In an open letter released at the Belém Climate Summit, special envoys for strategic regions have expressed their support for the COP30 presidency and for all leaders committed to advancing climate crisis action.

Former New Zealand prime minister Dame Jacinda Ardern, the “voice” for Oceania, was among the seven climate envoys signing the letter.

The document acknowledges the progress achieved through the Paris Agreement and the Dubai Consensus, while underscoring the need for further advances “in light of the Global Stocktake” and warning of the growing challenge posed by climate disinformation.

The text calls for unity and concrete action to bridge the “triple gap” between climate finance, adaptation, and mitigation.

These bottlenecks, it emphasised, could not be resolved solely through revisions to Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), but required tangible policy measures.

The Baku to Belém Roadmap is highlighted as a vehicle for developing innovative solutions to unlock large-scale investments while reducing financing costs.

In addressing the spread of climate disinformation, the special envoys underlined the need for coordinated responses, collective strategies, and reinforced regulatory frameworks.

The letter was signed by Special Envoys Adnan Z. Amin (Middle East), Arunabha Ghosh (South Asia), Carlos Lopes (Africa), Jacinda Ardern (Oceania), Jonathan Pershing (North America), Laurence Tubiana (Europe), and Patricia Espinosa (Latin America and the Caribbean).

The open letter to leaders in Belém and to the COP30 presidency from the special envoys for strategic regions

We, the Special Envoys for our respective regions, wish to express our strong support for the Brazilian Presidency and all leaders committed to climate action at Belém.

COP30 presents both a significant opportunity and a profound challenge. To remain aligned with the ambition of the Paris Agreement amidst an increasingly complex geopolitical environment, we must demonstrate decisive progress. Multilateralism, grounded in international law and guided by the Paris Agreement, remains our most effective framework.

A clear signal from COP30 that the international community stands united in its determination to confront climate change will resonate globally. Our shared commitment to fully implement the Paris Agreement is the strongest collective response to a crisis that is disproportionately affecting vulnerable households and countries, devastating lives, livelihoods, and the ecosystems upon which we all depend.

We should also recognise the progress achieved since the Paris Agreement in 2015. The rapid growth of clean solutions is bending the trajectory of global emissions; where we had been on track to exceed a devastating temperature increase of more than 4°C, we are now able to project a level of less than 2.5°C.

But we need greater progress. We are not on track to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement, and in particular, we are taking insufficient action to keep 1.5°C within reach, or even enough to keep warming well below 2°C. And every tenth of a degree of additional warming will mean harsh consequences for the world.

COP30 must acknowledge and address the “triple gap” in mitigation, adaptation and finance. Doing so requires an accelerated effort across the next decade, mobilising the full range of tools, resources, and partnerships available to us. This is at the heart of the goal of COP30: to advance the full implementation of both the Paris Agreement and the UAE Consensus, informed by the Global Stocktake presented at COP28 in Dubai.

To accelerate progress, we must maintain a laser focus on concrete, coordinated action.

The Action Agenda is a powerful reservoir of those actions, which must be structured, monitored, and supported for effective delivery. Addressing the gap should not be understood solely as revising Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), but rather as translating ambition into policies that enable each country to overperform on its existing commitments. And the policies we take, as has been amply demonstrated in our successes to date, can marry not only climate benefits, but also contribute to growing our economies, promote our national security, improve the welfare of our citizens, and promote a healthy environment.

Tripling global renewable energy capacity is a goal within reach. Collectively, we have the
technology and resources: what is required now is scaled investment in all regions. The Baku to Belém roadmap to mobilise US$1.3 trillion annually for developing countries outlines both established and innovative solutions to deliver investment at scale at reduced costs of finance. To operationalise it, clear milestones, mandates, and responsibilities are needed.

Ministers of finance should take the lead in defining the priorities. Creating fiscal space, minimizing debt burdens, effectively mobilising domestic and international finance, and
ensuring enabling policy environments, alongside increased investment in the Global South,
are all essential to making this roadmap credible and implementable.

Strengthening resilience and adaptation are equally critical. Climate impacts are increasingly a major barrier to sustainable economic and social development. We must work together to define the indicators that do not impose resource-intensive reporting burdens but instead help our economies and societies adapt to their local circumstances and become resilient.

We must engage the insurance sector, central banks, and private investors to close the
protection gap that threatens long-term developmental gains.

