The invitation to COP 30 in Belem, Brazil, in the heart of Amazon rainforest, calls for a leap in quality in the mass struggle, the only way to unlock the ecological, social, anti-imperialist, ecosocialist battles.
Social, environmental, and anti-imperialist movements everywhere face the challenge of organizing themselves as a global movement against capitalism's destruction of the climate and the biosphere. Fossil interests have hijacked the COPs, the biodiversity COPs are ravaged, and 15 million km2 of land has already been desertified or degraded, now at the rate of 1 million km2 per year. 2024 was the hottest year in 120,000 years, with an increase of 3.6 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere (the highest ever recorded in one year, 425.38 ppm) and temperatures 1. 5°Chigher than in the pre-industrial period. Without radical changes, we will undoubtedly exceed a warming of 2ºC before 2050. We are thus seeing the failure of the treaties signed in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro against climate destabilization, biodiversity loss, and desertification, of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which sought to limit global warming to 1.5oC, and of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, adopted in the same year.
Political dynamics exacerbate the catastrophic environmental scenario. Nationalist conservatism, religious fundamentalism, and neo-fascism are advancing through polarisation against the globalist order. The post-2008 economy is witnessing simultaneous processes of reaffirmation and radicalization of neoliberal orthodoxy and the growth of protectionism; the pandemic crisis, itself the result of an imbalance in the metabolism between society and nature, has had a profound disorganizing effect on global production chains. Big corporations and powers are doubling down on technological innovation - digital technologies that demand absurd amounts of energy, such as artificial intelligence, and irrational carbon sequestration technologies, a justification for maintaining the fossilist status quo. Geopolitical dislocations intensify disputes between imperialisms and sub-imperialisms and generate devastating wars; military spending skyrockets everywhere. The voracious pressures of the world economy are multiplying, and on the periphery of the system, neo-extractivist and neo-colonial demands are forming sacrifice zones for peoples and territories. They want to privatize everything and consider only global finance interests in international environmental policies through the creation of 'carbon markets.' None of this contributes to tackling environmental crises; even the previously agreed 'energy transition' policies have proved very fragile.
Now, with the election of Trump, racism, xenophobia, and intolerance have joined fossilism and science denialism in dictating policy in the heart of capitalism. The new US government is already threatening to promote 'big stick' territorial annexations, indicating that it will act as a state 'outside the law,' contrary to the international legal order that Washington established after World War II. Trump has once again withdrawn the US from the climate accords, is fighting energy transition proposals, and is promising the unlimited expansion of fossil fuel extraction. In the fight against contemporary forms of fascism, the more classic anti-imperialist struggle is becoming inseparable from the environmental struggles.
High-profile disasters are multiplying yearly: Derna in Libya, Porto Alegre in Brazil, and Valencia in Spain are the most recent examples. The most significant impact, however, is on rural populations and the outskirts of large cities, on the poor, women, children and the elderly, racialized populations, and the most vulnerable... Air pollution is the second leading cause of death in the world, claiming the lives of more than 8 million people every year. Although little covered in the press, the great drought that hit the Amazon in 2023/24 has had lasting impacts on the whole of humanity, bringing this strategic biome of the Earth System, already weakened by deforestation, closer to its tipping point, at which point the forest collapses. Some leading climate scientists have labeled their report on the state of the climate for 2024 'Dangerous times on Planet Earth.' We can only reaffirm their severe diagnoses and warnings!
The informed sectors of the population know that the 'system' is sowing storms; the critical sectors understand that the culprit has a name: capitalism. Competition for accumulation, greed for profit at any cost, and the law of value have reached a scale where it has become incompatible with respect for the times of life and the limits of the planet's natural systems. Green capitalism is impossible. Free markets and governments corrupted by business have brought us to this disaster. Contemporary anti-capitalism also has a name: ecosocialism. There is no future for civilization and the Earth's biosphere without meeting socio-environmental struggles with a new form of the socialist organization of humanity. Advancing this project requires regaining the political independence of the exploited and oppressed and welding social, environmental, and anti-imperialist struggles to new levels of coherence, organization, and globalization.
