I believe Belem will be the first COP of implementation. But we also want it to be a COP of adaptation and of turnaround: André Aranha Corrêa do Lago

The president of the 30th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), André Aranha Corrêa do Lago, has a tough job at hand.

Brazil’s former ambassador to India and its chief negotiator at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit has to guide the Belem climate summit in the right direction, by helping find a roadmap for more financial support and cut global emissions especially in context of the ongoing geopolitical and trade instability. The failure of Belem will raise further questions about multilateralism and the efficacy of the COP process.

In an exclusive interview with Jayanta Basu, Ambassador Corrêa addressed all contentious issues besides providing a peek into the impending COP process in a first-of-its kind freewheeling interview. Excerpts      

Jayanta Basu (JB): When COP 29 ended quite dismally at Baku with a financial commitment much less than the demand of the emerging and developing economies, everybody started talking about the next COP in Brazil, expecting it to be ‘a turnaround COP’. Around two months and some days away from COP30, how hopeful are you that Belem will be such a COP?

Ambassador Corrêa (AC): Well, lots of things have happened since Baku. With your huge experience with many COPs, you know that they have to be analysed in different layers. It is not really easy to define a COP as ‘successful’ or not. Sometimes, civil society is satisfied with something but countries are frustrated; sometimes business is happy and civil society is not. COPs have many actors. Baku was supposed to be the ‘finance cop’ and, as you said, the numbers did not satisfy most people. At the same time, you had the decision on the $300 billion.

JB: But you have a Baku to Belem roadmap?

AC: Yes, you had the decision that the president of COP29, together with the president of COP30, would present a roadmap from Baku to Belem trying to show how we can increase the $300 billion to $1.3 trillion. So, this is something that Mr Mukhtar Babayev and I are preparing. Obviously, it is not an easy task as you can imagine. But we have to be realistic. At the same time, we have to think of the urgency as beckoned by the scientific evidence and keep in mind that we only have a few years to do what would really make a difference. Hence, we have to try to do it as quickly and as intensively as possible. We are preparing this roadmap with that in mind.

JB: Any thoughts about revisiting the $300 million figure arrived in at Baku, in Belem?

AC: No, there is no such mandate. We will present the roadmap and the delegations will read but there is neither any plan nor there is any item in the agenda to formally debate the issue. But I expect many discussions, as happens in COPs. There are some subjects that seem obvious to debate. But if it is not in the agenda approved by consensus, it cannot be formally discussed. Hence, two of the most important sources of information for COP30, the $1.3 trillion roadmap and also the NDCs synthesis report … neither of them are supposed to be discussed at the COP.

JB: Relative failures of COPs, if I may say so, beyond Paris are raising questions about multilateralism, about efficacy of the COP process. Late climate expert Saleemul Haque, who was part of the COP process from the very beginning, once told me about his apprehension about COP efficacy while also accepting at the same time that this may be the only procedure. Your view?

AC:  I would share the same feeling like him but, the fact is, we don’t have a credible alternative. I may be the first COP president who used to be a negotiator, and hence understand what happens at COP negotiations. I also have mixed feelings from my experience and hence, have decided to talk to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on the issue. He told me very clearly that most people don’t understand what happens once those documents are approved at a COP. So, we decided that we should have a communication structure that helps people understand how they can use those already approved.

JB: You mean implementation …?

AC: Absolutely. In the decade since Paris, most of the important things that had to be negotiated have already been negotiated. So as we already have a mandate for so many things, why don’t we structure a very clear action agenda and show the world that we can do a lot with what has already been negotiated instead of only thinking about what is missing. Let’s not get sucked into the vortex of negotiation.

JB: So an action plan on issues is already being negotiated …?

