Pia Marchegiani is environmental policy director and deputy director at Fundación Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (FARN), and Vanina Corral is FARN’s environmental policy programme officer.

At 3,400 metres (11,150 feet) above sea level in the arid highlands of northwest Argentina, 29-year-old Franco Vedia tends his llamas and fields in the Indigenous community of Tusaquillas – one of more than 30 communities across the Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc Basin.

Here, life revolves around a single, sacred element: water, the source that feeds the lagoon, sustains crops and animals, and has anchored centuries of Indigenous life.

The Salinas Grandes, shared between the provinces of Jujuy and Salta, is one of the largest salt flats in South America. Beneath it lies another resource: lithium, the mineral driving the global race for batteries that power the energy transition.

“Lithium activity is water mining,” Franco said. “It consumes vast amounts of water in the Puna – a resource already scarce and extremely valuable here.”

Across Argentina’s northern provinces, environmental groups warn that lithium extraction has already dried rivers and degraded fragile Andean wetlands. The struggle of the Puna communities mirrors that of others across the Gran Atacama region – spanning Argentina, Chile and Bolivia – the so-called lithium triangle, home to more than half the world’s known reserves.

For communities like Franco’s, the balance kept for generations is breaking under a development model that promises progress at the cost of survival.

“If the water disappears, life disappears,” he added.

Families grow beans, potatoes and corn; raise llamas, sheep, and goats; and weave textiles by hand. In recent years, some have opened small community-based tourism projects. “We want to show the world how we work the land and what it means to us,” Franco said.

Their livelihoods sustain an ancient way of life – one now threatened by the expansion of lithium mining.

The energy transition paradox

Global demand for lithium is soaring as countries in the Global North accelerate their energy transitions. While lithium extraction is often portrayed as a solution to the climate crisis, the extraction process risks irreversible damage to fragile ecosystems such as the Andean wetlands.

Franco reflected on the global paradox of the energy transition: “We all use cellphones, computers and cars. It would be hard to imagine a world without technology. But what’s truly impossible is imagining a world without water.”

In the Andean cosmovision – a worldview that sees nature as part of the community – water is a living being. “When a water source is destroyed, a part of the community is destroyed. Without water, there is no balance and no existence,” Franco added.

A decade of community resistance

For more than 10 years, the Indigenous communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc have resisted the entry of lithium companies. Mining projects have advanced without basin-wide environmental assessments or reliable baseline data – in a region already parched and vulnerable to climate change.

Their defence is not only of water and life, but of human rights: the right to information, participation and free, prior, and informed consent, guaranteed under the the UN-brokered Escazu Agreement, and the International Labour Organization’s Convention 169, a binding agreement concerning the rights of Indigenous peoples.

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To protect their rights, the communities have taken their claims to national and international courts and created the Kachi Yupi Biocultural Protocol, defining how consultation must take place. Supported by organizations such as FARN (Environment and Natural Resources Foundation), they are building networks of technical and legal assistance.

Franco emphasised the importance of developing these networks to protect their territory: “It is very important for us that support comes from within, from our own people and from those individuals and organisations who want to defend life, the territory, Mother Earth, and the cosmovision of Buen Vivir.”

The road to COP30 in Belém

Franco will bring the voice of the Salinas Grandes to COP30 in Belém, Brazil.

“We want to show the world what is happening in our territories. Many communities across Latin America face the same situation. We need to unite our voices to defend water, human rights, and our collective right to live,” he said.

As the energy transition accelerates and minerals like lithium are treated as the next frontier, Franco carries an ancestral truth: “Water is worth more than lithium – because without water there is no life.”

Global call to rethink transition model

The defence of the Salinas Grandes Basin is more than a local struggle. It is a global call to rethink an energy-transition model that risks repeating the extractivism it claims to replace.

A truly just transition must respect community rights and participation, safeguard the ecosystems on which life depends, and place justice, equity and human rights at its core. The extraction of so-called critical minerals cannot repeat the same logic that has long harmed Indigenous peoples and degraded nature.

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As COP30 gets underway, the proposed Belém Action Mechanism (BAM) – a civil-society call for a global just transition rooted in rights and ecological integrity – offers a path towards the transformation Franco’s community demands.

His message to Belém is simple and urgent: “The energy transition cannot be built on the destruction of water. True progress means caring for life.”

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“Water is worth more than lithium,” Indigenous Argentine community tells COP30

African and Arab nations are calling for a two-year postponement of an agreement on a set of indicators designed to track countries’ progress in adapting to climate change – a deal that is expected to be one of COP30’s flagship outcomes.

As seen in a new draft text on the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) issued in Belém on Wednesday, the two groups of countries have raised concerns on some proposed indicators which they argue could unfairly shift financial responsibility for climate adaptation onto developing countries.

