The 30th round of COP was another disappointment in the road to feminist climate justice. The COP of truth failed to be true in any shape or form. Honestly speaking, none of the presented governments or institutions provided an answer to an urgent question: How many times would the frontline communities pay for the climate crisis?
COP30 was branded as the “Indigenous COP,” held in Belém, the gateway to the Amazon. Yet beneath this rhetoric of inclusion lay a profound structural failure that reveals how the climate finance mechanisms negotiated under UNFCCC are reproducing colonial extractive relationships, and how a feminist approach to climate justice is systematically undermined at every level.
Counting the Payments
The first payment was a fake financial mechanism reproducing a new debt cycle titled the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF). It was presented through a lexicon of financial innovation: “forest bonds,” “conservation payments,” “investor returns.” The mechanism, however, revealed a circular logic of extraction. The TFFF aims to mobilize $125 billion; $25 billion from governments and philanthropies as “junior capital,” leveraged to raise $100 billion from private investors.1 These combined funds would be invested primarily in emerging market and sovereign bonds, with interest returns funding forest conservation payments of approximately $4 billion annually.2
The fundamental contradiction: the funds are reinvested mainly in emerging country assets, including bonds from countries that need to offer high interest rates to attract investors.3 Forest-rich nations would effectively suffer from debt to create a financial asset (bond issuance cost); the interest paid on that debt would partially fund their own conservation labor. The communities performing the actual work of defense and stewardship (predominantly women) became the unwitting foundation for a speculative instrument. The value of their labor was financialized, while the underlying power structure; agribusiness, fossil fuels, consumption patterns remained unchallenged. This presents a fundamental contradiction: Can a mechanism that profits from debt and derives value from unpaid care work ever deliver justice, or does it merely commodify the crisis?
Second, the spatial payment. During the Bonn intersessions, indigenous representatives were talking about the creation of a fenced zone led by the Ministry of Indigenous People. We laughed about it as if it’s a bad joke why would we fence the indigenous people if we claim we are traveling that far for them? Till the night of the 19th when I visited the Aldeia COP, or the “Indigenous Village,” which felt like a form of sanctioned containment, a refugee camp. And if a friend had never told me about it when I was furious; where are the Indigenous voices, in our actions, in the rooms, even in the hallways? they took me to see them. All of us were kicked out at 10 PM because the place closes. This dedicated zone on the periphery, behind a fence, with a curfew for its residents a non-incidental spatial design to ensure participation without power. The Blue Zone, where texts were drafted, remained the sanctum of technical negotiation. The Aldeia became the curated display of indigeneity a place to be observed, photographed, and then left behind when the real decisions were made elsewhere.4 Over 3,000 Indigenous peoples who gathered in Belém, only 360 secured passes to the Blue Zone, compared to 1,600 delegates linked to the fossil fuel industry.5 This raises a stark question: When inclusion is designed as segregation, what does it mean to be a participant? The geography itself answered: your presence is valued as a symbol, but must be neutralized as a political force.
The third payment was bodily. The protest aimed to take place on the 20th of November at the entrance of the Blue Zone, with the key message of: “No to Imposing International Guardianship Mechanisms; A collective denunciation of the UN and intergovernmental bodies’ failure to stop genocide, war, famine, siege, and militarized extraction.” It was met with a new demarcation of restricted action zones (RED ZONES). When we informed the local authorities of our plan to include indigenous folks in the action to highlight how the struggles are shared, to voice our anger, and to show how within the halls of COP our brothers and sisters were not allowed to participate, the local authorities redrew their boundaries of restricted zones to make sure no action would take place, no voice would be heard, and to ensure that the message is clear: military is leading this COP.
And this was not the first time. On the first Friday of COP30, approximately 100 Indigenous protesters from the Munduruku people blocked the main entrance to the Blue Zone for 90 minutes, demanding meetings with President Lula and an end to extractive projects threatening their territories.6 Brazilian military personnel in riot gear kept demonstrators from entering, while other activists formed human chains in solidarity.7
The performative welcome collided with the operational reality: the body of the protester is a threat to the process. This was ensured by the letter leaked from Simon Stiell (the UNFCCC Executive Secretary) treating indigenous presence as a security threat, asking the COP presidency to ensure safety and security as the delegates are threatened by the presence at the entrance doors. This physical enforcement of boundaries laid bare the hierarchy of participation. Some bodies are granted access to negotiate; others are permitted to perform their identity in a designated area; but those same bodies become subject to control and exclusion when they attempt to transition from symbol to agent.
