Second Letter from the Presidency

Signs of human-induced climate change reached new heights since the issuance of my first letter to the international community in March. The World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) State of the Global Climate report confirmed 2024 as the warmest year on record, and the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has reached its highest level in the last 800,000 years. We see clear signals of planetary distress, including increased ocean heat, decreased sea- ice extents and glacier mass, and sea level rise.

With this second letter, the Brazilian incoming Presidency of the 30th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP30) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) moves from vision towards action, calling on the international community to mobilize in the face of climate urgency.

download

Second Letter from the Presidency

In this time of serious geopolitical, socioeconomic, and environmental challenges, we must unite to (1) reinforce multilateralism and the climate change regime under the UNFCCC, (2) connect the climate regime to people’s real lives, and (3) accelerate the implementation of the Paris Agreement by stimulating action and structural adjustments across all institutions that can contribute to it.

United, we can reverse the dangerous trend towards a sequence of systems collapses in domino effect. Together, we can build on and support each other, preventing a potentially devastating chain-reaction by triggering instead a “chain of action,” for exponential low-carbon and climate-resilient solutions. Though the challenge is immense, we must rise to face it.

This must be the time when nations and generations come together, combining the wisdom, patience and maturity of the more experienced with the youth’s enthusiasm, idealism and resourcefulness.

To contribute to an inflection point in our climate fight, I will be issuing a series of communications to advance a global Mutirão around four fronts of action with a view to COP30 and beyond:

(i)  a process of global mobilization;

(ii)  the Action Agenda;

(iii) formal UNFCCC negotiations - from the June sixty-second sessions of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA) and the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI) to the November COP30;

(iv)  the Leaders’ Summit.

The incoming Presidency will be announcing specific plans on all four fronts of action throughout the year. In this letter, I propose plans around “(i)” - our global mobilization starts right now.

The Presidency will be working closely with the recently appointed High-Level Champion, Dan Ioschpe, and Youth Champion, Marcele Oliveira, as well as selected Special Envoys, who will help as “levers” in the global mobilization front.

Global Mobilization: Carrying out the “Global Mutirão”

Beyond formal UNFCCC negotiations, the Action Agenda and the Leaders’ Summit, the incoming COP30 Presidency has embarked on a pioneering experiment to trigger an unprecedented global mobilization against climate change, based on the proliferation of self- organized initiatives throughout the world. This unprecedented mobilization – the “Global Mutirão” – aims to build momentum around climate action and ambition, and to create the conditions for an inflection point in our climate fight. It will strive to unleash a self-reinforcing movement to mobilize humankind in its transition to the future, supported by a global framework capable of integrating local action.

The incoming COP30 Presidency invites stakeholders to join us in co-creating this global framework in which all actors could engage in strengthening the Mutirão as a world movement. This collective co-creation mission will start at the first UNFCCC Climate Week in 2025 (Panama City, 19 to 23 May), to allow for different stakeholders, at all levels and geographies, to contribute to our common climate fight with what they can offer.

The incoming Presidency makes a standing invitation to all members of the human family: come as you are and as you can be. The Presidency welcomes in the Global Mutirão framework everyone and anyone at different levels of engagement, expertise, and perspectives.

Mutirão is much more than a joint effort or task force. This bottom-up and de-hierarchised form of mobilization emerges spontaneously and organically when there is an urgent need that remains unmet. Mirroring actual experiences on the ground – be it in indigenous and urban afro-descendant peripheric communities or other collectivities – the Global Mutirão framework will welcome individuals and organizations to present “self-determined contributions” in using their expertise, time, and/or resources to sustainably address climate challenges, by means of interventions and positive impacts at all levels – from local to global. Analogous to nationally determined contributions (NDCs), “self-determined contributions” will serve as bottom-up action.

Instead of entailing pledges to be fulfilled in the future, contributions to the mutirão should translate into initiatives effectively delivered or that are ongoing or on the verge of being undertaken. For example, a group of farmers adopting regenerative agriculture practices with local support; youth-led projects installing solar panels in underserved communities; coastal towns organizing mangrove restoration brigades; tech companies forming coalitions to decarbonize data centers; afro-descendant communities creating climate education programs for cities. These actions, though diverse, are united by a common spirit: collective, immediate, and self-driven contributions to a sustainable future.

This major endeavor involves learning by doing. Putting the Global Mutirão into effect requires a new approach: one in which the incoming Presidency acts as a vessel for empowering others. Stakeholders from all walks of life - governments, civil society, private sector, individuals – are all invited to take the lead in delivering concrete results in self-organized action. The spirit of the Mutirão is one of joining hands and taking responsibility for positive change, rather than just advocacy, demand, and expectation. As per Mahatma Gandhi’s famous quote, “be the change that you wish to see in the world.”