Countries pursuing the transition away from fossil fuels should define roadmaps, in line with their national circumstances, while fostering dialogue between producers and buyers of fossil fuels. Roadmaps to end deforestation and restore ecosystems are equally necessary. Taken together, these pathways can allow countries to implement the long-term strategies submitted in previous years.

For the first time, COP30 will also confront the challenge of climate disinformation: a growing threat that undermines public trust and policy implementation. Combatting this challenge requires coordinated approaches, shared strategies, and strengthened regulatory
cooperation. We must shine the spotlight on our collective progress, in general, but also cases in particular where countries have met their climate targets ahead of schedule,
demonstrating a positive bias for action.

Lastly, we need an evolution of the climate regime that makes implementation more effective and inclusive. Progress depends on joining forces with the local authorities, economic sectors, governments, and civil society. Subnational leaders, from governors, to regional authorities, mayors, and community representatives, must be empowered to reinforce and complement NDCs and National Adaptation Plans (NAPs). COP30 is the moment to have them at the table and to craft a new approach that brings all relevant actors together in a global effort to safeguard our common future.

It is the moment to remind ourselves of the need for solidarity, and to recognise our agency — we have it within our power to change the future for the better.

Signed:

Adnan Z. Amin (Special Envoy for Middle East), chair, World Energy Council; CEO of COP28; former director-general, International Renewable Energy Agency

Arunabha Ghosh (Special Envoy for South Asia), founder-CEO, Council on Energy, Environment and Water

Carlos Lopes (Special Envoy for Africa), chair, Africa Climate Foundation; former executive
secretary, UN Economic Commission for Africa

Jacinda Ardern (Special Envoy for Oceania), former Prime Minister of New Zealand

Jonathan Pershing (Special Envoy for North America); former US Special Envoy for Climate Change

Laurence Tubiana (Special Envoy for Europe), dean, Paris Climate School; CEO, European
Climate Foundation; former French Special Envoy for Climate Change

Patricia Espinosa (Special Envoy for Latin America and the Caribbean), former executive
secretary, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The United Nations’ highest court has found that countries can be held legally responsible for their greenhouse gas emissions, in a ruling highly anticipated by Pacific countries long frustrated with the pace of global action to address climate change.

In a landmark opinion delivered yesterday in The Hague, the president of the International Court of Justice, Yuji Iwasawa, said climate change was an “urgent and existential threat” that was “unequivocally” caused by human activity with consequences and effects that crossed borders.

The court’s opinion was the culmination of six years of advocacy and diplomatic manoeuvring which started with a group of Pacific university students in 2019.

They were frustrated at what they saw was a lack of action to address the climate crisis, and saw current mechanisms to address it as woefully inadequate.

Their idea was backed by the government of Vanuatu, which convinced the UN General Assembly to seek the court’s advisory opinion on what countries’ obligations are under international law.

The court’s 15 judges were asked to provide an opinion on two questions: What are countries obliged to do under existing international law to protect the climate and environment, and, second, what are the legal consequences for governments when their acts — or lack of action — have significantly harmed the climate and environment?

Overnight, reading a summary that took nearly two hours to deliver, Iwasawa said states had clear obligations under international law, and that countries — and, by extension, individuals and companies within those countries — were required to curb emissions.

Iwasawa said the environment and human rights obligations set out in international law did indeed apply to climate change.

‘Precondition for human rights’
“The protection of the environment is a precondition for the enjoyment of human rights,” he said, adding that sea-level rise, desertification, drought and natural disasters “may significantly impair certain human rights, including the right to life”.

To reach its conclusion, judges waded through tens of thousands of pages of written submissions and heard two weeks of oral arguments in what the court said was the ICJ’s largest-ever case, with more than 100 countries and international organisations providing testimony.

They also examined the entire corpus of international law — including human rights conventions, the law of the sea, the Paris climate agreement and many others — to determine whether countries have a human rights obligation to address climate change.

Major powers and emitters, like the United States and China, had argued in their testimonies that existing UN agreements, such as the Paris climate accord, were sufficient to address climate change.

But the court found that states’ obligations extended beyond climate treaties, instead to many other areas of international law, such as human rights law, environmental law, and laws around restricting cross-border harm.

