“It's not a party, it's a fight,” says Marina Silva on COP30 in Belém April 19, 2025

© Fabio Rodrigues-Pozzebom/Agência Brasil photographs Brazil's Minister for the Environment and Climate Change

“It's not a party, it's a fight,” says Marina Silva on COP30 in Belém

Minister defends planning to replace fossil fuels

Fabíola Sinimbú - Agência Brasil reporter

Published on 15/04/2025 - 12:44

Brasilia

The Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, Marina Silva, once again stressed on Tuesday (15) the importance of tackling global warming by planning to replace fossil fuels with renewable and less polluting energy sources. During her participation in the symposium Connecting Climate and Nature: Recommendations for Multilateral Negotiations, in Brasilia, the minister recalled the seriousness of the commitment to the environment made 32 years ago at the Earth Summit, ECO 92, in Rio de Janeiro.

“We have to plan for a just transition to the end of fossil fuels, otherwise we will be changed. And we're already being changed,” she said.

According to the minister, this planning needs to be translated into the delivery of the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) by the signatory countries of the Paris Agreement by the next United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30), hosted by Brazil in Belém (PA).

“It's not a party, it's a fight. It's not the World Cup, it's not the Olympics, it's a COP, which we could say comes at a time when we are experiencing the pedagogy of mourning and pain for many things, including the threat to multilateralism, solidarity, and collaboration between peoples,” she emphasized.

With planning, Marina says it is possible to promote this transition by avoiding problems such as climate extremes that cause storms, droughts, fires and unemployment.“I like the idea of planning for change, because then we have the chance to do things without the undesirable effects of change gradually,” she said.

Marina also pointed out that the climate negotiations need sobriety to bear the weight of the fact that, last year, the planet reached a temperature of 1.5ºC above the pre-industrial period.“Climate is part of nature, but we've done something so terrible that now we have to connect climate and nature as if it were something separate,” she said.

Indigenous peoples

The Minister for Indigenous Peoples, Sonia Guajajara, who also participated in the symposium, said that indigenous people have been working for a greater indigenous role in global politics and decision-making on climate change. “We are concerned, not with quantity, but with quality, with how we, the indigenous peoples, can enforce what comes out of the Paris Agreement, which is this recognition of traditional knowledge, of indigenous knowledge also as scientific knowledge,” she said.

According to Sonia, the natural synergy between indigenous peoples and nature is a decisive factor in building solutions to face the global challenges posed by climate change, and the example of the Amazon Forest is proof of this. “Indigenous peoples in Brazil didn't build big cities, but they did build a big forest. And this biodiversity that we have is not like that on its own, it is today this giant biodiversity because of the free transit of these indigenous peoples carrying the seeds and all this wealth to build this place,” he concludes.

Report originally published in Agência Brasil