Making waves: Circles of human wisdom for planetary metamorphosis

For further amplifying the global mobilization against climate change, the incoming Presidency recently launched four visionary Circles of Leadership: (i) the “Circle of COP Presidents,” (ii) the “Circle of Peoples,” (iii) the “Circle of Finance Ministers,” and (iv) the “Global Ethical Stocktake Circle”. Like waves forming and merging into an unstoppable tide, these circles will flow together, channeling collective wisdom to create renewal and evolution.

Chaired by Laurent Fabius, President of COP21, which led to the adoption of the landmark Paris Agreement in 2015, the “Circle of COP Presidents” will bring together the leadership from COP presidencies since then. This assembly will harness their collective experience and insights to advise the COP30 Presidency on how the international community can further strengthen global climate governance and accelerate the implementation of the Paris Agreement, preserving its integrity and the legacy of these last years.

The “Circle of Peoples,” led by Brazil’s Minister of Indigenous Peoples, Sonia Guajajara, will amplify the voices of indigenous peoples, traditional communities, and afro-descendant groups. Complementing existing participatory platforms under the UNFCCC, this circle aims to advise the COP30 Presidency on how to deepen global recognition and integration of traditional knowledge, practices, and solutions into mainstream climate policy discourse, ensuring these critical perspectives inform and enhance international climate solutions, respect their rights and combat environmental racism and inequalities.

The “Circle of Finance Ministers,” chaired by Brazil’s Minister of Finance, Fernando Haddad, will seek to offer advice to the COP 30 Presidency from an implementation and policy-making perspectives on climate finance issues. Regularly convening finance ministers, financial experts, private sector representatives and civil society leaders, this circle will provide strategic insights and actionable recommendations.

Under the guidance of UN Secretary-General António Guterres and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the “Global Ethical Stocktake Circle” will be led by Brazil’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Marina Silva. Its mission is to elevate global awareness through inclusive dialogues across diverse regions, bringing together political, intellectual, academic, cultural, and religious leaders, alongside voices from all sectors of society. Inspired by the enduring legacy of Pope Francis, whose passing we mourn, the incoming Presidency views Laudato Si’ (2015) as both an ethical compass and a pragmatic guide for this global mobilization.

As prototypes of proactive governance, the four Circles of Leadership can make waves of powerful ideas to strengthen the transformational potential of the flow of the Global Mutirão.

Preparing Now for an Unpredictable Future: Calling on Science and Ancestral Wisdom

In the flow of our global mobilization, we welcome the marshalling of ancestral wisdom and science towards new solutions in climate governance and climate action, including for preparing now for an unpredictable future. British theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking famously suggested the 21st century to be “the century of complexity.” As an issue pertaining to complex systems, climate change is a clear example of how complexity will increasingly define both risks and opportunities in the decades to come.

Even as we move towards the second quarter of the 21st century, we still rely on hierarchical approaches of the past, based on linear-thinking, for dealing with complex challenges that instead require systems-thinking, decentralization and distributed action. Our climate fight may be suffering from the “Last War Syndrome” – the tendency to confront new crises with outdated strategies, overlooking shifts in science, technology and broader political, economic and social realities. Though most existing governance institutions were designed and developed before global warming became the reality we face today, climate change will increasingly supervene and disrupt political and socioeconomic agendas.

It is high time we started reflecting on how to strengthen global governance to exponentially accelerate the implementation of the Paris Agreement and support the UNFCCC decision- making process and mechanisms through an intergenerational perspective. Climate change demands us to innovate towards new models for new challenges, as past assumptions are fast becoming obsolete in an exponentially changing environment accompanied by exponentially evolving and impactful solutions. Tropical forests and the internet themselves stand out as inspirational cases where complexity and diversity emerge in favor of both dynamism and adaptability.

In parallel to promoting immediate widespread climate action through the “Global Mutirão,” our global mobilization will drive the international community to anticipate coming risks and reflect whether current governance systems – our state and multilateral capacities – are prepared for the serious dangers that science is warning us about. The incoming Presidency invites community leaders, scholars and scientists to explore the best available science and ancestral wisdom around how our institutions can gain exponentiality in deploying solutions and versatility in responding to the unpredictable, including through agile, iterative and adaptive capabilities to address the climate crisis.

