Charlotte Gallagher (host / presenter)

Our correspondent, Aine Wells, has been following the case from Brazil.

She spoke to Crupapardi.

The judge in that high court ruling said that the companies continuing to raise the height of the dam when it wasn't safe to do so was, in her words, the direct and immediate cause of the dam's collapse, meaning that under Brazilian law, BHP was liable.

Now, this is something which BHP has always denied.

They are expected to appeal this ruling.

They have, though, accepted the need for compensation.

And over the last couple of years, there have been hundreds of thousands of people in Brazil that the company has compensated.

And that's one of the reasons why they argue that this claim in the UK court was not legitimate.

They argued that it duplicated proceedings that were happening in Brazil.

And it is expected that they're going to continue fighting that claim as they appeal this.

Well, the law firm, the British law firm that was representing hundreds of thousands of different claimants in Brazil, including civilians but also some businesses and local governments, argued that because BHP was headquartered in the UK at the time, that it should be held in London.

And certainly some of the claimants who I had spoken to said that they felt they might get better justice if it were to be held in the UK courts.

That's right.

I'm speaking to you from the COP30 climate summit, which is in the Amazon city of Belém in northern Brazil.

And certainly some environmental groups have been calling for more protection against what they see in some cases as irresponsible mining practices.

In this case, obviously, as I say, BHP have denied liability.

But certainly some of the environmental groups here are very concerned about the expansion of mining in regions like the Amazon, too.

Irony Wells.

Well, COP30 is now at the halfway point and several countries at the meeting are pushing for a roadmap away from fossil fuels, as Matt McGrath reports.

Matt McGrath.