COP30 Chief Calls on CEOs to Come to Brazil in Rebuff to Trump
(Bloomberg) -- The head of this year’s United Nations climate summit in Brazil urged CEOs to ignore the Trump-led green backlash and come to the Amazonian city of Belem to step up the fight against global warming.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Andre Correa do Lago, who will oversee the COP30 climate talks in November, sought to allay growing concerns that US President Donald Trump’s use of tariffs and hostility toward green energy sources could undermine the clean power transition. He said that recent attacks on clean energy sources like wind and solar show that the interests of fossil fuel producers are increasingly threatened by the transition to a greener economy.
“The success of this agenda is a challenge to some businesses and some interests,” said Correa do Lago, while calling on the private sector to attend the COP30 summit en masse in order to implement the commitments made by countries. “This is the utmost demonstration that these policies worked or these policies are working and that they are somehow threatening some significant interest.”
Trump’s distaste for climate-progressive policies has reverberated across the business community as he puts a halt to wind projects, slaps countries across the world with tariffs and causes banks to rethink their own climate commitments for fear of running against the ESG backlash. Against such a backdrop, it’s not clear how many executives will make the trip to a climate conference in Brazil.
The dilemma faced by business was recently exemplified when the world’s biggest climate alliance for banks suspended its activities and proposed a vote on scrapping its current structure in the face of a Wall Street exodus that spread globally.
In a letter published Friday, Correa do Lago called on the private sector to take a “step forward, and not back” in order to make the transition an “exponential reality.”
So far, the run-up to COP30 has been overshadowed by logistical issues in the Amazonian city of Belem, with many of the 50,000 participants expected battling a shortage of available accommodation and extremely high prices. It’s an issue that business executives will also have to contend with, and many may choose to focus on side events taking place in the larger cities of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
Correa do Lago said that private sector representatives would face less of an issue in Belem as they’d likely attend the summit for shorter periods than negotiators.
“Obviously the element that unfortunately everybody’s talking about Belem is the difficulty of having rooms,” he said. “But we just want to say very clearly that we need the private sector.”
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