Expensive accommodation, combined with restricted funding and accreditation, are set to limit the participation of Global South climate activists in COP30, casting doubt on Brazil’s promise to host the most inclusive UN climate summit ever.
Civil society groups told Climate Home News that the COP30 presidency’s failure to make affordable lodgings available in the Amazon city is pricing out many activists from countries at the forefront of the climate crisis, who are struggling to pay their way.
Campaigners had been enthusiastically preparing for this year’s talks in Brazil after their ability to demonstrate was severely limited at the last three COPs hosted in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan – authoritarian regimes with limited or no freedom to protest and poor human rights records.
But with basic rooms in Belém costing hundreds of dollars per night, many are being forced to stay at home this time around.
“Brazil has been a disappointment for a lot of us,” said Rachitaa Gupta, global coordinator of the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice (DCJ), a network of over 200 organisations primarily from the Global South.
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“This was a key moment for us because for the first time in many years we have been able to organise a huge people’s movement and mobilisation on the ground,” she added. “But we have had to scale that down significantly.”
A COP30 presidency spokesperson told Climate Home that the Brazilian government is taking concrete measures to ensure broad civil society participation, with a particular focus on the Global South, and has been responding to concerns expressed by organisations.
The measures include making available lower cost accommodation in university dormitories, schools and temporary housing facilities, they said, as well as negotiating discounted rates with hotels and transport providers.
Lula aims to host “the best COP in history”
Since President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva first announced in early 2023 that Belém would host COP30, the Brazilian government has been talking up the symbolism of bringing the annual UN climate summit to the Amazon rainforest, which plays a vital role in absorbing planet-heating carbon and regulating the Earth’s climate.
“I leave Pará with the certainty that we will hold the best COP in history,” Lula said in February after he visited the northeastern state of Pará, whose capital is Belém.
Pará state governor, Helder Barbalho, told The Guardian in April that “it will be the COP with the greatest popular participation in history and that is something we have particularly encouraged”.
However, local hotels hiked rates to exorbitant levels in anticipation of high demand, despite efforts by the COP30 presidency to persuade them to bring them down. A deal was done to help developing-countries’ official delegations find cheaper accommodation at fixed rates, but those were not extended to non-governmental organisations, businesses or media.
Official booking platform late and “glitchy”
The DCJ’s Gupta said the logistical chaos has more to do with the COP presidency’s “complete planning failure”, rather than being an issue with an Amazon port city itself.
As room prices on commercial accommodation sites like Booking.com and Airbnb skyrocketed early this year, local officials insisted the market would “stabilise” once the COP30 team launched its own platform.
But when it finally appeared in mid-July after repeated delays, it was met with disappointment.
“There were frankly horrendous accommodation options that were very, very expensive,” Gupta said. She added that information is often “misleading” and those who managed to book couldn’t keep the accommodation because the system is “glitchy”.
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When civil society groups voiced their concerns with the presidency in August, Gupta said the COP30 team responded with a plan to convert large buildings, such as schools and offices, into shared accommodation.
“For us, this was problematic because we cannot be seen as an afterthought and it’s not fair that civil society is reduced to being put into dormitory-style accommodation, like some kind of cattle being hoarded,” she said.
She added that many Global South campaigners come from conservative cultures and find it difficult to share rooms in mixed settings.
Reduced numbers attending
As a result, NGOs are slimming down the size of their delegations compared to COP28 in Dubai and what they had originally planned for Belém.
According to Gupta, many people in the DCJ network have ultimately decided against attending COP30 because of the pricey accommodation on top of costly flights to get there.
“It is specifically disappointing because we had anticipated doubling participation this year,” Gupta added.
Mariano Villares, co-founder of the Argentine organisation Sustentabilidad Sin Fronteras, told Climate Home that five members of their team had been planning to travel to Belém “to make the most of the COP’s return to Latin America after 11 years” – but only two will now be able to go.
“The prices and conditions of accommodation drive out civil society from the Global South. The climate conversation loses diversity when the voices most affected by the impacts are left out,” he said.
Marina Agortimevor, coordinator of the Africa Just Transition Network, told Climate Home the network had sent more than 15 of its members from grassroots organisations to past climate talks. But this time, because of funding cuts and the high cost of accommodation, it can barely manage to send four members to Belém.
While this COP has been billed as an inclusive conference, “inclusivity is still based on what is in your pocket”, Agortimevor said.
Other African civil society groups told Climate Home funders who had supported their attendance at previous climate talks had backed out of financing their participation at COP30 due to the high costs.
Limited accreditation allocations
In addition, Agortimevor said some Africa Just Transition Network members have struggled to get accreditation for the COP in Brazil, another factor that appears to be working against the wide participation of civil society.
Sustentabilidad Sin Fronteras said it had received less than a third of the accreditations it got last year, also limiting the size of its delegation in Belém.
One Latin American organisation – which asked not to be named – said it would have to divide up the three badges it had received so that some team members can attend the first week and others the second. “Some people need to be there for both weeks due to the work being done, and this situation has limited our activities,” they said.
The lower number of accreditations is a trend heard from most of the Latin American organisations Climate Home spoke with. Some are seeking other ways to get their staff into the conference, such as asking their countries’ governments to register them as “party overflow”.
When asked about this issue by Climate Home, a UN official said requests for COP accreditation by NGOs had increased “significantly” in recent years, with 4,000 organisations now registered as observer groups. The size of COP venues, however, has stayed the same, meaning that “the portions available to each organisation naturally become smaller”.
“This is not about restricting participation for any particular group, but rather a reflection of the growing interest, which affects everyone,” the official said, adding that the UN climate change body has been working specifically to enhance representation from developing countries as requested by governments at last year’s mid-year climate talks.
Blow to climate justice?
Osver Polo Carrasco, coordinator of the ambition and NDC working group of the CAN Latin America network, expressed concern about the limitations all this may pose on civil society in doing its job of monitoring and providing oversight of developments at COP30.
This problem was already been experienced at last week’s pre-COP in Brasilia, he added, “where access was very limited for civil society and also for the written press”.
One African Group negotiator – who is not attending COP30 because of the “prohibitive costs” – said the exclusion of himself and other representatives of governments and civil society from the continent “is not just an economic failure – it’s a political one”.
“It undermines representation, weakens multilateralism amid uncertainties like a potential US absence, and threatens the legitimacy and momentum needed for an inclusive and ambitious COP30,” he said.
He warned that “without the voices of those on the frontlines, climate justice becomes a hollow promise.”
The COP30 presidency said the substantive participation of Global South organisations “is essential for the credibility of the conference”, noting that it had already consulted with a wide range of groups, representing Indigenous peoples, youth and women among others, to ensure they can influence and engage in the summit.
“COP30 is being planned as a milestone for placing climate justice at the center, treating the full participation of civil society organisations as a pillar of this commitment,” the presidency spokesperson told Climate Home.
The post Global South campaigners question inclusivity of COP30 as some stay home appeared first on Climate Home News.
Global South campaigners question inclusivity of COP30 as some stay home
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Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes
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