Embracing complexity for upgrading cooperation

As many experts have pointed out, the climate challenge requires leaders to make a difference locally by aligning efforts globally. Navigating uncertainties, they need to look ahead to anticipate and implement governance that is sustainable in the longer-term, capable of constant evolution and experimentation. Our global climate cooperation should not only work for the reality of 2025 but also be ready to evolve to respond to those of 2030, 2035 and 2050. Though particularly daunting in such a complex, fast changing and deeply uncertain context, this task is no less imperative.

In embracing complexity, upgraded institutions and poly-governance approaches could resort to experimentalism and scenario planning for channeling systems’ feedback loops, leveraging tipping points and network effects, and engineering self-organization and emergent behaviors

towards systemic resilience and exponential diffusion of solutions, at the same time they address bottlenecks and delays.

Building on the debate launched by President Lula last year during the 2024 G20 and eyeing the longer-term, the international community should investigate how climate cooperation could become better equipped to accelerate the implementation of the Paris Agreement and of COP decisions by aggregating efforts that are currently fragmented. Leaving behind old bureaucratic models that impair speed and scale, debates at the UN General Assembly could explore innovative governance approaches to endow international cooperation with capabilities for rapid sharing of data, knowledge and intelligence, as well as for leveraging networks, aggregating efforts and articulating resources, processes, mechanisms and actors within and outside the UN. Innovations in international cooperation could focus on “alignment” of actors and efforts – which are now dispersed and fragmented –, leaving not only untouched but also reinforced the UNFCCC’s role in climate negotiation, coordination and rule-making in terms of international law.

Without duplicating the UNFCCC, upgraded global governance may additionally combine emerging technologies and ancestral wisdom to introduce a whole new cooperation infrastructure for collective intelligence and exponential results in climate implementation – precisely what we need to win the race against the first climate induced tipping-point. More systemic approaches could also help vulnerable countries in emergency situations, connecting the work of the Santiago network, the Warsaw International Mechanism and the Loss and Damage Fund with Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs), International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and the “Early-Warning for All” (EW4All).

Systems-thinking in climate implementation similarly gives us the possibility of gaining time against global warming in the short-term. In terms of sequence, we can concentrate global efforts on leveraging the role of climate regulators and on promoting massive efforts to remove greenhouse gas (GHG) from the atmosphere. Restoring forests, recovering degraded land in agriculture and enhancing coastal ecosystems can be powerful tools in both removals and resilience, while oceans stand as one of the world’s greatest ally against climate change as its largest “carbon sink.” The incoming presidency looks forward to working closely with Costa Rica and France with a view to the third United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC3, Nice, 9 to 13 June 2025).

Systemic implementation equally favors the integration of different mutually supportive solutions that could emerge as ecosystems of exchange, interaction and symbiosis. Traditional and ancestral knowledge, digital technology and biotechnology can help bridge gaps in speed, scale and resilience in ways that our governance is still slow to incorporate and amplify. As an example of untapped potential, Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), showcased under India’s leadership in the 2023 G20, can be explored as game changing innovations that could receive high-level consideration for subsequent mandate in technical development.

As innovations and technologies move the frontier of mitigation and adaptation, indigenous peoples and traditional communities – including the “peoples of the forests” and quilombolas, in the case of Brazil - demonstrate invaluable knowledge, traditions, and ways of life. They can all help evolve binary and linear mental models that worked for efficiency in the 20th century but can now become a liability in the 21st century – the “century of complexity.”

From Vision to Reality

Amidst growing geopolitical and socioeconomic challenges, the first Global Stocktake (GST), concluded at COP28, acknowledged the significant gaps that continue to hinder our collective climate response. Yet, it also confirmed that the Paris Agreement is working. Through Mission 1.5, we demonstrated unity by our collective determination to accelerate progress and course- correct. From Dubai to Baku, we have upheld our commitment to multilateralism, completing the legal foundations needed to unlock the Paris Agreement’s full potential as the world’s guiding framework for climate implementation.

Looking ahead, COP30 offers a unique opportunity to take the next step forward. Belem will be a significant moment where our shared vision begins to take shape as our new reality. COP30 can lay the foundations for the second Global Stocktake, to be concluded at COP33, serving as an inflection point in our historic transition that closed the gaps and charted the course toward a new era of sustainable and inclusive prosperity.

Let us imagine that, in 2028, the world will look back at 2025 not only as a year of negotiation, but as a moment of global alignment — when governments, communities, business and institutions came together to shift the trajectory of humanity’s relationship with the planet. A year remembered as the dawn of a new cycle of cooperation, innovation, and prosperity worldwide.

André Aranha Corrêa do Lago

COP30 President-Designate