Significantly for many Pacific countries, the court also provided an opinion on what would happen if sea levels rose to such a level that some states were lost altogether.

“Once a state is established, the disappearance of one of its constituent elements would not necessarily entail the loss of its statehood.”

READ HERE: The summary of the #ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change. https://t.co/7TWc7ifwfX pic.twitter.com/vVxxwpZpbX

— CIJ_ICJ (@CIJ_ICJ) July 23, 2025

Significant legal weight
The ICJ’s opinion is legally non-binding. But even so, advocates say it carries significant legal and political weight that cannot be ignored, potentially opening the floodgates for climate litigation and claims for compensation or reparations for climate-related loss and damage.

Individuals and groups could bring lawsuits against their own countries for failing to comply with the court’s opinion, and states could also return to the International Court of Justice to hold each other to account.

The opinion would also be a powerful precedent for legislators and judges to call on as they tackle questions related to the climate crisis, and give small countries greater weight in negotiations over future COP agreements and other climate mechanisms.

Outside the court, several dozen climate activists, from both the Netherlands and abroad, had gathered on a square as cyclists and trams rumbled by on the summer afternoon. Among them was Siaosi Vaikune, a Tongan who was among those original students to hatch the idea for the challenge.

“Everyone has been waiting for this moment,” he said. “It’s been six years of campaigning.

“Frontline communities have demanded justice again and again,” Vaikune said. “And this is another step towards that justice.”

“The most pleasing aspect is [the ruling] was so strong in the current context where climate action and policy seems to be going backwards,” Regenvanu told RNZ Pacific.

“It gives such hope to the youth, because they were the ones who pushed this.

“I think it will regenerate an entire new generation of youth activists to push their governments for a better future for themselves.”

Regenvanu said the result showed the power of multilateralism.

“There was a point in time where everyone could compromise to agree to have this case heard here, and then here again, we see the court with the judges from all different countries of the world all unanimously agreeing on such a strong opinion, it gives you hope for multilateralism.”

He said the Pacific now has more leverage in climate negotiations.

“Communities on the ground, who are suffering from sea level rise, losing territory and so on, they know what they want, and we have to provide that,” Regenvanu said.

“Now we know that we can rely on international cooperation because of the obligations that have been declared here to assist them.”

The director of climate change at the Pacific Community (SPC), Coral Pasisi, also said the decision was a strong outcome for Pacific Island nations.

“The acknowledgement that the science is very clear, there is a direct clause between greenhouse gas emissions, global warming and the harm that is causing, particularly the most vulnerable countries.”

She said the health of the environment is closely linked to the health of people, which was acknowledged by the court.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The United States shares the pathologies of all dying empires with their mixture of buffoonery, rampant corruption, military fiascos, economic collapse and savage state repression.

ANALYSIS: By Chris Hedges

The billionaires, Christian fascists, grifters, psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants who have seized control of Congress, the White House and the courts, are cannibalising the machinery of state. These self-inflicted wounds, characteristic of all late empires, will cripple and destroy the tentacles of power. And then, like a house of cards, the empire will collapse.

Blinded by hubris, unable to fathom the empire’s diminishing power, the mandarins in the Trump administration have retreated into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They sputter incoherent absurdities while they usurp the Constitution and replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with threats and loyalty oaths.

Agencies and departments, created and funded by acts of Congress, are going up in smoke.

They are removing government reports and data on climate change and withdrawing
from the Paris Climate Agreement,. They are pulling out of the World Health Organisation.

They are sanctioning officials who work at the International Criminal Court — which issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant over war crimes in Gaza.

They suggested Canada become the 51st state. They have formed a task force to “eradicate anti-Christian bias.” They call for the annexation of Greenland and the seizure of the Panama Canal.

They propose the construction of luxury resorts on the coast of a depopulated Gaza under US control which, if it takes place, would bring down the Arab regimes propped up by the US.

Uttering nonsensical remarks
The rulers of all late empires, including the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero or Charles I, the last Habsburg ruler, are as incoherent as the Mad Hatter, uttering nonsensical remarks, posing unanswerable riddles and reciting word salads of inanities. They, like Donald Trump, are a reflection of the moral, intellectual and physical rot that plague a diseased society.

I spent two years researching and writing about the warped ideologues of those who have now seized power in my book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. Read it while you still can. Seriously.

