Leadership Spotlight 💡CLI Fellow Daela Taeoalii-Tipton shares their experience at COP30 Brazil!

Daela (they/them) attended the United Nation’s annual climate conference, also known as COP30, in Belém, Brazil last month. They were present with a coalition of hundreds of other non-governmental environmental organizations from around the world pushing global leaders for more ambitious climate action. Though the Trump administration was notably absent, the other 194 countries present still struggled to agree on much-needed progress toward phasing out fossil fuels, the primary driver of climate change. Nevertheless, there was an important breakthrough in Brazil with the creation of a new mechanism explicitly intended to center human rights, labor rights, the rights of Indigenous peoples and Afro-decendants in the Just Transition to a clean energy future.

“It’s difficult knowing that while some countries like Saudi Arabia choose to haggle over commas in an effort to obstruct progress and keep getting rich off of fossil fuels, others like the Marshall Islands are quite literally fighting for the right of their islands to exist above sea level,” says Daela. “Resisting such intergenerational injustice is why we must return year after year. The true power of COP isn’t hidden away in a handful of negotiating rooms — it’s palpable among the tens of thousands of people present and determined to advocate for their communities around the world already suffering the consequences of the climate crisis. We may not have gotten everything we wanted, nor certainly everything we needed, but we did see meaningful progress for justice.” 

Feel free to reach out to Daela at dtaeoaliitipton[at]ucs.org to learn more!