They say the indicators which are meant to track progress in adapting to climate change are “not consistent with the Paris Agreement” because they include domestic budgets and national spending as part of adaptation finance.

This risks blurring the line between developing countries’ own money and the international support they are supposed to receive under the Paris accord, they argue. Asking governments to count their own spending towards global adaptation funding could place a further burden on poorer countries’ already limited resources, they fear.

An additional concern is that the proposed indicators related to expenditure tracking and national budget allocations could undermine countries’ sovereignty on how they spend their fiscal resources.

Africa needs over $50 billion a year to adapt to climate change. In 2019 alone, countries spent 0.95% of their governments’ budgets on adaptation – and in some countries like Botswana and Seychelles, it gobbled up 4% of their GDP, according to the 2023 UN Adaptation Gap Report.

In the new draft text, countries also note that the indicators fail to measure the quality and accessibility of climate finance. Observers told Climate Home News that this is especially key for African nations who want to avoid indicators that could set unrealistic criteria for accessing limited funds or locking them into high interest loans.

Responding to a question from Climate Home News, Richard Muyungi, chair of the African Group of Negotiators (AGN) said the indicators must be linked to finance, adding that this funding has to come from the international community so that developing countries are “supported” rather than being forced to use their own money to adapt to climate change.

The AGN wants the indicators to be shaped by government negotiators over the next two years so that they can be made more realistic, fair and reflective of national capacities.

An adviser to a North African government noted that deferring the adoption of the GGA indicators would not stop countries from using them to measure their adaptation progress, even though that would not be reported internationally in a formal way.

Analysts: NDCs have made little difference to projected warming

Last year, Climate Action Tracker (CAT) said the world was on course for 2.6C of global warming.

Since then, over 100 countries have updated their NDC climate targets. Now, CAT says, the world is on course for…still 2.6C.

“In other words, the 2035 NDCs so far submitted don’t change the dial in terms of keeping warming to 1.5˚C,” the analysts concluded.

On the other hand, as New Climate Institute’s Niklas Höhne says, CAT’s 2015 report predicted we were on course for 3.6C of warming. So “the Paris Agreement works”, he argues. Just not enough to hold global warming to its lowest limit of 1.5C, which the UN has now admitted will be exceeded, at least temporarily.

Also released today, Exeter University’s global carbon budget report projects – although with little confidence – that total carbon dioxide emissions in 2025 will be very slightly lower than last year.

While emissions from fossil fuels are likely to rise slightly in 2025 – with a big increase in the US as coal rebounds – emissions from land use look like they will fall.

That’s thanks partly to COP30’s Brazilian hosts, as deforestation rates in the Amazon have declined and are at their lowest level this season since 2014.

London Metropolitan University geography professor Julia Pongratz said this “demonstrates the success that environmental policies can achieve”.

Even if emissions have peaked though, the global average temperature will keep on heating up at least until we reach net zero, when no more greenhouse gas emissions are added to the atmosphere than are taken out by forests and other ways of removing them.

Amnesty study maps fossil fuel threat to health and human rights

From artisanal fishing communities in Brazil to Indigenous land defenders in Canada and coastal communities in Senegal, living near fossil fuel infrastructure is putting the health and human rights of hundreds of millions of people at risk, according to a new report from Amnesty International.

The global rights organisation teamed up with researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder in a mapping exercise showing that at least 2 billion people – a quarter of them children – live within 5km of more than 18,000 fossil fuel operations across 170 countries. Those include oil drilling and fracking sites, gas pipelines and coal power plants.

Among the 2 billion people, at least 463 million live within 1km of the sites, exposing them to much higher environmental and health risks, says the report released on Wednesday on the sidelines of COP30.

Exploration, processing, site development, transportation and decommissioning of fossil fuels have led to severe pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as damaging key natural areas, it found, turning communities and ecosystems into “sacrifice zones”.

Studies show that exposure to sites where fossil fuels are produced and used raises the risks of negative health impacts including cancer, heart disease and birth problems, the report adds.

“This report provides yet more evidence of the imperative for states and corporate actors to ’defossilise’ the global economy to mitigate the worst impacts of the climate crisis on human rights,” Agnès Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International, said in a statement.

The study shows that 16% of global fossil fuel infrastructure is sited on Indigenous territories, while around a third of the total overlaps with one or more ‘critical ecosystems’ that are rich in biodiversity or important carbon sinks.

The report warns that, despite governments pledging to transition away from fossil fuels two years ago at COP28, more than 3,500 fossil fuel infrastructure sites are either proposed, in development, or under construction globally.

