Cop30 live: exclusion zone around conference expanded after protests

12.55pm GMT Participation from industrial agricultural lobbyists at Cop30 is up 71% compared to Cop27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, but has not hit the record high set at the vast Cop28 in Dubai, according to an investigation by Rachel Sherrington from DeSmog and my colleague Nina Lakhani. More than 300 industrial agriculture lobbyists have participated at this year’s UN climate talks taking place in the Brazilian Amazon, where the industry is the leading cause of deforestation, a new investigation has found. The number of lobbyists representing the interests of industrial cattle farming, commodity grains and pesticides is up 14% on last year’s summit in Baku – and larger than the delegation of the world’s 10th largest economy, Canada, which brought 220 delegates to Cop30 in Belém, according to the joint investigation by DeSmog and the Guardian. One in four of the big agriculture lobbyists (77) are participating at Cop30 as part of an official country delegation, with a small subset (six) with privileged access to the UN negotiations where countries are meant to hash out ambitious policies to curtail global climate catastrophe. Agriculture is responsible for a quarter to a third of global emissions and scientists say it will be impossible to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris agreement without radical changes to the way we produce and consume food. Cattle ranching is the biggest driver of deforestation in the Amazon, followed by the industrial production of soy, which is mostly used for animal feed. Scientists have warned that as much as half of the Amazon rainforest could hit a tipping point by 2050 as a result of water stress, land clearance and climate disruption. “More than 300 agribusiness lobbyists occupy the space at Cop30 that should belong to the forest peoples. While they talk about energy transition, they release oil into the Amazon’s basin and privatize rivers like the Tapajós for soy. For us, this is not development, it is violence,” said Vandria Borari of the Borari Kuximawara Indigenous Association of the Alter do Chão territory. You can read more here. Related: More than 300 big agriculture lobbyists have taken part in Cop30, investigation finds 12.35pm GMT A marriage of Indigenous knowledge and mainstream science is essential for the maintenance of a healthy, habitable planet, according to a group of former state leaders, first peoples and influential climatologists at Cop30. The self-styled “Planetary Guardians” also interrupted the planned schedule on Monday to deliver a message to climate summit negotiators that they must do more to phase out fossil fuels and deliver the 1.5C (2.7F) temperature target of the Paris Agreement. The activism of venerable figures from academia, politics and the forest has been encouraged by the organisers of the conference, who have given more space than ever before to those on the intellectual and physical frontline of the climate crisis. Planetary Guardians includes Christian Figueres, Johan Rockstrom, Carlos Nobre and Mary Robinson as well as emeritus members, Jane Goodall and Robert Redford. The group describes itself as an independent collective elevating science to make the concept of planetary boundaries a measurement framework for the world. At Cop30, many of the participants have expanded their reach to collaborate with Indigenous leaders and act as a scientific and moral advisory body for Brazil’s Cop30 presidency. “There will be no peace among humans unless there is peace with nature,” said Juan Manuel Santos, the former president of Colombia who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his role in securing a peace deal with FARC guerillas after half a century of conflict. “My own experience is that nobody has more knowledge and more experience and more effective ideas on how to protect nature than the Indigenous communities… I hope that in the room where they’re negotiating, they hear science and the Indigenous communities. Those two sources of information are absolutely indispensable if we want to save the planet.” He was speaking at the Planetary Science pavilion of the conference alongside the Indigenous leader, shaman and philosopher Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, who spelled out the long struggle his people – who hold the largest Indigenous territory in Brazil – have had to fight to maintain their land and forest. “We, the Indigenous humans, the original inhabitants have been protecting the force of nature for many, many years. We are protecting everything that non-Indigenous society is destroying,” he said. “I think the leaders who come here don’t want to change, but my message to them is this: ‘Respect and cherish our Amazon. Respect our forest, the soul of the forest, the soul of the earth. That’s all that we have.” Scientists at the conference have warned the Earth is approaching – or may even have passed – several dangerous “tipping points” in the planetary system as a result of human emissions from coal, oil, gas and the destruction of forests. Last week, the Science Panel on the Amazon released the most comprehensive scientific analysis ever conducted on the South American region, which revealed the world’s largest