The last one that I will count will be the linguistic violence that was mirrored in the Mutirão cover decision titled “Global Mutirão: Uniting humanity in a global mobilization against climate change.” The operative text relied on the conditional: “calls upon,” “urges,” “invites.” The binding “shall” was absent. On adaptation finance, the promise to triple funding contained no enforceable specification that it be public, grant-based, or sourced from historical polluters. Most telling was the treatment of gender and human rights. After years of advocacy to embed these principles in operational text, they were relegated once more to the preamble—a place for recognition without obligation. The language of rights was stripped of its power to mandate action. What does it signify when the most robust protections for the most vulnerable are systematically moved from the realm of implementation to the realm of aspiration?
The entire process was framed by the concept of Mutirão (a term meaning collective, reciprocal community action). Yet at COP30, it manifested as its inverse: a global performance of unity that relied on profound division. This leads to the central, unanswered question: How many times must payment be extracted?
The payments are not a series but a system. They are layered and recursive:
- Payment through the financialization of land and labor
- Payment through the dilution of legal obligation into voluntary encouragement
- Payment through the spatial segregation of the very people hailed as central
- Payment through the physical policing of their agency
Each payment reinforces the same structure. The “Indigenous COP” did not fail despite its branding; it revealed the inevitable outcome of that branding. Placing indigeneity at the rhetorical center provided the moral cover to more efficiently manage, contain, and financially exploit it. The fences, the weak verbs, and the bond schemes were not failures of execution, but features of a system designed to manage crisis without disrupting power.
The final, lingering question is one of epistemology. The UNFCCC process validates certain forms of knowledge; technical, financial, diplomatic as legitimate. It frames climate finance as a complex puzzle solvable by experts and instruments. Meanwhile, the knowledge of land defenders, the expertise of care workers, and the lived experience of frontline communities are treated as anecdotal, emotional, or “contextual” to be acknowledged, perhaps, but not to determine outcomes.
This epistemic hierarchy is the base upon which the other payments rest. If the only knowledge that counts is the knowledge of how to structure a bond, then the only solutions permissible will be those that can be structured as a bond. What happens to a crisis when the solutions are forbidden, by the very structure of the discussion, from challenging the logic that created it?
COP30 provided no answers. Instead, it refined the questions into sharper, more urgent forms. The most profound outcome was not in any text, but in the clarity of the contradiction it staged: a gathering for global salvation, meticulously organized to prevent its own realization.
*NB: (AI has been used for language and grammar edits)
- World Resources Institute, “The Tropical Forests Forever Facility Could Finally Finance Nature Conservation,” https://www.wri.org/insights/financing-nature-conservation-tropical-forest-forever-facility
- TFFF Official Website, “About TFFF,” https://tfff.earth/about-tfff/
- Global Witness, “Inside private sector plans to shape the TFFF,” https://globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/forests/banking-on-forests-inside-private-sector-plans-to-shape-the-tropical-forests-forever-facility/
- Cultural Survival, “Despite Record Indigenous Presence at Brazil COP30 Climate Summit Sparks Frustration Over Exclusion,” https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/despite-record-indigenous-presence-brazil-cop30-climate-summit-sparks-frustration-over
- Cultural Survival, “The End of COP30 in Brazil: Indigenous Peoples and Multilateralism,” https://cs.org/news/end-cop30-brazil-indigenous-peoples-and-multilateralism
- JURIST, “Indigenous groups in Brazil protest at COP30,” https://www.jurist.org/news/2025/11/indigenous-groups-in-brazil-protest-at-cop30/
- PBS NewsHour, “‘No one enters, no one leaves.’ Protesters block main entrance to COP30 climate talks in Brazil,” https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/no-one-enters-no-one-leaves-protesters-block-main-entrance-to-cop30-climate-talks-in-brazil