That sense of immediacy and pressure can create branching political pathways. It can strain relationships and create openings for cooperation. As explored in our forthcoming book, Climate Change and Geopolitics: Planet at the Crossroads (Agenda Publishing, 2026), this duality is a critical aspect of geopolitics in an era of climate crisis. The book traces how people, institutions, alliances, and local communities respond to uncertainty in their own ways, often ending up on markedly different trajectories.
The Amazon shifts the tone
A lot of the early commentary on COP30 has zoomed in on the unfinished pavilions and the shortage of hotel rooms. Those things matter to visitors, but they don’t tell the real story. Belém sits in a region where millions of people are constantly weighing how to protect the forest while still securing the jobs, services, livelihoods, and opportunities their families need. When climate negotiations happen in a place shaped by those everyday choices, conversations about environmental justice take on a very different meaning.
This grounding tone shapes the summit. Lula’s insistence that the Amazon should sit at the centre of global diplomacy, alongside Brazil’s decision to establish a Circle of Indigenous Leadership, has shifted attention toward forms of stewardship based on long-standing ecological knowledge. These choices create an atmosphere that feels less performative and more rooted in histories of guardianship, conflict, adaptation, and care. At a moment when global climate politics needs responses that are rooted, collective, and deeply informed by place, it’s no surprise that Brazil’s team describes its approach as part of a global mutirão – a shared effort where many hands work together for the common good.
A summit unfolding amid real-time disruption
Beyond Belém, storms continue to hit the Caribbean, while typhoons tear across the Philippines. Coral reefs bleach faster with each passing season. Droughts bleed into floods, and long periods of extreme heat reshape planting cycles and fishing grounds. These shocks often collide, overwhelming emergency responders in one place and undermining food or healthcare access in another.
In the book, we consider climate risk as something that flows through intertwined systems. A cyclone can trigger a public health emergency; a drought can push families to relocate; a landslide can alter a country’s political mood for years. Each event sends consequences outward, sometimes encouraging cooperation and sometimes deepening tension. Much depends on how communities and leadership groups interpret the shock and position themselves (both before, during, and after hazards occur).
This is why the conversations in Belém about blue finance, regenerative agriculture, youth-led adaptation networks, and other emerging strategies matter. They acknowledge that environmental disruption radiates across political, social, economic, and ecological systems, and they encourage responses that draw on experience and capacity from both governments and civil society.
Who is in the room – and who is missing
One of the most striking elements of COP30 is the absence of voices at both extremes of the climate spectrum. Many island states with acute vulnerabilities are missing, hindered by travel prices, and administrative burdens that reduce delegation capacity. At the same time, several of the world’s largest emitters have chosen to stay away for political reasons. When those facing the sharpest impacts and those most responsible for historical emissions are simultaneously absent, negotiations risk drifting toward a narrow centre that lacks both urgency and accountability.
This is deeply troubling. Frontline states bring insight grounded in repeated storms, advancing seas, salt-poisoned farmland, and community-level recovery. Larger emitters carry the weight of industrial choices that shape global pathways. A COP shaped without either pole risks simplifying a complex system-of-systems and dulling the sharper questions that usually push negotiations forward.
In Climate Change and Geopolitics, we examine how this (re)shaping of climate norms, knowledges and ideologies is becoming central to global geopolitics more broadly. This can create fractures in geopolitical systems, such as when those with the clearest knowledge of climate harm or the greatest responsibility for change are muted or missing. Conversely, it can also move geopolitics towards positive alignment, such as when these same perspectives guide funding designs, governance and legal reforms, and adaptation strategies. COP30 embodies this duality: a summit situated in an ecological heartland yet missing crucial perspectives that could shift the pace and purpose of global action.
A glimpse of our turning point
For all the controversy over its setting, Belém offers something rare: a transparent view of the crossroads we are approaching. The Amazon reveals risk and possibility side by side: ecological thresholds on one hand and emerging alliances on the other. Climate Change and Geopolitics argues that climate change will generate many moments like this: junctures where environmental pressures collide with political imagination. Some choices will pull states toward disruption; others will move them toward forms of cooperation grounded in justice, equity, innovation, and shared resilience.
Despite the bleak headlines that have dominated this year’s news cycle, COP30 is one of those moments when the direction of global politics feels unusually open. Its setting in the Amazon, the voices that are present and those that are missing, and the arguments taking shape in its halls all point to a simple truth: geopolitics unfolds through choices being made right now. Those choices will shape whether future generations grow up in divided, fragile societies and landscapes or in places sustained by a shared sense of responsibility. Both are possible. Accordingly, when that mist over the Guajará Bay lifts at first light, let it hint that clarity, and the chance to choose differently, are still within our grasp.