Monday briefing: What to expect from Cop30 as the crucial climate conference kicks off in Brazil

 

Monday briefing: What to expect from Cop30 as the crucial climate conference kicks off in Brazil

 

In today’s newsletter: As the world’s leaders gather in Brazil, the urgency of the climate crisis collides with political inertia. The Guardian’s journalists will be following all the stories from Belém

 

Martin Belam

Mon 10 Nov 2025 06.33 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/10/first-edition-cop30

 

Good morning. I was warned when I agreed to sit in on First Edition that sometimes your early Monday morning could get derailed by a big breaking news story. So imagine my face yesterday when it happened on my very first weekend, as the BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, and the head of BBC News, Deborah Turness, both resigned.

 

The decisions come in the wake of Donald Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, describing the BBC as “100% fake news” over the way a speech by the US president was edited. A week of hostile rightwing media headlines – very clearly set out by Jamie Grierson in this piece – seems to have taken its toll at the top of the corporation. Culture secretary Lisa Nandy’s judgement will also no doubt be in the spotlight, having said, prior to his resignation, that she “retained confidence” in how Davie was handling the situation. Davie himself clearly didn’t agree.

 

The fallout from his resignation will grip the news cycle in the UK over the next 48 hours – but is that really the most important story in the world? In 2019 the Guardian made our environmental pledge, declaring “the escalating climate crisis is the defining issue of our lifetimes and the planet is in the grip of an emergency”.

 

Today is the formal opening of proceedings for the Cop30 conference in Belém. Ahead of those sessions in Brazil I spoke to Natalie Hanman, the Guardian’s head of environment. This newsletter is about her expectations from Cop30, the in-depth coverage that the Guardian has planned and how it feels to be running the coverage in a world where the climate crisis continues unabated – regardless of political shenanigans about the BBC, which we will no doubt return to here in the near future. But first, this morning’s headlines.

 

Last week UN secretary general António Guterres lambasted the world at the opening of Cop30 by describing the failure to limit global heating to 1.5C as a “moral failure and deadly negligence”. With the glad-handing of the world leaders over, the serious work begins today as the conference opens properly.

 

It comes at a time when climate action policies are under serious threat. A fossil-fuelled Trump administration is urging “Drill baby, drill!” and the party currently leading opinion polls in Britain – Reform UK – has set out a policy platform against renewable energy and net zero targets.

 

“The climate crisis is a slow-motion disaster,” Natalie said, “but the news agenda thrives on quick, new, fast, ever-changing stories. We think Cop provides us with a key moment every year to pull people’s attention back to what we think is the biggest and most urgent crisis facing humanity.”

 

Under the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, every country on Earth is treaty-bound to “avoid dangerous climate change” and find ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally in an equitable way.

 

Cop stands for “conference of the parties” under the UNFCCC. “It is the only time that all the countries in the world – with very few exceptions – have to come together and face each other and listen to each other,” Natalie said.

 

Experts say that 2023, 2024 and 2025 were the three hottest years in 176 years of records, with the 1.5C Paris agreement target now “virtually impossible” to achieve, meanwhile nonviolent climate protesters face jail sentences, research shows climate disasters in the US during the first half of 2025 were the costliest ever on record, and analysis suggests recently drafted climate plans from scores of countries fall drastically short of what is needed.

 

What are the positive signs going into Cop30?

If that all sounds bleak, at least Fiona Harvey, who is in Belém, reported findings that there is still a chance for the world to avoid the worst ravages of climate breakdown and return to the goal of 1.5C if action is stepped up.

 

“We know exactly what we need to do to address the climate crisis. We already have all the technology and all the money that we need. The problem is the politics and the power, which isn’t addressing these issues in an equitable way, or moving anywhere near fast enough,” Natalie said.

 

“We see again and again in polling, and in our reporting, that the majority of people across the world still say they want action on the climate crisis. People are our hope here.”

 

How will the Guardian be covering the conference?

The Guardian will be providing comprehensive coverage of the conference, with a significant team out in Brazil. Fiona is a veteran, closing in on her 20th Cop, and yesterday we had this piece from her, asking amid the squabbles, the bombast and the competing interests, what can Cop30 achieve?

 

Jonathan Watts, our global environment writer, lives in the Brazilian rainforest. He traveled to Belém up the Amazon river in a flotilla carrying Indigenous groups and forest defenders, which he wrote about last week. Oliver Milman, Dharna Noor, Damian Carrington and Damien Gayle will also be there.

 

As well as the people on the ground, Natalie said there will be “a global team supporting them around the clock – a daily live blog, the podcast, newsletters, helpful explainers, deep dives and hopefully some scoops.”

 

Cop will also see the Guardian run another series of This is climate breakdown. It profiles people who’ve been personally affected by extreme weather events which the climate crisis has contributed to, with, Natalie says, “some incredibly moving stories.”

 

And lastly, the Guardian’s free environment newsletter, Down to Earth, will also be sent at an increased frequency during the conference, with exclusive insight from reporters on the ground. You can sign up to that here.

 

Why have we invested so heavily in our coverage?

“We do invest heavily in our Cop coverage, but we also invest heavily in our environment coverage every day throughout the year. We can use this moment to tell those wider stories about what’s happening to people and the natural world here and now,” Natalie said.

 

“This isn’t just some sort of theoretical discussion in a conference room at a UN Climate Summit. We’ve just had Hurricane Melissa. It’s about trying to make those links for people.

 

“We’re there because we want to know what’s going on behind the scenes. We want to know the extent of the lobbying against meaningful action.”

 

How has covering Cop changed over time?

The Guardian has been covering the UN’s discussions on the environment since the 1970s (pictured above), when our correspondent Malcolm Stuart attended the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm. The outcome of that was the Stockholm Declaration and Action Plan for the Human Environment.

 

Among its 26 principles was a declaration that “The natural resources of the earth … must be safeguarded for the benefit of present and future generations”, words that surely must ring hollow for the current generation of young people who face growing up in a more hostile climate.

 

Over the last five years, Natalie said, the team have tried to shift the reporting away from simply narrating the outcome of the summit, and instead “really engage critically with the process.”

 

“To reveal, as we did on Friday, that there have been more than 5,000 fossil fuel lobbyists at the climate summits over the past four years.”

 

“That comes at a time of a massive rise in catastrophic, extreme weather, inadequate climate action and record oil and gas expansion. We want to keep an eye on the actions of governments, in particular the petrostates, who often are blocking progress and highlight the voices and experiences of those, often from the global south, who are pushing hard for action.”

 

What would be a good outcome?

It was a tragedy, Natalie said, that we are going into Cop30 “and we’re not in a better place, and that so little actually has changed since Cop29 last year in Baku.”

 

Natalie said that a proposed deal on the protection of forests was one potential outcome that could have a hugely positive effect, provided there was money to support that. Good outcomes would also be to see more climate finance assistance from richer to poorer countries, an agreement to rapidly wind down fossil fuel production, and a “serious and permanent embedding of Indigenous voices and perspectives in every stage of the process.”

 

“But I think we probably have to approach it with high hopes, low expectations and rigorous scrutiny.”