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”.
Brazil launches COP30 accommodation platform after pressure from UN committee
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
The United Nations Secretary-General and foreign ministers from the UK, France and Spain have blamed the deadly wildfires engulfing Europe on climate change, using the disaster to renew calls for faster cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
António Guterres told journalists on Friday that the “climate crisis is in overdrive”, adding that global heat seen so far is just a “warm up act” as a phenomenon known as El Niño intensifies “adding fuel to a planet already on fire”.
A new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report published on Friday predicts that the weather pattern will grow into a “strong event” between now and October, increasing the risk of higher than normal temperatures across much of the world and disrupted rainfalls.
“That risks shattering every seasonal record – and driving even more severe effects worldwide,” Guterres said.
El Niño builds on top of an already warming world, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. A WMO scientist, who did not want to be named, told journalists that all the heatwaves and other climate impacts seen so far this year are “before the effects of El Niño are really kicking in at a global scale”.
Fossil fuellling the fires
Fires have broken out across much of Europe but are threatening the most people in the south-west of France near Bordeaux and in Central Spain near Madrid. Nearly a quarter of a million people have been evacuated in France with hundreds of homes destroyed while in Spain 80,000 people have had to leave their homes and at least 13 died in one village.
A scientific study published on Friday by the World Weather Attribution group found that man-made climate change made deadly fires in France twice as likely and those in Spain twenty times more likely. Smaller fires in the UK were not analysed by the study.
UN Climate Change leader Simon Stiell blamed fossil fuels for the fires, as well as storms in Chile and heatwaves in North America and Japan in recent weeks. “The climate alarm is blaring”, he said on Wednesday.
Guterres criticised new fossil fuel production projects and fossil fuel subsidies for causing hardship across the world. Discussing his speech, a senior UN official – who did not want to be named – said the subsidies amounted to trillions of US dollars a year and criticised pension funds and institutional investors, including insurance companies, for continuing to invest in fossil fuel projects.
Asked why world leaders and the public are not prioritising climate action, Guterres said they are distracted by wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan and elsewhere and sometimes forget “other aspects that are a sometimes even more dangerous threat”.
Also the fossil fuel industry and “some countries” are campaigning to pretend that climate change does not exist, he said, adding that the UN should be more active in “naming the situations as they are and the responsibilties as they are and mobilising the public opinion”.
After meetings in Paris and Madrid earlier in the week, the UK’s new foreign minister Ed Miliband issued joint statements with his French and Spanish counterparts – Jean-Noël Barrot and José Manuel Albares Bueno – calling on the world to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.
They promised to do more to reduce emissions and protect their people and encouraged other governments to do the same.
The UK-French statement called on governments to publish UN climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which are aligned with the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global average temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
According to Climate Action Tracker, only three countries – the UK, Nigeria and Norway – have submitted NDCs with 2035 emissions reduction targets which are compatible with 1.5C. Fifty-two countries – including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina – have yet to submit an NDC at all.
Defending science
Beyond action on emissions, the ministers also intervened in an ongoing dispute over the timing of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC)’s next flagship assessment.
Miliband and Barrot’s statement said they “underline the importance” of scientific report feeding into governments’ next global stocktake of progress on climate action in two years’ time, calling it a “critical input” to that process.
The timing of this report has been a contentious issue in government negotiations at the IPCC and at June’s climate talks in Bonn. While a group of nations calling themselves the “friends of science” want the report before the stocktake, others like Saudi Arabia and India have argued that this would make the report of a worse quality and less inclusive of developing countries’ scientists.
Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks
The UK-Spanish statement weighed in less explicitly on this issue but said that they “recall the importance of scientific evidence and acknowledge the work of the IPCC in this respect.”
The British and French ministers said they would seek to accelerate reductions of emissions in methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, at COP31 in November. They encouraged governments “to work jointly to develop a marketplace for fossil fuels with near-zero methane intensity.”