AC: Yes. There is this obsession about the negotiation that, I think, somehow distances the general public, businesses and subnational governments from the essence of the COP. The essence of the COP is not only to approve decisions but also to implement. We also understand quite clearly that the Paris Agreement and the UNFCCC process so far were designed for negotiations but not for implementation. So we decided to underline the difference between the negotiation and the action agenda very clearly, and structure the action agenda in a very transparent way to stimulate implementation of what was being approved in the global stock take. Since we did a global stock take, since we have a mandate, why don’t we do what we have already approved? Let’s not use the action agenda to get some issues into the negotiation. Let’s invert the logic and do the opposite. Let’s use the action agenda to implement what has already been approved … people are reacting very positively to the model. I think that is a structure which can actually take forward this multilateralism that you have been rooting for.

JB: Before I go to the key issues of COP30, your view on the Donald Trump factor. The US president is not exactly a friend of climate negotiations and climate issues in general and there is a fear of the Trump factor affecting the talks. Also, are we going to see the possibility of US states and other non-federal government stakeholders putting up an independent pavilion and showcasing their pro-climate stand as had happened earlier … proclaiming boldly ‘US is still in’?

AC: I believe we will. Because when we think that while the American government withdrew from the Paris Accord, it doesn’t mean that America left the Paris Accord because so many governors, businesses and universities remained totally connected to the logic of the Paris Accord in America. Some American analysts told me that at least 60 or 70 per cent of the American GDP is still committed to Paris and this is a larger economy than China. So we may be frustrated that the whole of America is not committed. But a significant part of America is.

JB: But President Trump is so aggressive in his anti-climate change stand?

AC:  Yes. We are seeing that Mr Trump is actively going against renewables and other climate- linked policies in a stronger manner, compared to his first time presidency. So, this is obviously a concern. But somehow, this effort to undermine some renewables and pro-climate policies may also be an indication that these things are working.

For instance, solar energy now is the cheapest form of energy in all countries of the world. So how can you (Trump) fight that? Wind energy is extremely efficient in many countries. It is good for business, it is good for jobs. Hence, we have to see how the stand of the Trump Administration influences the business attitude, how it evolves. It’s very clear that Trump wants to favour a more traditional business model and is trying to bring a kind of growth in the United States like the old economy, not positive for climate change.

JB: How may it affect global geo-business politics?

AC: The contrast is very impressive. If you think of China, which has very much invested into this new economy, there is going to be an interesting clash of titans; you know, one choosing a direction and the other clearly choosing another one.

JB: This is supposed to be an NDC COP. The NDCs were supposed to be submitted by February but the time got extended. So, there are question marks about whether all NDCs will be submitted or not and also, even if they are submitted, whether they would address the emissions gap that the scientists are talking about to keep the world within the 2°C at most, preferably 1.5°C?

AC: Yeah, I believe that the NDCs are going to be presented on time for the synthesis report that will be published at the end of October. So I think we will have the numbers. But unfortunately, there are strong indications that the numbers will not be able to take us closer to 1.5 as we would like it to be.

But, I am a permanently optimistic Brazilian. When we were negotiating Paris, you remember, the world was on track to rise four degrees or more; while 10 years from Paris now we are on track to 2.7 degree rise or something like that. So though we are still very far from the 1.5-degree target, it’s infinitely better than having a four-degree rise. So, I hope the numbers, being tabled, will indicate that we are somewhere close to a two-degree rise. We need a very important debate on how we can move forward.

JB: So, will we soon have the NDC numbers from the countries?

AC: This is a very delicate discussion because as you know, the countries don’t want to face a situation with fingers pointed towards them for not lowering their emissions enough or having modest NDCs. Nobody wants that. That is why the synthesis report is going to show a general number of all the countries together or most of the countries together. But I believe that we need a very important debate next year about what we do if the emissions gap is really significant. 

JB: Apart from NDC debate, there are key other issues at hand … especially on finance, particularly loss and damage and adaptation finance.

AC: I think those are going to be negotiated. Adaptation finance is central because we have the global goal on adaptation. We are going to address the priorities including just transition. I think this is extremely important because the transition has to make economic as well social sense. If we cannot convince the general public that this agenda is a pro-growth, pro- job and pro-development one, we are going to face more and more difficulties, particularly in democracies.

JB: What about global stock take?

