By COP30 is unfolding in the Amazon for the first time — a moment of huge symbolic and political weight. Inside the halls and out on the streets, Indigenous Peoples, forest communities, women, workers and youth are shaping the atmosphere: coordinated advocacy on negotiation text, large mobilizations and grassroots convening spaces scattered across Belém, and strong Indigenous Amazonian leadership asserting itself with clarity and purpose.
Their message is clear: the Amazon cannot survive under the same financial system that is driving its destruction.
Inside the negotiations, a parallel truth is visible. Governments are attempting to respond to a planetary emergency while operating inside a global financial architecture designed for extraction, not ecological stability or justice. COP30 is one of the few spaces where these tensions surface openly, even if the process is not well-equipped to resolve them.
THE STRUCTURAL PROBLEM: A CLIMATE REGIME TRAPPED IN AN EXTRACTIVE FINANCIAL ORDER
Countries arrive in Belém carrying pressures the UN climate regime cannot fix on its own: heavy debt burdens, rising interest rates, volatile currencies, commodity dependence, and a financial system that often prices climate action higher for those most affected by climate impacts.
For many developed countries, defending this architecture protects fiscal space and geopolitical leverage. Many developing countries push back, but are constrained by debt service, credit ratings and limited fiscal room. Large emerging economies face yet another configuration: less vulnerable to some shocks, but deeply tied to commodity markets, overseas finance and large-scale extractive projects.
Overlaying all of this is the influence of corporate sectors with a strong stake in the status quo. Fossil fuel companies, agribusiness conglomerates, commodity traders and financial institutions hold a heavy presence across delegations, pavilions and side events. Their quiet but consistent pressure narrows the scope of what negotiators consider “deliverable”.
The result is a systemic tilt toward lower-friction measures: voluntary initiatives, market-based instruments and policy pathways that avoid disrupting the business models of fossil, mining or agribusiness industries.
JUST TRANSITION: WHERE THE FINANCIAL FIGHT COMES INTO FOCUS
The Just Transition Work Programme (JTWP) exposes these structural tensions clearly.
Many developing countries argue that a real just transition must encompass finance, land, food systems, mineral access and the inequalities that keep communities locked into extractive economies. Many developed countries frame it more narrowly, centered on domestic industrial and labor transitions — avoiding deeper questions about global supply chains and financial rules.
The proposed Belém Action Mechanism gestures toward a more ambitious vision: embedding rights, community governance, implementation support, and tackling the systemic barriers that make unjust transitions the norm. Its heavy bracketing in the draft text reflects both political caution and the influence of vested interests.
TFFF: FORESTS ON THE TERMS OF THE BOND MARKETS
The Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF), launched by the Brazilian Government in the lead up to COP30, illustrates how proposed “solutions” can replicate the very financial dynamics driving forest loss.
A recent civil society statement highlights that the TFFF relies on bonds and long-dated debt instruments — effectively tying the future of forests to the expectations of credit rating agencies and bond investors. This model treats forests as assets and liabilities within global debt markets rather than living territories.
Concerns are fundamental: exposure to market volatility; reliance on private capital; reinforcing the logic of indebtedness; prioritizing returns to investors over payments to governments and Indigenous Peoples; and leaving untouched the core drivers of deforestation — mining, industrial agriculture and the finance that enables them. Its political appeal is understandable, but the risks are structural.
FOOD SYSTEMS AND LAND: WHEN FINANCE SETS THE RULES
The food system is another arena where finance quietly governs outcomes. Over recent decades, agriculture and land have been transformed into investment classes, with production shaped by asset managers, traders and speculative capital.
This model accelerates land consolidation, sidelines small-scale producers, and prioritizes export-oriented commodity flows over food sovereignty, ecological resilience and food security. Draft agriculture texts at COP30 reference agroecology and Indigenous knowledge, but the political space remains constrained — and market-based approaches risk reinforcing land financialization through offsets and ag-carbon mechanisms.
RIGHTS AND REPRESENTATION: A QUIETER FRONT LINE
Attempts by some states to dilute gender language, weaken rights references or sideline defender protection may look technical, but they are part of the same political economy: where extractive interests are strong and rights protections are politically inconvenient.
INDIGENOUS PEOPLES: THE CLEAREST BLUEPRINT FOR STRUCTURAL CHANGE
The Amazon-wide Indigenous Political Declaration offers one of the most grounded and coherent climate agendas at COP30: territorial protection through legally enforceable demarcation, exclusion of extractives, direct access to finance, meaningful participation, knowledge recognition and defender protection.
Indigenous leaders are advancing these positions inside and outside the negotiations — shaping text, briefing governments, mobilizing publics, and articulating what aligning climate action with ecological reality actually requires.
WHEN FINANCIAL FLOWS OUTPACE CLIMATE ACTION
Each year, trillions of dollars continue to flow into fossil fuels, mining, industrial agriculture and infrastructure that drive forest loss, pollute waterways, and damage grasslands and other critical biomes — supported by vast public subsidies that reduce investor risk and entrench extractive models. These incentives shape land use and capital allocation far more powerfully than any decisions currently emerging from climate negotiations.
BEYOND BELÉM
The tensions on display at COP30 will not be resolved this week or next year. They point toward a larger horizon: changes to debt, trade, financial regulation, territorial governance and human rights protection that lie beyond the mandate of the UNFCCC — but determine the fate of the Amazon.
What Belém alters is the clarity of the narrative. The Amazon and its Peoples have shown that incrementalism within an extractive order cannot protect forests, communities or the climate. The debates sparked here will shape political expectations and movement strategies long after COP30 closes.
The question is no longer whether this COP can “save” the Amazon — but whether what has been exposed in Belém accelerates the wider fight for a financial and political order capable of doing so.
