The COP30 climate summit's success is crucial for BRICS countries, including India and Brazil. Here's why

Mint

3 days ago

Climate Change & You is a fortnightly newsletter written by Bibek Bhattacharya and Sayantan Bera. Subscribe to the newsletter to get it directly in your inbox.
We are less than four months away from one of the most consequential international climate summits of our lives. The COP30 summit will be held in Belém, Brazil, between 10-21 November, amid deepening international tensions and an increasing lack of consensus on the responsibilities of member-countries to stop climate change.
COP summits are held every year, so why is this year so special? Well, first of all there's the optics. Brazil is one of the powerhouse economies of the Global South, and as a member of Brics, plays a very important role in articulating the priorities and demands of developing nations. It is also home to the Amazon rainforest, which is a profound symbol of the Earth's bountiful resources, that is now under threat due to the climate crisis.
Brazil would dearly like its COP to be a successful one, and forge new climate goals and commitments at a time when the impacts of climate change are getting worse every year, even as the use of fossil fuels continues to rise around the world. This in turn is raising planet-heating carbon emissions at a time when such emissions need to reduce drastically. Right now, the world is on track to heat up by about 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century—a nightmare situation.
So, are we ready for a comprehensive new deal where countries raise their ambitions to move from fossil fuels to renewable energy? Where the rich western nations pay the necessary billions of dollars to poor and developing nations so that they can juggle development, climate mitigation and adaptation better? Let's take a look.
STATE OF THE CLIMATE
Let's start with Brazil. Despite a climate-conscious president at the helm in Lula da Silva, Brazil's natural resources—especially the Amazon rainforest—continue to be under attack. The country's senate passed a bill on 17 July that will drastically weaken environmental safeguards and drive significant deforestation. Lula can veto it, but either way, this bill will lead to a protracted political battle that will cast a shadow on COP30.
And Brazil's ability to facilitate a global consensus may also be harmed by the US. Donald Trump and Lula don't like each other, coming as they do from the opposite ends of the political and ideological spectrum. Last week, Trump imposed a steep 50% tariff on Brazilian imports unless Lula goes easy on prosecuting the disgraced former president Jair Bolsanaro, who is a favourite of Trump's. Lula responded that Brazil would not be blackmailed.
Moreover, Trump hates the Brics grouping, and wouldn't want its members to succeed in providing any sort of global leadership. The US has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement on climate change, and has a climate denier government. With Trump's so-called One Big Beautiful Act gutting all economic incentives for US businesses to be climate friendly, it might suit him if COP30 were to be a failure.
Meanwhile the latest Brics summit in early July reaffirmed the group's commitment to multilateralism and the Paris Agreement, emphasizing equity and common but differentiated responsibilities.The joint declaration called for stronger global cooperation to combat climate change while addressing sustainable development and poverty eradication.This year's COP is surely going to be an important one for climate finance, and Brics urged developed nations to fulfill their obligations under the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement.
THE NEWS IN BRIEF
-As a part of Trump's economic agenda, the Pentagon will get $1 trillion for military spending. This article crunches the numbers to find out just how this will increase global carbon emissions.
-Just talking about climate science and clean energy is not going to be enough to get governments to act. As this excellent article shows, what the world needs is a new story.
-Himachal Pradesh can't seem to catch a break. This article by my colleague Vijay C. Roy explains how inadequate winter snowfall, followed by monsoon floods are wreaking havoc on the state's apple crop.
CLIMATE CHANGE TRACKER
How India's forests are getting degraded
A recent study from scientists at IIT Kharagpur has found that in some of India's densest forests, trees are steadily losing the ability to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. This decline has been happening at the rate of 12% per decade over the past 20 years. The study was conducted by scientists Rahul Kashyap and Jayanarayanan Kuttippurath at IIT Kharagpur's Centre for Ocean, River, Atmosphere, and Land Sciences.
The study links this decline in ability of forests to absorb and sequester CO2 to reduced photosynthetic efficiency, due to drier soils and rising heat stress. This is extremely worrying, because although India's green cover has been rising (by 1,445 sq km between 2021-2023, according to the environment ministry), primary forest cover has been going down, due to the pressures of economic development. I had written in a previous newsletter about how India's total area of humid, primary forests has declined by 5.4% between 2002-2024.
If photosynthetic efficiency continues to degrade, it will have an impact on India's climate action goals. A big chunk of this includes the ambition to create carbon sinks of up to 3 billion tonnes of CO2 through forest cover by 2030.
PRIME NUMBER
India needs massive investments to meet its climate goals. According to a new Deloitte report, that amount is about $1.5 trillion. The report, The Climate Response: Tapping Into India's Climate and Energy Transition Opportunity, states that India needs to secure the amount by 2030. Doing so will not only allow us to reach the ambition of 500GW of non-fossil fuel energy generation capacity (the report estimates that this requires $200-250 billion), but also drive investments in biofuels ($75-80 billion) and green hydrogen ($90-100 billion). Another big chunk of funding ($600-650 billion) is required for developing sustainable transport systems, and meeting environmental, social and economic goals.
BOOK OF THE MONTH
The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard
Human beings do not react well to climate calamities, and actually have a very limited capacity to adapt and survive beyond a narrow environmental niche. Visionary science fiction writer J.G. Ballard exhibited a very clear understanding of this fragility of civilization in his brilliant novel The Drowned World (1962). In it, the world is in the grips of extreme warming, caused by violent and prolonged solar storms damaging the Earth's ionosphere.
It is a world where the polar ice has melted and even higher latitude cities such as London are fully immersed in swamps. People are gathered at the poles, which are the only places suitable for human habitation. The story follows a science expedition that is cataloguing the new flora and fauna of this new Earth.
It is a deeply phantasmagoric and moving novel which, to quote Will Self, a British writer, exposes 'the skull beneath the skin of civilized humanity". The only hope then is to give in to the new climate, and either perish or regress into something more primordial.
So that's it for this edition of Climate Change & You, dear reader. Sayantan will be back in a fortnight with the next instalment.