COP 30 in Belem in November offers a unique opportunity for this. The event will occur in Brazil under the Lula government and in the more considerable capital in the Amazon rainforest. Brazil's social movements are already collaborating to organize a People's Summit ahead of and parallel to COP 30. There is a huge lack of open and unified spaces for all social movements to meet and express themselves (as the World Social Forums were), and this aspiration is being channeled toward Belém.
The conditions are particularly favorable. The Amazon is the only region with a regular tradition of organizing Pan-Amazonian Social Forums every two years; the 10th FOSPA in 2022 was in Belém, and the 11th in 2024 was in Rurrenabaque, Bolivia. Together with the World Assembly for the Amazon (AMA), the Panamazon Ecclesiastical Network (REPAM), and the Coordination of Indigenous Organisations of the Amazon Basin (COICA), the FOSPAs have nurtured a supranational dynamic of meetings of Indigenous and social movements in the region, building relationships of trust, a radical common agenda to combat extractivism and the violence that accompanies it. And they forged links with the global climate movement.
In June 2024, the XI FOSPA produced 'A Call from the Amazon to Build an Agreement for Life in the Face of Climate and Ecological Collapse,' which starts from the classic slogan of the climate movement, 'Change the capitalist system, not the climate,' to call for the constitution, around a ten-point platform, of a global coalition in defense of climate and life. This coalition had already met in Belem in August 2023 at the Panamazon Summit of presidents and met again in Yasuni, Peru, in August 2024, during the COP16 on biodiversity, in Cali, Colombia, in October, and in Rio de Janeiro in November, when tropical forest movements produced an agreement proposal. They scheduled an international seminar to outline the final path towards Belém, for São Paulo at the end of May 2025. In addition, the 1st Latin American Ecosocialist Meeting (held in conjunction with the 6th International Ecosocialist Meeting), which met in Buenos Aires in May, has set its next meeting point in Belém in the days leading up to COP 30. In an autonomous space in Belém, we will endeavor to express the Peoples' Summit, the social and political conflict, and the articulation initiatives needed to rebuild a powerful global climate movement.
The open space for social movements in Belem is also an opportunity to promote another strategic initiative, a dynamic of antifascist meetings, now made more urgent by the inauguration of the Trump administration and its reactionary nationalist policies. The climate catastrophe that destroyed Porto Alegre and its state, Rio Grande do Sul, postponed the First Antifascist Conference, planned to take place in May 2024 in that Southern Brazilian capital. But its need is greater than ever. Holding it this year would disperse forces that should converge in the convocation in Belém. But we should use Belem to organize a pre-meeting to leverage the first International Antifascist Conference, maybe for the first half 2026.
Regarding COP 30, there is no question of having any illusions about what the international negotiations between states will produce in the current scenario. Trump's victories in the US and the growth of the far right in the European Union fossilism reinforced fossilism. So, an agreement that updates national emissions targets or requalifies the climate negotiations process (increasingly perceived as inseparable from those on biodiversity and desertification). The initial challenge for workers' movements and popular sectors is to converge socio-environmental struggles into an international movement capable of building confrontations of a higher quality.
We must not minimize the difficulties that await us. Belém is not Porto Alegre, and COP 30 is not a World Social Forum. The city is one of Brazil's state capitals with the most precarious urban infrastructure. The Brazilian government had already blocked the hotels for COP 30. Lula has appointed Ambassador André Corrêa do Lago, a veteran climate negotiator, as COP president. The adverse correlation of forces in the Brazilian federal executive - where agribusiness, fossilism, and extractivism have a decisive influence - will constrain us. The federal administration, Pará state government, and Belém municipality are aligned and signaled that they will seek to reduce social participation during the COP event. But we're not setting impossible goals: Belém already hosted a WSF in 2009 with over a hundred thousand participants. The social movements of Belém and Panamazonia will welcome those who come to show solidarity with their struggles, which are strategic for the whole world.
Fourth International militants in Brazil, working in their different organizations, must converge their efforts and, in harmony with those in other countries, make it possible for Belém to be an open space for movements, political exchanges, and the organization of campaigns. We must concretizeour Manifesto of Revolutionary Marxism in the Age of Capitalist Ecological and Social Destruction. The invitation to Belem calls for a leap in quality in the mass struggle, the only way to unlock the ecological, social, anti imperialist, ecosocialist struggle!
28 February 2025
Approved by the World Congress