The Palestinian Institute
for Climate Strategy
for Climate Strategy
Yet, what is at stake here reaches far beyond taming anthropogenic climate change. Lying beneath the technical language is the enduring logic of extraction, of power, and of dispossession. It unveils the existential questions of whose lives and lands are deemed worth protecting, and whose are structurally silenced, sacrificed, and erased.
Amid this landscape, the Palestinian Institute for Climate Strategy (PICS) has been present throughout week one, grounding the Amazonia COP in the lived realities of militarised climate destruction. Our COP30 Palestine Solidarity Toolkit has been circulated among delegates, unions, and media as a practical guide to centre Palestine across negotiation tracks, from the Mitigation Work Programme and Just Transition Work Programme to Loss & Damage and climate finance, the toolkit was built around five core demands: (1) expelling Israel from the UNFCCC, (2) enforcing a people’s energy embargo, (3) banning false solutions, (4) counting and cutting military emissions, and (5) advancing Indigenous land back everywhere. Alongside the toolkit, PICS has launched the Radical Research Briefs and two zines, The People’s Energy Embargo: No Drop of Brazilian Oil! and From the Docks to the Streets: Workers Shut It Down, which trace the concrete routes of Brazilian oil and global dockworker resistance. Through these tools, and through panels, press conferences, and street mobilisation, PICS has insisted that Palestine is not peripheral to Belém, but a central test of whether climate governance has any integrity at all.
In the negotiation rooms, the familiar tracks dominate: finance, adaptation, mitigation/NDCs (nationally determined contributions), and just transition. What does not get questioned, however, are deeper, structural contests of who gets to set the agenda? Whose knowledge counts? Whose voice is heard and whose voice is persistently silenced? These remain largely unspoken.
COP30 carries a hangover from its previous iteration, with unresolved debates on climate finance spilling over. The headline figure of mobilising “USD 1.3 trillion annually by 2035”, packaged under the Baku-to-Belém Roadmap, serves as a benchmark of the toothlessness of multilateral climate governance. The core tension to climate finance remains: what kind of finance can actually enable just transitions for communities without entrenching the powers of global financial elites? The answer rests in the repeated demands of the Global Majority: public, concessional, predictable, and anchored in justice. Anything short of that becomes another spreadsheet entry in the ledgers of accounting acrobatics, and not one that foregrounds the reality of most impacted communities. Had this been recognised and acted on in Baku during COP29 finance negotiations, the momentum in Belém would have been much stronger. As a result, deliberations on the Global Goal on Adaptation are under tension, and developing countries are pushing for the formalisation of Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement, which underscores rich nations’ responsibility to provide climate finance.
On mitigation and NDCs, pressure is mounting, but the gap between intention and action remains cavernous. References to a “fossil-fuel phase-out road-map” are circulating with much rhetorical ease, yet the biggest emitters continue to stall. Therein lies a familiar choreography: ambition articulated in words, but delay entrenched in deeds. On adaptation, negotiations to formalise adaptation indicators can provide a common language to track progress in adaptation efforts across key sectors (such as biodiversity, livelihoods, infrastructure, food systems, and water). Indicators can also help illustrate the nexus between adaptation challenges and broader socio-economic policymaking and shift the dial from measurement to delivery, provided they are backed by sufficient adaptation finance mobilisation.
While there are plenty of successes on the Loss and Damage Fund, with the opening of the Call for Proposals, the Fund still has a long way to go to ensure justice and equity. The Barbados Implementing Modality (BIM) will accept proposals only from governments, contradicting demands from civil society for direct access. Further, the 250 million USD allocated to the Fund is tiny in relation to actual needs; worse when compared to the 20 million USD that can actually be accessed. Just before COP, Hurricane Melissa ravaged the Caribbean, particularly Jamaica, and Typhoons Tino and Uwan hit the Philippines. Twenty million USD is not nearly enough to meet post-disaster needs.
