Belém's climate justice paradox

Even a full week in Belém, Brazil at the 30^th Conference of Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) can leave you ambivalent on questions of specific value and impact, outside of staid official communication suspiciously evidentiary of pre-determined bureaucratic outcomes.

You need not look far to understand that regional and international public servants are fully in charge, with process chronically accorded prominence over output.

It’s just how it is. Until they meet the guy who suggests that there isn’t 100 percent official adherence to the Latam/Caribbean Escazú Agreement on open environmental information, because the tabulation requires nuanced inclusion of Caribbean hesitancy.

It was also important that the story of Caribbean children embrace common cause with the condition of children everywhere. Yes, I needed to speak with the “others” too, whatever the presumed editorial leadership of UNICEF officialdom.

So, yes, with COP17 hosted in Durban, South Africa providing fading personal contrast, the Belem chapter inspired multiple levels of déjà vu.

Security at the gate

There were the usual hordes of UN officials, leaders and/or their supporting casts, public servants, development entrepreneurs, construction workers, engineers on active duty, journalists, civil society activists/advocates/protesters, daredevil attention seekers, volunteers, and sundry hybrid, conference human varieties.

Fears that the jungle city hugging the mighty Amazon with mango trees lining the major promenades was not up to scratch can only be judged alongside personal experience, expectations, and ambitions.

Belém provides the lived metaphor of human encroachment up against natural and civilisational persistence. The lively river-front Ver-o-Peso market serving food, fruit and clothing is a 20-minute bus ride from the Basilica of Our Lady of Nazareth which is the focal point for October’s Círio de Nazaré festival annually attracting over a million people.

With COP30 focused on the slowed advance of anthropogenically-induced climate change, the overwhelming imperatives of development co-exist alongside the Amazonian eco-system in Belém as lived testimony.

Inside the sweltering conference centre – the Blue Zone assigned to “official” business and the Green for everything and everybody else – there appeared distance from conditions past the security perimeters - other than when indigenous folk advanced rowdily to claim what they considered to be their sovereign space and conversations.

However multi-tiered and multi-dimensional the negotiations, discussions, workshops, panels and networking sessions, it was difficult to encounter, at official levels, too many essential threads that enjoined one week at COP30 to some key points of concurrent reality.

For Caribbean folk there were numerous such entry points via the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), the financial arrangements to facilitate adaptation and compensation, a concern for the vulnerable, and other imperatives common to a concern for social justice.

There is no social justice without “climate justice” declared one panellist - though my own feelings assert the converse. That a country’s social, political, cultural, and economic arrangements need first to be suitably aligned in order to envisage “just” transitions, and the ability to survive both effects of and actions on climate change.

My friend, scientist Steve Maximay, cleverly asserts that the “just” in the process of transitioning to new low carbon circumstances is more adjective than adverb. When put this way, there is cause for greater focus on vulnerable people and places.

It also takes more than tales of national woe to get to the bottom of these heavily sloganeered principles. Caribbean experts, for the most part, alongside their Small Island Developing States (SIDS) counterparts, seemed much more prepared to mesh diagnosis with multi-course prescription – however compelling the case for pre-emptive and reparative financing as a discrete ingredient.

The CARICOM Pavilion has been, in that sense, a source of nuanced discourse. Under the heat of heartlessly bright lights and even more merciless air conditioning failure, for instance, we heard of Anguilla’s innovative use of revenue generated through ownership of the “.ai” country code top-level domain (ccTLD), for funding climate related actions.

But the highlight that came at the end for me – and about which I plan to say more in due course – are the actions of youth advocates to occupy space along the internal COP perimeter. There is a lot to say about the principles to which their attention is being attracted that lie at the heart of the process of adaptation in situations of high vulnerability.

An informal session arranged by the Child Rights International Network (CRIN) made the climate change/social justice points in ways other platforms failed or refused to address. That was my COP30. It continues this week. But I am over and out.