climatologist says poor countries need financial and technological support to tackle global warming<\/a>
\n– Scientific expeditions head into little-explored areas of the Amazon<\/a>
\n<\/div>\n
Since then, COP\u2014celebrating its 30th<\/sup> edition this November in Bel\u00e9m\u2014has become the premier global platform for debate and, especially, for negotiation among the 198 parties (197 nations plus the European Union) that have signed on to the climate convention. Its most enduring contribution has been the creation of two major international agreements aimed at cutting greenhouse-gas emissions, the main driver of global warming.<\/p>\n The first was the Kyoto Protocol, negotiated in 1997 during COP3 in Kyoto, Japan. Kyoto set binding emissions-reduction targets only for industrialized nations, which historically have been the largest emitters due largely to their reliance on fossil fuels. The second is the Paris Agreement, adopted in 2015 at COP21, which requires every signatory to submit voluntary five-year emissions-reduction plans known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). In practice, because it is broader in scope, the Paris Agreement has effectively superseded the Kyoto Protocol.<\/p>\n Jorge Ara\u00fajo \/ Folhapress | Wikimedia Commons<\/span>A protest in Copacabana during the Earth Summit; below, COP21, where the Paris Agreement was signedJorge Ara\u00fajo \/ Folhapress | Wikimedia Commons<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n \u201cThe creation of COP played a key role in slowing the rise of global emissions, even if there\u2019s still a long road ahead,\u201d says agricultural engineer Jean Ometto of Brazil\u2019s National Institute for Space Research (INPE). \u201cBack in the 1990s, emissions were growing about 2% a year; today that rate is roughly half.\u201d But curbing global warming ultimately requires emissions to fall in absolute terms\u2014not just grow at a slower rate.<\/p>\n Over its three decades, COP has expanded so dramatically that it\u2019s now the single largest annual gathering convened by the United Nations, which stages global meetings on everything from economics and science to public health, migration, human rights, and geopolitics. At COP28 in 2023, held in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, attendance hit a record 80,000 people. International media outlets also noted the conspicuous presence of oil-industry lobbyists. The next conference, in Baku, drew 54,000 participants.<\/p>\n Some researchers argue that COP has become too high-profile for its own good. \u201cThere should not be big fanfare and whatnot. It’s detrimental to the UN process,\u201d said Benito M\u00fcller, a climate-policy scholar at the University of Oxford, in an interview with Undark shortly after the latest conference. \u201cWe’re going to get climate fatigue.\u201d In Bel\u00e9m, organizers expect roughly 40,000 people to pass through Parque da Cidade\u2014the main venue for COP30\u2014each day.<\/p>\n \u201cThe message coming out of COP has to be taken seriously,\u201d says climatologist Carlos Nobre of the University of S\u00e3o Paulo\u2019s Institute for Advanced Studies (IEA-USP). \u201cWe need to move beyond emissions-reduction pledges and into concrete action. The world has more than enough financial capacity to support both the clean-energy transition and climate-adaptation efforts in developing nations.\u201d<\/p>\n COP\u2019s influence has grown in tandem with a mounting body of scientific evidence showing that global warming\u2014the engine driving climate disruption\u2014is overwhelmingly the result of human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels. The vast scale of the conference, combined with the slow, consensus-based decision-making of a multilateral forum, has fueled criticism of the most recent COPs.<\/p>\n \u201cThe climate agenda is critically important, but it needs to advance alongside the biodiversity agenda,\u201d says ecologist Ima Vieira of Par\u00e1, a senior advisor to the president of the Brazilian Funding Authority for Studies and Projects (FINEP). \u201cRight now, climate is occupying almost all the space in global environmental discussions, and that imbalance needs to be fixed.\u201d The climate-change agenda emerged within scientific circles and the broader environmental movement, which during the era of the Earth Summit focused far more on preserving biodiversity and securing indigenous lands than on global warming itself.<\/p>\n As the steep rise in global temperatures has grown into an existential threat for humanity\u2014reinforced with each new assessment from the UN-created Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), established in 1988\u2014issues related to protecting native plants and wildlife have steadily lost prominence.<\/p>\n The story above was published with the title “From Berlin to the Amazon<\/strong>” in issue 357 of November\/2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Number of participants in the meeting has increased more than tenfold since the Berlin meeting in 1995","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":576881,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6331,156],"tags":[206,200],"coauthors":[101],"class_list":["post-576876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cop30","category-cover","tag-biodiversity","tag-environment"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=576876"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":583237,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576876\/revisions\/583237"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/576881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=576876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=576876"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=576876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/RPF-cop-30-anos-lideres-2025-11-800.jpg\")