Climate Action
COP30 Hypocrisy: High Expenses Leave Most Impacted Nations Out
November 11, 2025
Opinion
At first glance, it may seem like the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP30, chose a fitting location for its talks. Belém, a large Brazilian city at the mouth of the Amazon River, is near one of the most biodiverse places in the world, and one of the most threatened by climate change. However, shortly after it was chosen, climate change experts worldwide began to question whether selecting this location prioritized symbolic dedication over actual change.
As early as March 12th, 2025, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported that the conference was being used to justify building a road through the Amazon rainforest. While Brazil has denied allegations that this road, called the Avenida Liberdade, was connected to the summit, interviews with government insiders, locals, and a professor of urban studies in the state suggest that it provided the “necessary justification” to move forward after decades of pushback from citizens. The road’s construction has cut down açai trees, harming local harvesters, and built walls around the road (ironic, for a road called “freedom”), dividing forest habitats.
This project is one of several meant to “modernize” the city, in part for the conference. As environmentalists, we might want to protest it, call that kind of justification weak, and argue for an environmentalism more focused on action than image. However, as we do so, it’s essential to understand that Brazil is only following a trend that developed nations expect, even while calling for sustainability.
An Unspoken Pattern…
This brings us to the second criticism of COP30: price. Many hotels in Belém are charging over $1,000 per night for the conference, about 10-20 times their usual price, and four times the usual United Nations rate. And the nations that cannot afford these prices — including Chad, Panama, and island states — are among the most heavily impacted by climate change. Some argue that this choice is intentional, and matches a longstanding effort to exclude “developing,” less wealthy nations from environmental decision-making.
This is not a logistical hiccup. This is insanity and insulting.
Juan Carlos Monterry Gómez, chief climate negotiator of Panama
Delegation size has been one such mode of exclusion. While developed nations (nations with more industrialized economies, higher standards of living, and more robust infrastructure, such as the U.S., most of Europe, and Japan), have increased their delegation size over time, developing countries (nations with less industrialized economies, lower standards of living, and less infrastructure, including large parts of of Africa, Asia, and Latin America) have not, all while the agenda items per conference has increased by 50 and 87 per cent from 1995 to 2023.
While larger delegations can manage this expansion in conference workload, the smaller delegations cannot ensure that they can attend every session. The UNFCCC Trust Fund for Participation, meant to help support developing countries, has been accused by some of being chronically underfunded, and has strict eligibility criteria — for most nations, they must have a GDP of $14,000 U.S. dollars to be eligible. This can leave many nations that might need aid, specifically lower-middle-income ones, and conflicted-affected ones, out.
Travel also prevents equal participation. When Poland hosted COP14, a Pakistani delegate was refused a visa, and many sub-Saharan African delegates struggled to get visas from the three Polish embassies that exist in the region. At COP26, Glasgow’s pandemic-related requirements, including quarantine measures that cost £2,285 per person, meant that some Pacific Island nations had to send fewer than ten people. Just one conference later, at COP27, over a hundred delegates from developing nations trying to attend and to speak in Germany faced visa complications.
Furthermore, since 2009, developing countries pledged to give developing nations $100 billion per year by 2020 to bolster climate action, but according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), only met this target by 2022. And whether the OECD is right about that has been disputed; the European Chair for Sustainable Development and Climate Transition, a research body in Paris, has suggested that it might not have been met that year either.
Nevertheless, according to leaders of developing nations, even the newly revised pledge of $300 billion is not enough to address the devastating effects of climate change on their countries. Delegates from developing countries often face greater challenges to attend these conferences in person, and then find that the powerful nations are not listening when they get there.
…Of Broken Promises
Things came to a head at the last conference, COP29, held in Baku, Azerbaijan. The conference had been criticized prior to its start for its host country’s authoritarian, environmentally unsustainable government, as well as for waging acts of aggression on its neighboring country, Armenia.
During Baku, the LDCs (Least Developed Countries) and AOSIS (Association of Small Island States) entered finance negotiations only to find that the rest of the delegates had drafts of detailed finance plans that they had not received and, perhaps even worse, had not been consulted on. Because of this, and missed fundraising targets, many delegates from developing nations walked out of the conference in frustration.
Now, as COP30 approaches, the exclusionary hotel costs seem to reflect the same ongoing patterns, and potentially a desire not to avoid the critically important conversations — and even protests — that are often a vital part of successful COPs. Brazil bears some responsibility for this, but, given that it is also part of the Global South and was historically colonized, its aim towards modernization also makes sense.
It is a tale as old as time that “modernized,” “developed,” or “First World” countries have had greater decision-making power in international institutions, and can sometimes choose whether they want to acquiesce or ignore countries that do not meet this threshold. But when it comes to the issue of climate change, the hypocrisy of this is that it is these same countries that are most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, and often the least impacted by climate change. From 1820 to 2024, Europe and North America have contributed 60% of emissions, while South America and Africa emitted 3% each.
So, keeping the developing countries out of the room isn’t just wrong, but counterproductive to environmentalism itself: How can we expect to understand and address what climate change is doing to the world if we don’t listen to the people who are most affected? And how do we make progress if we’re unwilling to reckon with our past mistakes?If the world wants to move beyond symbolic gestures and toward real, inclusive action, it can start by supporting projects that empower the very regions being sidelined. Initiatives like EARTHDAY.ORG’sCanopy Tree Project, which helps restore forests and strengthen communities around the world, including the Global South. By strengthening our ties with environmental activists around the world, we can have a diverse group of voices to truly ensure that environmentalism protects the whole planet — not just the few and the powerful.
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