Finland's President Alexander Stubb waves during the COP30 U.N. Climate Summit in Belem, Brazil, on Thursday. (AP photo)

BELEM, Brazil — World leaders who descended on the United Nations annual climate summit in Brazil on Thursday only needed to look out their airplane windows to sense the unfathomable stakes.

Surrounding the coastal city of Belem is an emerald green carpet festooned with winding rivers. But the view also reveals barren plains: Some 17% of the Amazon’s forest cover has vanished in the past 50 years, swallowed up for farmland, logging and mining.

Known as the “lungs of the world” for its capacity to absorb vast quantities of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that warms the planet, the biodiverse Amazon rainforest has been choked by wildfires and cleared by cattle ranching.

Here on the edge of the world’s largest remaining rainforest Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva hopes to convince world powers to mobilize enough funds to halt the ongoing destruction of climate-stabilizing tropical rainforests in danger around the world and advance the many unmet promises laid out at previous meetings.

But they’ll have to overcome reduced participation from the planet’s three biggest polluters. The leaders of China, the United States and India will be notably absent from a gathering of heads of state over the next two days. The formal U.N. climate talks begin next week at the Conference of Parties, known as COP30.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres opened Thursday’s gathering with harsh words for world powers who he said “remain captive to the fossil fuel interests, rather than protecting the public interest.”

Guterres said allowing global warming to exceed the key benchmark of 2.7 Fahrenheit – as laid out in the Paris Agreement – represented a “moral failure and deadly negligence.”

“Even a temporary overshoot will have dramatic consequences,” Guterres warned. “Every fraction of a degree higher means more hunger, displacement and loss.”

Absence of U.S. looms

U.S. President Donald Trump, who calls climate change a hoax and withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate accords the same day he entered office, won’t send any senior officials. China will send its deputy prime minister, Ding Xuexiang.

That leaves the rest of the summit’s leaders — including U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron — to confront not only the consequences of an intensifying global climate crisis but a daunting set of political challenges.

Advocates and diplomats have raised concerns that the absence of the U.S. — which has at times played a key role in convincing China to restrain carbon emissions and securing finance for poor countries — could signal a more global retreat from climate politics.

In a rousing speech, Lula warned the that “window of opportunity we have to act is rapidly closing and said there was “no greater symbol of the environmental cause” than the Amazon rainforest.

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