However, it is notable that in the Loss and Damage negotiations, references to the International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion (ICJAO), the Advisory Opinion of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR), and the 1.5°C limit were made, particularly by the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). Further, outside the negotiations, reparations conversations have been strengthened, with side events on reparations and the Reparations Hub's physical space this year.
On nature and forests, the host country’s position looms large. A proposed Tropical Forest Forever Fund (TFFF) is backed by financial institutions, but Indigenous leaders are unequivocal that no fund is just that ignores their lands, rights, knowledge and agency; no fund is just that commodifies and assetises the heartbeat of the global ecosystem. The TFFF is a public-private investment opportunity, and is facing criticism for further eroding already existing but under-resourced biodiversity and climate funds. Its design to attract private investors has also been questioned, as it enables developed countries to dilute their legal obligations to pay their fair share and to be held accountable for their massive contributions to the biodiversity and climate crisis. Insidiously, it responds to the environmental crises ahistorically, which has been the trend in most of the conversation so far: it sets aside the fact that tropical forests have been heavily impacted by extractive industries and colonisation by the Global North.
On the just transition, the civil society-led proposal to turn a dialogue-based agenda into a concrete mechanism of international cooperation remains on the table. Yet, several Global North countries remain ignorant of the cross-border implications of just transitions, or how their own transition displaces harm and violence on vulnerable communities elsewhere. Self-determination is not optional, but must underpin all transition frameworks.
The COP Presidency has signalled that this COP will pivot from grand packages to “implementation steps”. While this may sound pragmatic, for frontline communities living through climate-fuelled destruction, “implementation” without structural naming becomes a low-stakes gesture. If the architecture of multilateral climate governance does not name, let alone confront colonialism, militarism, extraction, and dispossession, it remains complicit.
Yet what unfolds inside these negotiation rooms is shaped not only by what is debated, but also by what is forbidden. Week one of COP30 has been marked by an intensified suppression of discussions on colonisation and occupation, especially regarding Palestine. Civil society stakeholders continue to name resource theft, green capitalism, colonialism, or militarism as the systemic crises underlying climate breakdown, while Party delegates and UNFCCC facilitators side-step these uncomfortable truths and steer conversations towards technocratic neutrality.
The suppression is not only in voice, but also in infrastructure. Civil society actions calling for a ceasefire or naming Israeli ecocide have faced unprecedented restrictions, including badge removals, threats of expulsion, and what the Secretariat has termed “collective punishment” for groups voicing political demands. Protest routes and spaces have been tightly confined, with restrictions on volume levels, stomping, or the use of certain slogans. Meanwhile, the visible presence of Brazilian military forces, who guard entrances, hover over protest sites, and patrol the grounds, has made the negotiations feel less like a global climate summit and more like zones of securitisation. These dynamics stand in stark contrast to the People’s Summit and the People’s Flotilla, which were organised outside the official venue, where Indigenous peoples, Palestinian movements, and Global South networks converged to reject the sanitised neutrality of the UNFCCC and to assert that the climate crisis is inseparable from land theft, war, and racialised dispossession.
Yet, amidst Indigenous Peoples’ clamour for representation and leadership in the COP is the equally shameful reality of fossil fuel lobbyists’ participation. A report by Global Witness showed that, taken together, fossil fuel lobbyists amount to 1,600 delegates (which is larger than any country delegation except for Brazil). This means that for every 25 COP delegates, there is one fossil fuel lobbyist.
Outside of the plenaries, a different momentum is shaping Belém. The streets have become the terrain where demands for rights, land, and justice converge.
On 15 November, thousands marched on the streets of Belém under the Global People’s March, demanding something beyond the polished language of negotiations, something more real. The Amazon is central to the struggle, alongside the thousands of communities around the globe whose futures are being negotiated in the hyper-professionalised spaces of COP.
Indigenous peoples from Amazonian territories halted the COP’s main entrance early this week, remonstrating: they are not observers but protectors of our planetary systems. Their resistance must seem as lived truth: forest protection cannot, and will not, be unbundled from the rights and sovereignty of peoples who steward those forests. Their mobilisation also confronts the host government’s decision to reopen oil exploration on their ancestral lands. This is a direct contradiction of the climate narrative presented inside the halls.
