Referred to as “the people’s COP” by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, COP30, hosted in Belém on the edge of the Amazon, was meant to center climate justice, ecological protection, as well as the voices of the Global South. However, the conference’s emphasis on Amazonian visibility and inclusivity, was potentially overshowed by controversy. Primarily, COP30 further highlighted the challenging contradiction that has been at the heart of, and debates on international climate diplomacy. The controversy concerns the substantial environmental footprint that is often associated with assembling together tens of thousands of participants from across the globe. In our paper “Floating at COP30: exclusivity and the carbon cost of travel and accommodation in Belém”, we explore this tension by investigating travel and accommodation-related emissions of delegates from the UK that attended the summit in Belém and critically reflect on the wider logistical challenges that emerged around access, inclusion, conference scale, and infrastructure.

As previously established in earlier papers in this series on the carbon cost of travel to COPs, aviation remains by far the largest contributor to emissions from summits. However, the use of cruise ships in Belém introduced a new layer of emissions associated with the infrastructure required to sustain a “mega-COP”. What we find most curious about COP30 associated emissions is not simply the numbers themselves, but what these numbers reveal about the future of international climate negotiations. COP30 underscored the ways conference location, accessibility, and scale are becoming increasingly difficult to separate from critical issues of climate justice and inclusivity. The decision to host the conference in the Amazon carried immense political and symbolic significance, yet the practical realities of constricted international connectivity and accommodation capacity created significant challenges for delegates, especially those who had to travel from geographically distant locations. The cruise ships utilised for accommodation in Belém is a visible representation of these tensions – not because they dominated total emissions, but rather because they are illustrative of the lengths required to conduct conferences now attended by tens of thousands of participants.

Broadly, COP30 raises critical questions about whether future climate conferences should become smaller, be more regionally distributed, and increasingly hybrid in format.

We have chosen to publish this paper in UCL Open: Environment because the journal encourages interdisciplinary conversations that link environmental analysis to broader debates on policy, governance, and justice. We hope that this paper contributes to the growing conversation on the carbon costs of climate conferences, as well as the ways international climate diplomacy itself has to evolve in a warming world.

Floating at COP30: exclusivity and the carbon cost of travel and accommodation in Belém by Joffrey Doma (University College London, UK), Simon Chin-Yee (University College London, UK), Priti Parikh (University College London, UK) and Jonathan Barnsley (University College London, UK) is part of the UCL Open Environment series, UNFCCC/COP and published in UCL Open Environment volume 8.

climate change COP30 emissions carbon footprint cruise ships accommodation Belém conference transport travel