COP30 – UN Climate Change Conference 2025
COP30 in Belém, Brazil
When Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) formed to create a new center of gravity in the climate movement, we knew that those on the frontlines of the climate crisis must lead in solving it, at home and globally.
As representatives of frontline and Indigenous communities throughout Turtle Island in the so-called United States, we are here at the annual UN Climate Conference (COP30) to hold our nation to account for their past and present harms across the globe and ensure they do their fair share towards repairing the harms of the climate crisis both economically and through international policy.
We are also here to join the Peoples’ Summit in solidarity with frontline communities across the globe, as we build power together towards Just Transition and climate solutions that work for all of us, leaving no one behind.
The US Context
The US has left the UN Paris Agreement, a treaty that governs international action towards combatting the climate crisis, while resisting and opposing efforts to cooperate on reducing fossil fuel emissions at the global level. By imposing tariffs, it is also undermining other countries’ climate actions and human rights protections by threatening to tax goods and services everyday people rely on, among other harmful measures.
At home, the US has actively divested from climate action while speeding up development of oil and gas projects and energy intensive industries like data centers for artificial intelligence, polluting frontline communities with the very industries that cause climate change (like oil & gas, plastics, waste incineration, and more) to deal with the aftermath. And leaving us all at the mercy of increasing climate disasters, without investing in disaster prevention or recovery.
The US has played a significant role in creating the climate crisis — from expansive industrial demand for fossil fuels to a military that forces the world into submission and is the world’s largest single institutional emitter of greenhouse gases – with historical origins in racism, slavery, colonization, and imperialism. This history and its continued current day practice comes with responsibility to combat the climate crisis.
While these UN climate spaces are less than perfect and we have fewer and fewer opportunities to participate in and influence governance, we refuse to forfeit this space in which countries convene for collective climate action to the whims of fossil fuel lobbyists who hold profit above human rights, who do math to uphold a system of capitalism that is incompatible with Earth’s natural systems, our Indigenous wisdom, and our lives.
Climate Justice Alliance member groups and allies have played pivotal roles in strategic interventions during many COP conferences to demand strong international agreements that protect and benefit the people most impacted by the climate crisis. Together, we speak truth to power as we confront global leaders, help redefine climate leadership, and ensure that community voices are heard at the highest levels of decision making to keep false solutions like geoengineering, among others, off the table.
Instead of convoluted climate finance schemes like carbon credits that allow continued fossil fuel use, we demand countries in the Global North – especially those who historically and currently benefit the most from extraction of resources and the violation of human rights in the Global South – pay reparations and drive resources for mitigation, preparedness, and recovery directly to these harmed communities and to those in small island nations now facing the worst of the climate crisis.
At the same time, we must continue to Build the New on our own, supporting alternative global spaces that center people and community solutions. We are here, and we are powerful, moving in solidarity at the Peoples’ Summit with our friends around the world and across the Global South who are fighting to actualize Just Transition for all of our peoples.
We hold solutions from being in right relationship with nature through agroecology to sustainable accessible and affordable community-controlled energy systems that heat our homes and cook our food, to protecting our waters to nourish our bodies and ecosystems, to creating resiliency hubs that support us through climate disasters and in the absence of support from our governments — regardless, together, we are actualizing them.
We will uplift the stories and conditions of our communities from Michigan to Alaska to Guam to Florida and beyond, while bringing home stories from our international comrades who need our solidarity.
We will engage with US state actors present at COP30, knowing that social, health, and economic costs of development on local and Indigenous communities are not unfortunate side effects (“externalities”), but the primary issues to be addressed.
We will continue fighting to ensure that Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian, poor white, rural, and frontline communities are at the forefront of discussion about climate action and that those who created the crisis take an active role in contributing to solve it
History of CJA at the UN Climate Change Conference
When Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) formed to create a new center of gravity in the climate movement, it was also due to the recognition that there was a need to strengthen democratic representation of frontline community leadership at national climate movement tables, as well as in international spaces such as the United Nations Climate Change conferences.
The yearly UN climate conferences are held in the framework of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which was established in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Its mission is to stabilize “greenhouse gas emissions at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”
The first formal meeting of the UNFCCC parties (Conference of the Parties, COP) took place in 1995 and established the Berlin Mandate, which declared portions of the 1992 Rio Convention “inadequate.” COP1 emphasized the importance of setting specified time frames, and acknowledged that developed nations must play a larger role. The Berlin Mandate led to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, adopted at COP3. The Kyoto Protocol focused on reducing emissions and increasing contributions from wealthier nations, setting a goal of overall emissions reductions of 5 percent below 1990 by 2012, though militaries were given an automatic exemption from emissions reductions, following a pressure campaign by the US government, who never ratified it, citing potential damage to the US economy.
The Paris Agreement followed at COP21 in 2015 and introduced efforts to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5°C. While the agreement emphasized the need for mitigation and adaptation measures and the need for financial contributions, and technology transfer by developed nations to developing nations, the Paris Agreement never mentioned the need to curb let alone phase out extractive energy, and the goals it set were far below those needed to avert a global catastrophe. The agreement signed by 196 countries did acknowledge the global urgency of the climate crisis, a reflection of the strength of the climate movement. But the accord ignored the roots of the crisis, and the very people who have the experience and determination to solve it. It also relied heavily on “false solutions” such as carbon markets and other offset schemes (promoted in Article 6 of the accord).