AC: We are also going to debate the progress in the GST. I think the ‘global stock take’ has indicated many priorities and the countries are very much divided on whether we should concentrate on one aspect or another aspect of the GST. So, I think that these are the delicate negotiations at hand. But I reiterate, we really have to look at the action agenda as something that can deliver a lot.

JB: Other major negotiating issues …?

AC: We have selected six axes of priorities including one on energy, transportation and industry. The second one is a critical issue of forestry, very important especially with the conference happening in the Amazon. Then, we are going to have a debate on cities. We are also going to have another axis on agriculture. Then another one will be on people; and finally a sixth axis crosscutting mostly about finance and technology.

So, under these six axes, we have chosen 30 priorities; we are organising a series of debates about these priorities and are going to have a section of the COP on those, the first time such a thing is happening in a COP. We are going to have debates on all these aspects of the six axes in six different rooms during the entire COP. So we are going to have more than 320 events bringing the main experts on the 30 most important issues as approved in the GST.

It is not about discussing negotiations. It is about discussing implementation. And we also have analysed more than 400 initiatives of previous action agendas. I believe that this will be the first COP that we can really say is a COP of implementation. But we also want this to be a COP of adaptation and we also want this to be a COP of the turnaround, as you said.  

JB: There are discussions about the anti-fossil fuel treaty in some quarters. Any quick thoughts on that?

AC: We already had this very important agreement of transitioning away from fossil fuels. But we also agreed that it has to be according to each country’s circumstances because India or South Africa have a huge issue with coal, because it is the traditional source of energy. Brazil has a completely different circumstance because we don’t have coal. We have renewable energy but we discovered lots of oil and lots of gas. So, we are on the way to become the fifth-largest exporter of oil. Hence, each country has a different relationship with oil, gas and coal and each has to find its own pathway, transitioning away from fossil fuels because we all agreed to transition away from them.

JB: The International Court of Justice (ICJ) recently passed an advisory directive on climate change obligation on countries. Do you see the development influencing the Belem discourse?

AC: We are going to have this very special circumstance at the COP, as it is the first COP since the decision of the ICJ. So, we are going to have a very important debate. The Supreme Court of Brazil is going to organise a debate with many judges of the world on the issue and we are going to have two days dedicated to justice because we cannot ignore that very strong decision of the ICJ. At the same time for Latin America, a few days before the ICJ, there was a very strong decision of the Latin American Court on Human Rights linked to climate change having a direct impact on legislation of Latin American countries. So the legal dimension, I think, has switched to fear of very intense litigation. This is a very important debate and we are looking forward to that.

JB: You were the Indian high commissioner for five years and India and Brazil have a very good relationship. Brazil took the G20 responsibility from India and both countries are part of the BASIC bloc in global negotiations. How do you see India’s role in COP30 and also, is there any talk about Indian  Prime Minister Narendra Modi going there during the Leaders Conclave?

AC: Well, we would love to have Prime Minister Modi at COP30 and we had the privilege of having him at the BRICS summit and then on a state visit to Brazil last month and we really appreciated that enormously. I was there and I could see the wonderful personal understanding that President Lula and Prime Minister Modi enjoyed on that occasion. India is more and more a very important partner for Brazil and now, ironically, we are the two countries that are united by the 50 per cent tariffs (chuckles) imposed by the United States. So, everything unites Brazil and India, and we look forward to that collaboration during COP30.

JB: Every year we cover COPs and cannot schedule our return flight as the meetings get extended by several hours even days as a routine. Will Belem be different?

AC: You know, as a diplomat with all my wonderful team members, we are going to try to make this the most transparent COP. I don’t like surprises. I am super transparent, and I hope that through transparency we can have a rhythm for the COP that will allow us to finish with very good results and on time. But, as president of the COP, you know, I have to depend on the countries, and I will try to be as fair as possible. You can count on me being extremely ambitious on the success of COP30.

JB: Do you feel the Leaders’ Conclave, at the beginning, will play a key role in that success?

AC: Absolutely. I think that the international geopolitical context is very much challenging for multilateralism. So, the presence of the leaders is extremely important because it is a confirmation that multilateralism is central.