Methane leaks from oil, gas and coal production are a major contributor to global warming. Over a 20-year period, methane traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
The UK and Spanish statement emphasised the importance of supporting the Global South and underlined the need to mobilise sustainable financing “at scale with the challenge we face”. The previous UK government, in which Miliband was energy minister, cut climate finance to developing countries to pay for increases in military spending.
The UK government led by new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has yet to outline any major changes to climate finance in its two weeks in power but has announced it will convert some finance from grants to loans in order to free up money to subsidise bus travel in England.
More adaptation needed
Guterres said that “it is time to stop treating each disaster as an isolated tragedy and recognise the systemic risk that is unfolding before our eyes.” A recent study found that three-quarters of UK media reports about the British June heatwave did not mention climate change.
As well as reducing emissions, the UN Secretary-General called for measures to adapt vulnerable people to extreme heat. Specifically, he said that buildings should be built and retrofitted for extreme heat and that every city and country should have heat-health action plans and early warning systems. Over 250 cities have joined the UN’s ‘beat the heat’ initiative, he said.
The Portuguese diplomat called for governments and employers to do more to protect their workers from heat, criticising global fashion brands for not setting heat standards for the factories that supply them. “No one should have to risk their life to earn a living,” he said.
The post UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire
Climate Change
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In response to the federal government announcing its once-in-a-decade review of Australia’s Marine Parks Network, the following lines can be attributed to Elle Lawless, Senior Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific welcomes today’s announcement that the Albanese Government will review Australia’s Commonwealth Marine Parks Network. This is a rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to strengthen our marine parks and ban industrial fishing in Australia’s marine protected areas.
“Australians would be appalled to know that more than half of Australia’s Marine Parks Network currently allows for extractive industries, like longlining, bottom trawling and oil and gas mining. These so-called ‘protected’ areas were designed to safeguard our beloved ocean wildlife and underwater ecosystems – that is what Australians expect. Damaging industrial industries should not be given a free pass to trawl, fish, drill or extract from our marine parks.”
“With the first Ocean COP just around the corner, and off the back of Australia’s move to ratify the Global Ocean Treaty earlier this year, the Australian government has a unique opportunity to ride the wave of this momentum and solidify itself as a true global ocean leader.
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling for industrial activities to be banned from our protected waters and for at least 30% of Australia’s ocean to be protected as ocean sanctuaries. This review presents a rare opportunity to create more ocean sanctuaries, true blue havens where ocean life can recover, thrive and repopulate the surrounding waters.”
—ENDS—
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In recent days, prominent climate sceptics and rightwing commentators have shared charts on social media incorrectly implying that Europe is having its “quietest” year for wildfires in 2026.
These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist and self-described “professor in exile”, who was recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program.
However, these charts paint a misleading picture as they are skewed by encompassing the entirety of Russia in the data – including the vast plains of Siberia.
These charts also use data that include fires that are deliberately lit to manage cropland, which is a declining practice across much of Europe.
In this factcheck, Carbon Brief shows that the area burned by wildfires across the European Union in 2026 is second only to 2022 for this time of year.
The latest data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) also shows that France has set a new modern record for area burned and Spain’s wildfire season is among the worst on record.
The fires have displaced more than a third of a million people across south-western Europe, while an impending heatwave has also raised fears of the fires worsening in the coming days.
‘Quietest year’
On 27 July, as wildfires raged across multiple European countries, former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley posted on Twitter that “2026 is the quietest year for wildfires in Europe by some distance”.
Ridley, who sits on the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK-based climate-sceptic lobby group that refuses to reveal the sources of its funding, was responding to an article by Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley.
Stanley’s column, headlined: “Climate change is real – and the right needs to get serious about it”, warned:
“This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.”
Ridley included a chart from Our World In Data, showing the cumulative area burned by wildfires by week for Europe. The chart puts 2026 as having the smallest area for this time of year in a dataset going back to 2012.
Ridley’s post was widely shared by prominent rightwing figures – including Richard Tice, deputy leader of the hard-right, climate-sceptic Reform UK party, former Conservative cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and multiple commentators.