COP26 in 2021 in Glasgow, Scotland culminated in the Glasgow Climate Pact. The Pact committed to maintain the 1.5°C goal identified in the Paris Agreement, and for the first time in the history of the UNFCCC, the COP decision called upon Parties to accelerate the phasing down of “unabated coal and inefficient subsidies for fossil fuels.” Specifically stating that fossil fuel emissions lie at the heart of global climate change is a step forward. However, confronting the climate crisis will require the complete phase-out of all coal and fossil fuel subsidies. False climate “solutions” such as carbon trading, carbon capture and storage, and market-based mechanisms are upheld in the Glasgow Climate Pact as well. Read the It Takes Roots statement on the COP26 decisions.
COP27 in 2022 in Sharm El Shaik, Egypt, established a loss and damage fund at COP27 as a historic and welcome first step, but the conference failed once again to confront the vice-grip of the fossil fuel industry. Many countries named the root causes of the climate crisis in coal, oil, and gas, but a handful of Parties shut down needed progress. COP27 was attended by more than 600 fossil fuel lobbyists linked to major oil and gas companies, a larger number than the delegation of any single nation. The naming of Sultan Al Jaber, the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (one of the world’s largest oil producers), to preside over COP28 doesn’t bode well for progress in the United Arab Emirates.
Climate Justice Alliance member groups and allies have played pivotal roles in strategic interventions during the conferences to demand strong international agreements that protect and benefit the people most impacted by the climate crisis. Together, we speak truth to power as we confront global leaders, help redefine climate leadership, and ensure that community voices are heard at the highest levels of decision making to keep false solutions off the table.
In order to achieve the policy shifts we need in these UN climate conferences, even the best inside strategies are not strong enough if we don’t organize powerful, grassroots pressure on the outside as well. True climate solutions are coming not from a formal UN negotiation process, but from the growing pressure and power of our collective struggle. Climate Justice Alliance is in unity with blossoming social movements across the globe, led by the people most impacted by the climate crisis. We are pressuring governments for more meaningful action, while implementing our own real solutions on the ground and planning for how vulnerable communities can best survive severe impacts of climate change
The People’s Solutions Lens
for Climate and Economic Policy Proposals at COP30
It can be difficult to keep up with the slew of climate solutions that are going to be discussed at COP30, and not all “solutions” are inherently equitable or just. Fortunately, we’ve identified five straight-forward questions that can help you separate false solutions from the real deal. Use the People’s Solutions Lens to determine whether the various policy proposals that are being brought forward at COP28 are rooted in justice for workers, frontline communities, and the environment:
1Who tells the story? Frontline communities and workers are impacted first and worst by the interlinked crises of climate change and the extractive, exploitative economy. We speak for ourselves, and hold the wisdom, vision, and organizing power to lead climate and economic solutions. Yet, often times, others claim to speak for us without necessarily representing our interests. As we often say, nothing about us without us is for us.
2Who makes the decisions? The environmental justice movement defines environment as “where we live, work, play, and pray.” Whether it’s the factory floor or the neighborhood, those closest to the problems will inevitably know the most about what the solutions need to look like. For any other climate or economic policy to truly work for Indigenous Peoples, Black communities, immigrants and refugees of color, and working class communities, it must embody the practice of community self-determination.
3Who benefits, and how? The climate crisis is ecological, but it has its roots in systemic inequity that is racial, gendered, and economic. To address these root causes, authentic climate and economic policy solutions must flip the existing dynamics around racial injustice, wealth extraction, and labor exploitation.
4What else will this impact? Sometimes environmental and climate policies or “solutions” can create new problems for other issues that we care about— e.g. workers’ rights, housing, economic development, immigration, policing, mass incarceration, etc. Real solutions must work for ALL of our issues. No false solutions. No more sacrifice zones.
5How will this build or shift power? To address the climate crisis at scale, individual and collective solutions must put us in a better position to pursue subsequent solutions. Transformative solutions, then, must do more than accomplish individualized goals, specific policies, or select elections; they must shift the landscape of political, economic, and cultural power such that subsequent goals become more attainable. Climate and economic policy proposals must be organizing tools that bring together a mass movement of people, workers, and communities. This is imperative to ensure the implementation phase is both inclusive and equitable.
This tool was based on a version from Labor Network for Sustainability and Climate Justice Alliance, adapted from the original People’s Solutions Lens—a collaborative creation by It Takes Roots (a frontline formation composed of Climate Justice Alliance, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, Indigenous Environmental Network, and Right to the City Alliance) and their Funder Support Circle. For more information on It Takes Roots, and to view the original People’s Solutions Lens, visit: www.ItTakesRoots.org/peoplesorientation
COP27 in Sharm El Shaik, Egypt
COP26: The Net Zero COP
COP25 and the Cumbre de los Pueblos
The 25th UN Conference of Parties (COP25) took place from Dec. 2-13, 2019 in Madrid, Spain. Our work at COP25 included pushing back against Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which supports Carbon Pricing and offsets, exposing the threat of Geoengineering, building for a Just Transition, and coordination with others around Frontline Green New Deal work.
COP25 was initially scheduled to take place in Chile. However, a massive popular feminist and student uprising against neoliberalism, forced the Chilean government to move COP25 to Spain. Part of our delegation traveled to Chile nonetheless to stand with the courageous Chilean social movements, and to join the Cumbre de los Pueblos.
COP24 in Katowice, Poland
It Takes Roots threw down with the youth of SustainUS and organized an intervention during the US administration panel, which pushed for the continual use of fossil fuels and dirty energy. We interrupted Trump’s Energy advisor, Wells Griffith, with laughter then chanted “Keep It In The Ground” as we brought frontline speakers upfront.
Check out videos, photos, the People’s Demands, and more info from the actions and events of the 2018 It Takes Roots delegation at COP24 in Katowice, Poland:
