Sailing for about an hour in the Amazon river’s delta, a flotilla of dozens of boats carrying hundreds of people raised Indigenous concerns about Brazil’s oil and gas, mining and agricultural expansion in their forests.
In Belém’s Parque da Cidade, climate negotiators gather for the first COP hosted in the Amazon rainforest. Outside the conference halls, Indigenous activists demanded outcomes that address threats from agriculture, fossil fuels and mining in their communities.
The activists will meet at the People’s Summit, a civil society event parallel to COP30, which organisers say is meant to denounce false climate solutions. Boat passengers carried signs reading “agriculture passes, destruction stays” and “we are the climate resistance”.
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Raimundo Tupinambá, chief of the Pajurá tribe, said that he and his village were there “to demonstrate against the federal government, the state government, and the parliamentarians who are pushing projects that could affect both the environment and us, the indigenous peoples”.
Chief Raoni Metuktire, an Indigenous leader who was recently awarded the highest decoration of Brazilian diplomacy by president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for his decades of climate activism, said at the event that these communities shouldn’t be facing the climate impacts they have been experiencing, among them an extreme drought last year that scientists linked to climate change.
“This river where we are could dry up, too,” Raoni said.
Raoni also talked about the recent licenses Lula gave to Petrobras to explore oil off the Amazon coast, saying that projects like that could cause severe problems for the world, “first us, the Indigenous Peoples, but also all of you, all of us will have environmental problems.”
The demonstration happened one day after protesters clashed with security guards as they stormed their way into the COP30 conference venue. When asked about that, Indigenous groups at the flotilla said that they didn’t organise it, but weren’t necessarily against it.
Sailing along the soy corridor
One of the main boats in the flotilla was a vessel named ‘Caravan of the Response,’ a nod to the ‘we are the response’ slogan from Indigenous peoples and had been sailing for a week, having started 3,000 kilometres inland in Sinop, Mato Grosso.
The route is meant to emulate Brazil’s “soy corridor”, a network of roads, railways and waterways designed to move soybeans from inland production areas to ports for export. One of the boats carried a banner reading “agribusiness doesn’t fill your plate”.
The vessel also carried a large banner rejecting the Ferrogrão, a railway of nearly 1,000 kilometres that would become part of the soy corridor and would connect Sinop – Brazil’s soybean capital – to the state of Pará, where Belém is located. The project has been halted since 2021 due to possible environmental impacts. Tupinambá said Ferrogrão is one of his people’s main fights and called its possible construction a “predatory activity.”
If built, the railway would affect at least six indigenous lands, home to approximately 2,600 people, and 17 conservation areas, according to Brazilian media.
Inside the boat, on the first of four floors, activists played music, danced and sold traditional Indigenous food. The top floors were full of hammocks reserved for the people who did the trip from Sinop.
Making the case for rivers
With flags reading “The Arapiuns river talks, we listen”, the group of hundreds of Indigenous activists also sought to raise awareness on the health of rivers in the Amazon region, which experienced severe drought last year.
Arapiuns, a river over 1,300 km from Belém, has a tributary connection to the Tapajós, the fifth biggest of all the rivers that lead to the Amazon River. During the 2024 drought, it dried to its lowest levels.
Jéssica Kumaruara, an Indigenous activist from the region, was on the boat holding a sign that read “the Tapajós River, enchanted dwellings that also sustain us, is asking for help.”
She grew up in the area, and told Climate Home that she and her community will fight to defend their beloved river, “that the government wants to turn into a route for agribusiness”.
“When they kill our river, when they leave it in the forests, they are killing us too. It is a way of killing us and we are here to say that we are not going to stop, we are not going to keep quiet, we are going to fight until the end.”
The post “They are killing us too”: Amazon flotilla raises Indigenous concerns at COP30 appeared first on Climate Home News.
“They are killing us too”: Amazon flotilla raises Indigenous concerns at COP30
Cleaner cooking projects in the UN carbon market will have to set aside a share of their credits to insure against the risk that the trees they save are lost to fire, drought or logging, after the market’s regulator rejected calls to exempt the sector.
The requirement is part of a new rulebook that the Paris Agreement carbon market regulator – the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body – approved last Friday for programmes that aim to cut emissions by distributing new and cleaner cookstoves in regions that still burn wood or charcoal for cooking.
These are the UN mechanism’s first rulebooks for cookstoves, one of the carbon market’s most popular credit types and also one of its most criticised for overstating climate benefits.
They consist of two methodologies: one for programmes that aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions by distributing more efficient cookstoves that burn less wood or charcoal, and a separate methodology for projects shifting households to lower-emissions cookers running on electricity or liquid petroleum gas (LPG).
Mkhuthazi Steleki, the South African chair of the Supervisory Body, said “this decision gives cleaner cooking projects a new pathway under the UN carbon market, with clear rules to ensure that each credit represents a real and credible emission reduction”.
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Exemption push rejected
More efficient cookstove projects earn credits based on the amount of carbon they save by preserving trees that would have otherwise been cut down and burned for fuel. But if those trees later burn in a wildfire or are logged, the carbon stored would be released anyway, erasing the climate benefits of the credits.
Several carbon credit developers, conservation NGOs and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) disputed that cookstove projects face this risk, in what critics described as a “coordinated lobbying campaign”.
They argued that, unlike forest protection schemes, this type of credit represents a “flow” of avoided emissions rather than a “stock” of stored carbon that can be released. They also warned that requiring a buffer would impose disproportionate costs and undermine the financial viability of these activities.
But the UN carbon market regulator was not persuaded by the argument. It decided that projects would have to protect against this reversal risk by handing over a percentage of credits to a so-called “buffer pool” instead of selling them.
‘New paradigm’
The amount of credits to be given up is calculated by applying different methods for natural risks, like wildfires, droughts or hurricanes, and human-caused ones, such as logging or land clearing.
For natural risks, project developers will need to apply local risk values derived from new modelling published by a group of independent scientists.
Campaigners have broadly welcomed the decision. Federica Dossi, an expert at Brussels-based advocacy group Carbon Market Watch, said it sets a new paradigm for calculating reversal risk based on empirical data. “This approach is grounded in science and we hope to see this now being adopted by other carbon crediting mechanisms in the voluntary market,” she added.
Backers claim this method is more rigorous than current practice in the voluntary carbon market, which largely relies on expert guesswork.
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Pushback over science
As Climate Home News previously revealed, the same industry and NGO groups that sought an exemption from the “buffer pool”, along with some corporate buyers, criticised the use of a study backed by the UN carbon market’s experts that recommended the new risk assessment approach.
The groups pushed for more flexible rules that would have allowed natural risk values drawn from other sources, including national databases, or from the project developers themselves.
While the Supervisory Body rejected this approach, it gave project developers and countries the option to propose alternative values that would first need to be vetted by the mechanism’s expert panel and then approved by the regulator.
A carbon market expert told Climate Home News that, while it is too early to say how this provision will be used, they expect requests will have to be backed up with solid scientific evidence, lowering the risk of unfounded claims.
Policy discounts questioned
To guard against human-caused risks, projects will need to apply a flat 20% value set by the Supervisory Body, at the bottom of the 20-45% range recommended by its technical experts ahead of last week’s meeting.
That value can be further reduced by up to two-thirds if the host country has an emission-reduction plan covering forests, a long-term climate strategy and a framework for the UN’s REDD+ forest protection scheme.
Injy Johnstone, senior research fellow at the Munich-based Max Planck Institute, said that, while these are important governance measures, their existence does not necessarily demonstrate that the underlying risk of forest carbon loss has been reduced.
“It is important to distinguish between evidence of actual risk reduction and assumptions about the effectiveness of policy commitments,” she added.
Moving target
A UN source told Climate Home News that, under the approved formula, improved cookstove projects must set aside at least 9% of credits linked to saved wood if they operate in the lowest-risk areas and the host country can claim all available discounts. The share of credits rises significantly in regions with high natural risk values, such as Guyana, Sri Lanka and Timor Leste, or that do not have REDD+ programmes.
These factors could change in the future as the Supervisory Body asked its technical experts to recommend revisiting the risk values “should credible new evidence arise”.
Climate change is likely to make forest destruction events, such as wildfires or hurricanes, more frequent and more severe in certain regions. Meanwhile, national policies on forest protection can shift significantly depending on government changes.
Johnstone said the UN carbon market needs periodic reassessment to respond to new evidence showing that previously assumed levels of risk were too low.
“The integrity of credits is not guaranteed simply because a reversal risk tool exists,” she added. “The real test will be whether the mechanism provides equivalent atmospheric protection over time, rather than simply introducing another layer of accounting requirements”.
The post UN carbon market forces cookstove projects to protect against forest loss appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN carbon market forces cookstove projects to protect against forest loss
Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD.
This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway point between the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the deadline for achieving its targets.
The CBD has found that countries are currently not on track to meet 22 out of the framework’s 23 targets.
During the fortnight, delegates will also be negotiating decisions relating to the two supplemental protocols to the CBD: the Cartagena Protocol, which covers biosafety; and the Nagoya Protocol, which covers access and benefit-sharing for the use of genetic resources.
(The Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, which are each governed by a “meeting of the parties”, or “MOP”, have fewer parties than the CBD as a whole, with 173 and 141, respectively.)
Carbon Brief is tracking the progress of countries towards consensus on dozens of negotiating texts using the interactive table below.
The tracker includes texts from the COP, as well as the MOPs for the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols. It also includes draft decisions from the most recent subsidiary body meetings, as these form the starting point for the negotiations in Yerevan.
The CBD has three subsidiary bodies: the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA), the subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) and the subsidiary body on article 8(j) and other provisions (SB8J).
SB8J focuses on issues related to the Indigenous peoples and local communities. It was established at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024.
The first two columns of the interactive tracker list the topic of each agenda item and the relevant body, with subsequent columns including dates, page counts and links to the original documents.
The table is searchable and can be sorted using the arrows in the header.
Areas of disagreement in UN draft texts are denoted by square brackets. Counting the brackets in a particular iteration of a text therefore gives a sense of how far parties are from reaching consensus.
The bracket column is colour-coded, with dark green indicating a low number of brackets and red indicating a high number of brackets remaining.
Texts can also present parties with choices using “options” or alternatives (“alt”), which are counted together in the sixth column of the table.
The key discussions in Yerevan will centre around two agenda items in particular. The first is the global review, which will assess progress towards the GBF and make recommendations for accelerating action.
The second is finance, which can be separated into two parts: resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism. On resource mobilisation, biodiverse global south countries are likely to push for an increased amount of international finance for conservation.
Disagreement over the creation of the financial mechanism led to the suspension of COP16 in Cali in October 2024, as parties failed to find agreement on the mobilisation of finance before the end of the summit.
Global south countries want the establishment of a separate financial mechanism under the control of the CBD; global north countries largely prefer to maintain the existing mechanism, which sits under the Global Environment Facility.
At the resumed session of COP16 in Rome in early 2025, countries agreed on a roadmap that would lead to the establishment of a permanent mechanism.