Separately, Wielicki also shared a chart on Twitter to imply that wildfires in Europe are declining. Wielicki has previously claimed that the “science is not settled on climate change”.
The charts posted by Ridley and Wielicki both use data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS). The GWIS category for “Europe” encompasses all the countries on the continent and includes the whole of Russia.
As a result, Russia accounts for about 74% of the area included in the GWIS definition of “Europe”.
Wildfires in Russia typically account for 80-90% of the burned area in the GWIS Europe dataset. In 2026, fires in Russia are substantially below average. Therefore, including Russia in this comparison creates the false impression that wildfire activity across Europe is unusually low.
Dr Calum Cunningham, a research fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Fire Centre, says that such claims are “highly misleading”, noting that “they rely on aggregating fire activity across an enormous and climatically diverse region”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“A relatively quiet season in Russia can easily mask an exceptionally active season in France or Spain. If the analysis is focused on the regions actually experiencing the current fires, the picture is very different.
“The reality is that western Europe has experienced an extraordinary sequence of climate conditions this year.”
In contrast, the EFFIS provides a subset of wildfire data specifically for the area covered by the 27 nations of the EU, which, therefore, excludes Russia.
Another difference between the two datasets is that GWIS monitors all fires – including those on agricultural land that are intentionally set alight. The burned area as measured by GWIS contains significant cropland area.
By contrast, EFFIS uses land-cover data and other information to filter specifically for forest fires.
Looking at the EU-only data from EFFIS reveals that Europe is far from having its “quietest” year. The bloc’s burned area, as of 29 July, is almost 435,000 hectares (ha) – second only to 2022 for this time of year.
Notably, Wielicki has actually continued to post charts based on GWIS data, even after acknowledging that “includ[ing] all of Russia, including vast areas of Siberia…isn’t a good proxy for Europe”.
French fires
Even looking at EU-wide data misses the scale of this year’s wildfires for some individual countries.
The chart below shows the surge in burned area in France since mid-July.
For much of the first half of the year, the country was having a wildfire season that was only slightly above average in terms of total burned area. However, a notable uptick began in the first week of July.
The third week of the month saw France break its previous cumulative annual record by more than 19,000ha. That gap has widened as the fires continue to burn; as of 29 July, the cumulative burned area in France during 2026 was nearly 24,700ha above the previous record.
The fires in France follow a record-breaking June heatwave that “dried out vegetation across the region, allowing fires to spread quickly”, wrote the New York Times.
On 27 July, French president Emmanuel Macron called a “crisis cabinet meeting” in order to address the fires “ravaging several areas of south-west France”, said France 24.
More than 220,000 people have been evacuated due to the Gironde fire, west of Bordeaux, in “what may be France’s largest peacetime evacuation”, reported the Associated Press.
In the Conversation, Cunningham and two other University of Tasmania researchers write that evacuation orders “protec[t] human lives, but makes it more likely houses and other structures will burn if there’s no one to defend them”. They add:
“There is little doubt climate change has made France and Spain’s wildfires worse. They represent yet another reason to redouble our efforts to tackle climate change and stabilise our climate.”
Central Spain scorched
While Spain’s fire season has not broken records in the same way that France’s has, it is on track to be among the worst since EFFIS began reporting data in 2006.
The chart below shows the rapid increase in burned area in Spain since 8 July. The latest data from EFFIS reveal that, as of 29 July, Spain has almost matched its previous record at this point in the year. It is also nearly five times the average area burned for this time of year.
In Spain, the wildfires have been concentrated in the central part of the country, near Madrid.
BBC News reported that the fires outside the capital have burned “an area more than twice as large as the city itself”.
Nearly 90,000 people were forced from their homes in central Spain by the fires, said the Associated Press.
Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, called the fires a “painful expression” of climate change.
Meanwhile, the UK, French and Spanish governments have issued joint statements this week in response to the fires. The UK/Spain statement begins:
“This summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.”
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The post Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires
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