The researchers estimate that such expansion could put at least 135 million more people at risk. The number of oil and gas projects is set to increase across all continents, it notes, while coal plants and mines are being added mostly in China and India.

Local people are often not consulted by authorities and companies managing the projects nor given enough information about their potential impacts, Amnesty said.

“Most affected groups condemned the power imbalance between their communities and corporate operators, as well as the lack of effective remedy,” said Candy Ofime, researcher and legal advisor on climate justice at Amnesty International.

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COP30 Bulletin Day 4: African and Arab groups want adaptation indicator delay

After an opening call by Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to discuss a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels at COP30, countries are starting to rally behind the idea, with experts saying it could lead to an agreement in Belém to move forward on the idea.

Brazilian Environment Minister Marina Silva hosted ministers from the UK and Germany at Brazil’s COP pavilion on Wednesday to launch a call for a planned shift away from fossil fuels, with support from Denmark, Kenya, Colombia, France and the Marshall Islands.

“We need a dialogue with everyone – producers, consumers and those who are affected by our actions. We need a compass to guide us away from our dependency on fossil fuels,” said Silva, who first suggested the idea in London in June.

UK climate envoy Rachel Kyte told the COP30 event that “there is a way for us to walk out of here with a roadmap to manage the transition away from fossil fuels, [to] manage their just transitions, but also manage what was set out in the Paris Agreement.”

“Jigsaw” of initiatives

Observers at the UN climate talks told Climate Home News that while several proposals for a fossil fuel transition roadmap have emerged, it remains unclear how they could land in the formal climate talks, as the topic is not on the negotiating agenda.

An agreement to start working on a roadmap could be included in a cover decision for the talks – a general text brokered by the COP presidency at some summits – or in any of the established formal negotiations on cutting emissions, they said.

The Environmental Integrity Group – composed of Mexico, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Korea, Switzerland and Georgia – also expressed support for the Brazil-led initiative and have even submitted a proposal to discuss a roadmap in the negotiating rooms.

But the EIG proposal was rejected by oil-producing countries in the Arab group – among them Saudi Arabia, which last year blocked all mentions of fossil fuels at COP29. Major coal producers in the Like Minded Developing Countries (LMDCs) – among them China and India – are also opposed.

Colombia has opted for a different approach, seeking support for a political declaration on a planned fossil fuel transition outside of the UN climate talks, which is so far backed by small islands and Panama, one observer told Climate Home News. 

The country also announced on Thursday a plan to make the Colombian Amazon free of fossil fuels and large-scale mining, which picks up on campaigners’ calls to create oil and gas “exclusion zones” such as across biodiversity-rich areas. Colombia will also host a fossil fuel phase-out summit in 2026.

The “jigsaw” of initiatives and the “diplomatic heavyweights” supporting it suggests there is a “growing sense that this needs to be part of the final package” in Belém, according to Romain Ioualalen, global policy campaign manager with Oil Change International.

“Now the job for the next few days is giving confidence to the [COP30] presidency that there is a broad base of support for this,” he said, adding that countries also need to pin down how such a roadmap could look.

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COP host lukewarm

But while Brazil’s political leadership is pushing the fossil fuel transition up the agenda, the COP30 presidency’s top diplomats have distanced themselves. On Wednesday, COP30 President André Correa do Lago said it was not an item on the agenda, and COP30 CEO Ana Toni reiterated the same point on Thursday, after several countries had voiced support for the discussions.

“The topic is not – at the moment at least – in the negotiations, and we will need to see how parties come together,” Toni told a press conference in Belém.

Brazil has been caught up in controversy for awarding a drilling license to state-oil company Petrobras near the mouth of the Amazon River just days before COP30. The Amazon Basin has emerged as a new oil and gas frontier, with growing production plans.

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The South American country is also one of the 20 major oil and gas producers planning to expand their fossil fuel output in the next decade, according to this year’s Production Gap report, and is set for one of the largest oil expansions alongside Saudi Arabia and the US.

Meanwhile, Indigenous activists who have been affected by new oil and gas drilling in their territories ramped up calls for this COP to address fossil fuels.

Olivia Bisa, leader of the Chapra nation in the Peruvian Amazon whose land is crossed by a large oil pipeline, told an event at COP30 that Indigenous people are “giving their lives” fighting back.

“Some weeks ago, a brother leader in my territory was murdered. I don’t want his death to remain unpunished, just for defending life. We are defenders of life,” she said. “We need support in this fight – not just at COPs but in our territories where we’re exposing our lives.”

The post At COP30, roadmap away from fossil fuels gains ground – but next step unclear appeared first on Climate Home News.

At COP30, roadmap away from fossil fuels gains ground – but next step unclear