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Journalism of Courage
The 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference or Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC, also known as COP30, concluded Friday in Belem, Brazil. The summit’s Action Agenda was rooted in mutirão, a Brazilian word for collective effort or consensus.
The Brazilian presidency of COP30 has described mutirão as a “continuous method of mobilization that begins before, extends through, and continues beyond COP30.” It aimed to leverage the collective participation of governments, social movements, youth, indigenous peoples, traditional communities, the private sector, academia, and civil society to establish a new form of participatory climate governance.
The term mutirão originates from the language spoken by the Tupi-Guarani. This large indigenous South American tribe has a history of migrating from the Amazon to the Atlantic. The choice of the term, as well as its Indigenous origin, is significant, adding to the choice of Belem as the location for COP30 to draw attention to the impact of global warming on rainforests.
With more than 5,000 distinct groups of Indigenous people worldwide who play an integral role in conserving nature, the conference sought to highlight their role in conservation and land management. Many of these communities battle encroachment from mining and drilling for oil and gas.
COP30 came ten years after the 200 countries (the Parties in the Conference of Parties) agreed to limit global temperature increases to 1.5°C above “pre-industrial levels” and to restrict them “well below” 2°C.
The 2°C ceiling was chosen owing to strong scientific evidence which suggests that the impacts of climate change, such as the increased temperatures and rising sea level, would be much greater at 2°C than at 1.5°C.
Thus far, this target has not been met. Despite the increase in adoption of renewable energy, the climate plans for many countries fall well below the 1.5°C goal.
