COP30 shows why governments won’t solve the climate crisis

If there was one clear lesson from the 30th Climate Change Conference it is that governments are incapable of solving the climate crisis. If they were able and willing, it would not have needed 30 expensive, fossil fuel-guzzling meetings to do so. But yet another failure is the outcome of the COP30 at Belem, Brazil, that concluded on November 21.

Months of preparation and two weeks of hundreds of government delegates debating every word have resulted in an agreement that has a couple of tiny advances and two massive regressions.

The advances are a bit more money for “developing” countries to deal with the climate crisis and the inclusion of text on “just transition” to ensure that workers and others are not adversely affected by the movement towards a more climate-sensitive economy. The regressions? Complete silence on the urgently phasing out fossil fuels – leaving behind even the lacklustre language on this in COP28 – and stopping deforestation.

The silver lining, though, was the increasing realisation that solutions lie in people’s actions on the ground.

Why are governments incapable?

There is no dearth of knowledge of the crisis, nor of the availability of solutions. The problem lies in the unwillingness of powerful actors, including governments and corporations, to act. Capitalist profit-making and state powerplay will simply not allow such solutions to be acted on with the urgency needed.

There was some hope in COP30 because of what seemed to be serious efforts by the host government backed by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. And because it was labeled the “forest COP”, being located visibly next to the Amazon forest and river ecosystem.

But mostly those who have gained are, again, corporations and governments that continue to profit from climate-unfriendly activities such as promoting fossil fuels, and those who are investing in the “green economy” or “climate transition”. Evidence of the disastrous impacts of such transition is visible across the world, especially the global South, in the large-scale mining for lithium for electric vehicles and mega-renewable energy projects grabbing huge tracts of land. Nature, and communities dependent on it who have never been responsible for the climate crisis, are becoming “sacrifice zones” for this so-called transition.

At COP30, Brazil launched the Tropical Forest Forever Facility to protect forests by mobilising several billion dollars in investments. Critics, however, point to this becoming another route by which powerful government agencies and corporations continue to commodify and commercialise forests, with Indigenous peoples and other communities living in these forests once again losing out.

Grounded action

COP30 showed, dramatically, that solutions to the climate crisis lie elsewhere. On November 12, Indigenous peoples stormed the official venue and on November 14, blocked the entrance, to highlight the demands to recognise their territorial rights and stop extractive projects. The Brazilian government relented by accepting the long-standing demand to recognise the territorial rights of Indigenous Peoples in 14 territories of Brazil, including over two million hectares of the Amazon forest.

Evidence has mounted over the last couple of decades that one of the most effective means of climate mitigation is to curb deforestation through such recognition, given that the vast majority of forests coincide with the territories of Indigenous Peoples and other forest-dwelling communities. Or rather, that it is the practices and worldviews of such communities that have contributed to these forests still being intact.

A 2021 study showed that resistance by Indigenous peoples to fossil fuel expansion in what are today called the United States and Canada, “has stopped or delayed greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least one-quarter of annual … emissions” of these two countries.

In hundreds of initiatives across the world, including through “territories of life”, such actions have helped stave off deforestation, the destruction of grasslands and draining of wetlands, thereby mitigating causes of the climate crisis. There are also numerous examples of producing food, energy, housing, basic needs and generating livelihoods, in ways that are ecologically sensitive, climate friendly and socially equitable.

Many of these initiatives were advocated at the people’s mobilisation at COP30. At the Cupola dos Povos or People’s Summit, and the Indigenous-led Aldeia COP, tens of thousands of community and civil society representatives gathered for marches, dialogues, public hearings and tribunals, cultural programmes and more.

A powerful People’s Summit Declaration was issued, challenging the forces that have led the planet to the precipice of collapse, and demanding attention to solutions that centre people and nature. Ecological and feminist approaches were given prominence.

The weak link

There remains, however, a serious inadequacy in civil society articulation and action. Understandably, there is a lot of focus on demanding action from governments and inter-governmental institutions, given that these agencies hold immense power and resources.

But there is an inherent tendency of the state to centralise power, get alienated from “ordinary” people, and compromise on principles to stay in power. Combined with the continuing reliance on an extractivist and globalised model of “development”, the modern nation-state – capitalist or socialist or anywhere in between – is inevitably undemocratic and ecologically unsustainable.

This is so even for governments led by “revolutionary” parties: Podemos in Spain, social democratic parties in other parts of Europe, Syriza in Greece, various leftist parties in Latin America. Such institutions simply cannot solve the climate crisis. We need radically different political formations.

Indigenous people’s movements, local community assertions, some urban collective movements, and many from the new Left, feminists, Gandhians, the Kurdish and Zapatista movements and others are advocating and demonstrating grounded forms of democracy.

Decision-making on the ground, where most or all people have the capacity and right to participate (which also entails dealing with internal gender and other inequities), and where the non-human is also at the core of people’s vision – what I call the Radical Ecological Democracy – is crucial to any meaningful strategy for dealing with the climate crisis.

In the long run, the goal could be to even dismantle nation-state boundaries towards much greater respect for natural, cultural and economic flows (biocultural regions, or bioregionalism) between the people and ecosystems of the world.

Over the last few months, the Global Tapestry of Alternatives and other groups have held gatherings that focus on “Radical Democracy, Autonomy and Self-Determination”, and “Earthy Governance and Inter-species Justice”.

At Belem, this culminated in a session on “Radical Democracy and Climate Justice: The Missing Debate at COP30”. This argument was also brought into events by groups such as the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, the International Tribunal on the Rights of Nature, and Just Transition processes by War on Want and others. Increasingly, people’s movements are demanding such fundamental shifts in the exercise of power.

Participants agreed that more work is needed on documenting, supporting, enabling, and inspiring forms of governance in which the most marginalised sections of humanity, and the rest of nature, have a decisive voice. Such an approach, however, has far greater chance of stemming the climate crisis than one inter-governmental COP after the other.

Ashish Kothari is an environmental researcher.