World leaders gather in Brazil for UN climate talks
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This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Ankur Desai and at 16 hours on Thursday, the 6th of November, these are our main stories. World leaders gather in Brazil ahead of UN climate talks, but Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi will not attend. South Africa says it's received distress calls from 17 citizens lured into fighting for Russia in the war in Ukraine. And could the Trump administration be charged with crimes against humanity for striking ships near Venezuela? Also in this podcast, the young lawyer challenging Pakistan's tax on period products.
I was getting congratulations for bringing this petition forward as if I'm a soldier returning from war, you know. But there should be nothing brave about it. It's a biological function. It's a natural phenomenon that all women go through.
The Brazilian city of Belém is known as the gateway to the Amazon, a focal point of the global climate crisis. And on Wednesday and Thursday, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is hosting dozens of world leaders there, in advance of the COP United Nations Climate Summit, which begins officially next week. Notably absent are the leaders of the three greatest producers of carbon emissions, China's Xi Jinping, India's Narendra Modi and Donald Trump, who says he won't even send a senior representative from the US. The proceedings began on a dire note. The UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said the world had already failed to keep global temperatures from increasing by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, a key climate goal.
President Lula, you have called this the cop of truth. I could not agree more. And the hard truth is that we have failed to ensure we remain below 1.5 degrees. Science now tells us that the temporary overshoot between the 1.5 limit, starting at the latest in the early 2030s, is inevitable. We need a paradigm shift to limit this overshoot's magnitude and duration and quickly drive it down.
Our environment correspondent Matt McGrath is in Belem. There's only about 50 or so world leaders coming to this particular meeting, and the notable absentees, as you've mentioned, represent the bigger hitters in terms of emissions. But there's still a number of countries here. The European Union is here. The UK is here with Sir Keir Starmer and Prince William. So there is still significant heft, I think, in the people that are here, and I think President Dula is hoping that he'll be able to garner enough support from those leaders that are here to be able to make some significant announcements on issues related to forests at the very least. And as you mentioned, with some of those leaders in attendance, well, what can be achieved then at this COP?
I think for President Lula, there's a number of things. He wants to set the tone for the COP meeting next week. This is the leaders' summit, and they're doing this right now to highlight the leadership, but also, I suppose, in terms of it's a response to the logistics, which essentially is this is a smallish town that has struggled to be able to accommodate the massive nature of the COP, and so I think they're bringing the leadership meeting forward so that they get around that particular problem. They'll be hoping to get the launch of a new forest fund, the Tropical Forest Forever Fund, that will pay people around the world, particularly in Africa and in South America, to preserve their forests.
And they want this to be a long-term, large-scale fund. And that's, I think, the apple of the eye for President Lula. But I think he really wants to ensure that people, ordinary people all over the world who are struggling with... the cost of living and with energy bills, really feel the connection to the climate crisis, that the prices of food have gone up because of the climate crisis, that we're seeing devastation in the Caribbean and in the Philippines because of the climate crisis.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–7:22
2
What are the key issues surrounding the COP30 summit in Brazil?
7:22–13:23
3
Why are major world leaders absent from the climate talks?
13:23–14:53
4
What did the UN Secretary General say about global warming goals?
14:53–23:17
5
What initiatives are being proposed to combat climate change at COP30?
23:17–29:16
Speakers
7 identifiedMore from Global News Podcast
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