World leaders warned on Thursday that time is running short for urgent and decisive action to prevent the worst effects of climate change, and blasted the US for its retreat from those efforts, as they gathered at the edge of the Amazon rainforest for the annual United Nations climate summit.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres opened a gathering of heads of state in Belem, Brazil, with harsh words for world powers who he said “remain captive to the fossil fuel interests, rather than protecting the public interest”.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Prince William in Balem.Credit: Getty Images
Guterres said allowing global warming to exceed the key benchmark of 1.5 degrees, laid out in the Paris Agreement, would represent a “moral failure and deadly negligence”.
“Even a temporary overshoot will have dramatic consequences … every fraction of a degree higher means more hunger, displacement and loss,” he said.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva sought to mobilise funds from world powers to halt the ongoing destruction of tropical rainforests and advance the many unmet promises made at previous summits.
The Amazon rainforest has been under great threat in recent years through deforestation, mining, infrastructural development and exploitation of other natural resources.
In a rousing speech, Lula warned that the “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.
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.
Seventeen per cent of the Amazon’s forest cover has vanished in the past 50 years, swallowed up for farmland, logging and mining.
The Amazon is one of the world’s most biodiverse regions.Credit: iStock
“It is only right that it is the turn of the Amazonian people to ask what the rest of the world is doing to prevent the collapse of their home,” Lula said.
US President Donald Trump, who calls climate change a hoax and withdrew his country from the Paris climate accords the day he entered office, did not send any senior officials to Belem.
Even American lawmakers struggled to get to Brazil as US airlines cancelled hundreds of flights due to the government shutdown.
“Extremist forces fabricate falsehoods to gain electoral advantage and trap future generations in an outdated model that perpetuates social and economic disparities and environmental degradation,” Lula said, without naming Trump.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro says Donald Trump is wrong for not attending the summit.Credit: AP
Colombian President Gustavo Petro, however, called out Trump directly, saying his absence was “100 per cent wrong”.
“Trump is against humankind,” said Petro, whose feud with his American counterpart escalated recently as Trump accused him of being a drug kingpin and imposed financial sanctions on him and his family.
Leaders spoke as the UN weather agency announced that 2025 was on track to be the second- or third-warmest year ever recorded.
The concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which hit a record high last year, continued to rise in 2025, as did ocean heat and sea levels, the World Meteorological Organisation reported.
AP