For Palestine, and for all contexts marked by occupation, resource extraction, and exclusion, the activism in Belém resonates profoundly. These movements remind the world that climate change itself is a product of colonial and structural violence, and that responding to it must centre reparations, justice, and sovereignty, not merely emissions accounting (and recounting). The struggle for ecosystems is inseparable from the struggle for the peoples who sustain them. The climate fight is the fight for land, for dignity, for futures.
In Belém this year, tropical forest, decolonisation and climate finance meet uneasily. This intersection exposes how profoundly broken the existing climate regime remains. For Palestine, this relevance is not peripheral. It is central.
Week one in Belém has brought to the surface the contradictions of Brazil’s role as COP host. Brazil is not merely a bystander to the global fossil-military complex, it is one of its pillars. PICS’ Briefs reveal that Petrobras exported over US $215 million in mineral fuels to Israel in 2024 alone, forming a critical artery in the supply chain that powers the Israeli air force, tanks, and mechanised invasion of Gaza. These flows are not abstract; they translate directly into bombardments, starvation, and ecocidal destruction.
PICS’ counter-mapping shows a transnational network, from Petrobras to Vitol to Shell, profiting from the militarised extraction and circulation of Brazilian oil. This is why Brazilian unions, Indigenous coalitions, and international solidarity networks have begun mobilising around an energy-embargo-from-below, asserting that workers and communities have the power to disrupt genocidal supply chains even when states refuse to act. The struggle to cut the flow of Brazilian oil to Israel has become one of the most significant climate-justice interventions emerging from this COP.
These dynamics illuminate a deeper continuum: the Amazon and Gaza are both frontlines of settler-colonial extractivism. As Indigenous leaders defend forests, rivers, and territories as living systems of sovereignty, Palestinians fight for their aquifers, cropland, olive groves, and solar networks, while systems are systematically targeted and destroyed by Israeli occupation. The Recognise, Resist, Rebuild Manifesto articulates this shared reality: ecological sovereignty is inseparable from political sovereignty. Extraction in the Amazon and ecocide in Gaza are not parallel crises. They are produced by the same global architectures of militarism, racial capitalism, and land theft.
And when the COP speaks of “just transitions” while ignoring settler-colonial realities -- from Gaza’s decimated infrastructure, restricted water rights, and land fragmentation -- it shows that the climate agenda remains trapped inside colonial logics of development, technocratic neutrality, and depoliticised humanitarianism. Military- and conflict-related emissions remain absent from the methodologies of emissions accounting in these hyper-sanitised rooms.
For Palestinians and the global solidarity movements, COP30 is about disrupting the narrative and shifting the frame of the roots of the climate crisis, and the futures we demand. Being present becomes an act of resistance; it is an insistence on placing Palestine within the global climate architecture, against ongoing attempts at erasure.
As COP30 enters its second week, the demands from frontline communities and Global South movements are unequivocal. The UNFCCC must name colonisation and occupation within the Just Transition and Global Stocktake decisions. Israel must be removed from the COP process as a perpetrator of genocide and ecocide. An energy embargo—beginning with halting Brazilian oil exports—must be recognised as a legitimate tool of climate justice. Militarism and conflict-related emissions must be integrated into emissions accounting. Climate finance must be grounded in reparations, not loans. And protections for environmental defenders and Indigenous peoples must be non-negotiable. Anything less is not implementation—it is complicity.
Belém may be geographically distant from Gaza, but the logics of dispossession, extraction and injustice bind them. What happens in these halls, what is debated in these texts, and what is omitted: it matters for all of us who live on the margins of systems built to exclude. Week one of COP30 revealed the terrain still contested: a world still fighting to redefine whose lives, whose lands, whose knowledge count. The world we build must not leave behind those living under occupation, under extraction, under erasure. For Palestine. For the Global South. For justice.
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