tropical forest was losing its globally important function as a regulator of water, temperature and carbon due to human pressure from land-grabbing, mining, logging and rising temperatures. “Maintaining ecological and sociocultural connections is critical not only for safeguarding the Amazon but also for addressing the global climate crisis,” warned Brazilian climate scientist Carlos Nobre. “But we are on the edge of the point of no return in the Amazon.” Kopenawa has previously warned in his own way of tipping points with the publication of a book, The Falling Sky, with anthropologist Bruce Albert. He welcomed the opportunity to talk beside other planetary guardians, whom he described as “influential warriors,” but he was grimly realistic about the prospect of anyone acting on his words. He told The Guardian he had been talking about the threats to the forest for more than thirty years without being listened to and he did not expect the first climate summit in the Amazon to be any different: “ I don’t believe Cop30 will bring something for forest peoples that will be respected. They’re not going to say to us that no one is going to destroy, no one is going to mine on Indigenous land, no one is going to build roads on Indigenous land. They will continue attacking us, continue threatening the land, threatening our forest. They are used to doing evil.” Updated at 12.39pm GMT 12.13pm GMT Hello, Ajit Niranjan here from Berlin - I’ll be hosting the liveblog this morning and my colleague Gabrielle Canon will take over this afternoon. We’re looking forward to bringing you the latest from the Cop30 climate summit. 12.13pm GMT Exclusion zone around conference expanded after protests Walking on to Belém’s Parque da Cidade, the site of Cop30, yesterday morning revealed the extent to which the so-called “Indigenous Cop” has become a zone of exclusion for the very Indigenous people it is celebrating. Soldiers and militarised police lined up to form human roadblocks, filtering access to the UN climate summit. The closer you got towards the summit, the more heavily armed they became, until those closest to the venue carried shotguns and wore bandoliers of tear gas canisters. Throughout the day military helicopters buzzed ominously overhead. Cop30 is the first in four years to be held in a democracy, but civil society groups’ hopes of being able to exercise their rights to the civic space have been increasingly disappointed. Inside the tightly secured “blue zone”, where conference negotiations take place, the only permitted expressions of dissent were small demonstrations numbering no more than a few dozen youths politely chanting for an end to planet-killing industrialised ecocide. And if the first Cop in four years to take place in a democracy seemed depressingly repressive business as usual on the civic space front, on the negotiations front things seemed little better. A key issue at Cop30 – as at all recent Cops – is the issue of who pays. Under article 9.1 of the Paris agreement, the basis for the past decade of climate negotiation, developed countries have an obligation to provide climate finance to developing countries based on their historical responsibility for carbon emissions. This is the money that developing countries need to adapt to a rapidly warming world, and it is the money they need to respond to the climate-related disasters that it is bringing. Developing countries want this money provided publicly by the global north. A major demand is for Cop30 to adopt a clear plan for the provision of finance implementation, including a formal process to track the progress of article 9.1. Developed countries, particularly the UK, EU, Canada, Australia and Switzerland, have refused to engage meaningfully, say representatives of the global south. The UK is key to unlocking this process, with Ed Miliband, the UK government’s energy and climate chance secretary, chairing the summit’s finance consultation, alongside his counterpart from the Kenyan government. “If you can get an outcome on finance, it will unlock everything,” said Asad Rehman, chief executive of Friends of the Earth England, Wales and Northern Ireland, on the sidelines of the Cop30 negotiations on Monday. But in common with their counterparts in the developed world, the UK government is apparently averse to any outcome that will create new commitments that could prove politically difficult domestically. “There has been no progress on finance. They simply don’t want to talk about how the provision of finance is being implemented,” said Meena Raman, head of programmes at Third World Network. “If we are at an ‘implementation Cop’, then money must be the central topic.” The UK is also the main barrier to the much touted Belém Action Mechanism (Bam), the just transition framework that last week won the support of the G77 and China, collectively representing about 80% of the world’s population. These positions expose the UK, which has in recent years presented itself as among the most ambitious of the wealthier nations when it comes to climate, as well as other European countries that have represented themselves as progressive on climate issues. “This is the first Cop that the US aren’t here poisoning the process,” said Rehman. “Now will the UK show climate leadership?” Updated at 12.14pm GMT