World leaders are gathering again this year, this time in Belém — a city at the mouth of the Amazon River — for the thirtieth United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP30. Brazil has promised an “Amazon COP,” a summit that would finally give the largest rainforest, and the communities who protect it, a seat at the table. But the table itself looks shakier than ever.

In the years since the Paris Agreement, the conferences have become rituals of hope and exhaustion, a choreography of urgency performed under the fluorescent lights of negotiating halls. But this time, the geopolitical stage is bleaker. Wars rage across three continents. The planet has just endured the hottest year in recorded history. And sitting once again in the White House is Donald Trump — the man who called wind turbines “ugly,” ridiculed climate science as a hoax, and re-centered American policy around oil, coal, and militarism.

But if COP30 was meant to re-anchor the world’s climate ambitions, Trump’s second term has ensured that the anchor will drag. UN Secretary-General António Guterres, according to a recent Reuters report, condemned nations for failing to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Leaders attending the summit lamented the fractured global consensus on climate action, taking pointed jabs at the climate-denying Trump administration while assuring the world that the mission to tackle the climate crisis remains alive.

Still, the climate agenda survives in name only, hanging by a thread between ambition and reality.

A summit overshadowed

In Belém, Brazil’s diplomats have promised that COP30 will restore faith in multilateral climate action. But many of the negotiators arriving for the conference know better. The past year’s sessions under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change were dominated by disputes over loss and damage financing, the slow pace of phasing out fossil fuels, and the widening chasm between rich and poor nations.

Patrick Bigger, research director at the Climate and Community Project, describes what an honest COP agenda should look like if stripped of the diplomatic theatre.

“It would be restricting the exploitation and burning of fo