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This year, I will not attend COP30. After 15 years of negotiations, which I began following in 2009 at COP15 in Copenhagen, I will have to give up covering the work of implementing the Paris Agreement ten years after its signing. Fewer than 100 days from the UN climate talks, now at their 30th session, it is still impossible to find accommodation for less than 300 euros a night. Not luxury hotels, but simple, basic rooms.

No medium-sized news outlet can afford such prices (and even the big players are struggling to find anything defensible), and I have no intention of using our magazine’s resources to enrich a local property or hotel baron in Belém.

The UN summit, scheduled for November in Brazil, was meant to mark a turning point in a moment of profound crisis for multilateralism, bringing together world leaders, diplomats, and some 50,000 other participants in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. Now, the event risks being defined by an impending logistical fiasco that will weigh heavily on the negotiation and geopolitical process itself.

Lula, the Brazilian government and even the skilled chief negotiator and COP30 president, André Corrêa do Lago, have made a grave mistake in choosing the summit’s location, and now they do not want to open a political crisis with the government of Pará state, of which Belém is the capital, and which is counting heavily on the event to fill its coffers. According to do Lago, “the issue of accommodation has become a political issue”, as he told journalists at the beginning of August. Of course, in these cases, one must adapt. But if the prices of flights and hotels are prohibitive, the only choice is to renounce. A choice, unfortunately, forced upon many members of civil society, the press, and even the negotiating delegations.

“A reduction in the number of delegates would undermine the very legitimacy of any result negotiated in Belém, handing countries keen to weaken the Paris Agreement the perfect excuse to derail the talks,” notes the Observatório do Clima. An empty COP would be an extraordinary blow, and a precious opportunity squandered for humanity, at a time when we have only five years left to keep the climate Agreement's temperature target alive. More than the United States' reckless abandonment of the COP.

For now, the government stubbornly refuses to move COP30 to Rio de Janeiro, in particular to the vast Rio Centro, where the key Rio+20 summit was held in 2012, which led to the creation of the SDGs. “There will be no alternative venue, since COP30 will not be moved from Belém,” reads a government letter in response to the concerns raised by many delegations, because the host city “already has a sufficient number of beds to accommodate all expected participants”.

As of 8 August, Bloomberg reports, organisers claimed to have identified 53,000 beds in Belém and its surrounding areas: 14,547 in hotels, 6,000 on two cruise ships, 10,004 in holiday rentals through real estate agencies, and 22,452 via Airbnb. The government says further options will be added to the official booking platforms BNetwork and Qualitours. But the real problem is the cost. There are penny-ante rooms in one-star guesthouses that are sold at prices higher than five-star hotels in New York during the United Nations General Assembly, which will open on the 9th of September (an event that Renewable Matter will be attending).

The only action taken so far is to offer special reduced-rate deals for delegations from small islands and poorer countries – categories that include over a third of UN members – with 15 single rooms per delegation available at prices ranging from 100 and 200 dollars per night. The remaining countries are guaranteed 10 single rooms per delegation, with prices ranging from 200 to 600 dollars.

Then there are the two cruise ships, Costa Diadema and MSC Seaview, which will be converted into floating hotels and docked at Outeiro port, each hosting around 3,000 guests. Yet for negotiators, this will prove an inconvenience, as the ships are 20 kilometres from the COP venue and traffic will be insane during the summit (one only has to recall the logistical chaos in the much larger city of Rio de Janeiro during the 2012 UN summit, when it took up to 180 minutes to reach the city centre).

This was meant to be the “People’s COP”, popular and inclusive. Now it risks becoming the most exclusive and chaotic COP in history, given that even local transport is totally inadequate. Lula and Marina Silva are left with only one option: move the event to Rio de Janeiro, citing the overwhelming number of accreditation requests. Or take responsibility for the risk of failure, equal to that of COP15 in Denmark.

Cover: photo by Maria Fernanda Pissioli, Unsplash