With negotiations in their second week here at the COP30 climate conference in Belém, Brazil, we get an update on the United Nations talks from Asad Rehman, chief executive of Friends of the Earth. He says COP30 is taking place against a backdrop of rising far-right authoritarianism, climate denial, and genocide in Gaza, which are all testing the “rules-based system” underpinning the U.N. climate framework. “How do you celebrate 10 years of Paris, 30 years of COP, to show that, actually, multilateralism matters and implementation matters?” says Rehman of the central challenge of the talks.