These Christian fascists, who define the core ideology of the Trump administration, are unapologetic about their hatred for pluralistic, secular democracies. They seek, as they exhaustively detail in numerous “Christian” books and documents such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, to deform the judiciary and legislative branches of government, along with the media and academia, into appendages to a “Christianised” state led by a divinely anointed leader.

They openly admire Nazi apologists such as Rousas John Rushdoony, a supporter of eugenics who argues that education and social welfare should be handed over to the churches and Biblical law must replace the secular legal code, and Nazi party theorists such as Carl Schmitt.

They are avowed racists, misogynists and homophobes. They embrace bizarre conspiracy theories from the white replacement theory to a shadowy monster they call “the woke.” Suffice it to say, they are not grounded in a reality based universe.

Christian fascists come out of a theocratic sect called Dominionism. This sect teaches that American Christians have been mandated to make America a Christian state and an agent of God. Political and intellectual opponents of this militant Biblicalism are condemned as agents of Satan.

“Under Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the 10 Commandments form the basis of our legal system, creationism and ‘Christian values’ form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all,” I noted in my book.

“Labour unions, civil-rights laws and public schools will be abolished. Women will be removed from the workforce to stay at home, and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be denied citizenship. Aside from its proselytising mandate, the federal government will be reduced to the protection of property rights and ‘homeland’ security.”

Chris Hedges talks to Marc Lamont Hill on Up Front on why “democracy doesn’t exist in the United States” today.   Video: Al Jazeera

Comforting to most Americans
The Christian fascists and their billionaire funders, I noted, “speak in terms and phrases that are familiar and comforting to most Americans, but they no longer use words to mean what they meant in the past.”

They commit logocide, killing old definitions and replacing them with new ones. Words — including truth, wisdom, death, liberty, life and love — are deconstructed and assigned diametrically opposed meanings.Life and death, for example, mean life in Christ or death to Christ, a signal of belief of unbelief. Wisdom refers to the level of commitment and obedience to the doctrine.

Liberty is not about freedom, but the liberty that comes from following Jesus Christ and being liberated from the dictates of secularism. Love is twisted to mean an unquestioned obedience to those, such as Trump, who claim to speak and act for God.As the death spiral accelerates, phantom enemies, domestic and foreign, will be blamed for the demise, persecuted and slated for obliteration.

Once the wreckage is complete, ensuring the immiseration of the citizenry, a breakdown in public services and engendering an inchoate rage, only the blunt instrument of state violence will remain. A lot of people will suffer, especially as the climate crisis inflicts with greater and greater intensity its lethal retribution.

The near-collapse of our constitutional system of checks and balances took place long before the arrival of Trump. Trump’s return to power represents the death rattle of the Pax Americana. The day is not far off when, like the Roman Senate in 27 BC, Congress will take its last significant vote and surrender power to a dictator. The Democratic Party, whose strategy seems to be to do nothing and hope Trump implodes, have already acquiesced to the inevitable.

The question is not whether we go down, but how many millions of innocents we will take with us. Given the industrial violence our empire wields, it could be a lot, especially if those in charge decide to reach for the nukes.

The dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) — Elon Musk claims is run by “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America” — is an example of how these arsonists are clueless about how empires function.

Foreign aid is not benevolent. It is weaponised to maintain primacy over the United Nations and remove governments the empire deems hostile. Those nations in the UN and other multilateral organisations who vote the way the empire demands, who surrender their sovereignty to global corporations and the US military, receive assistance. Those who don’t do not.

Building infrastructure projects
When the US offered to build the airport in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, investigative journalist Matt Kennard reports, it required that Haiti oppose Cuba’s admittance into the Organisation of American States, which it did.

Foreign aid builds infrastructure projects so corporations can operate global sweatshops and extract resources. It funds “democracy promotion” and “judicial reform” that thwart the aspirations of political leaders and governments that seek to remain independent from the grip of the empire.

USAID, for example, paid for a “political party reform project” that was designed
“as a counterweight” to the “radical” Movement Toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo) and sought to prevent socialists like Evo Morales from being elected in Bolivia. It then funded organisations and initiatives, including training programmes so Bolivian youth could be taught the American business practices, once Morales assumed the presidency, to weaken his hold on power.

Kennard in his book, The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire, documents
how US institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank, USAID and the Drug Enforcement Administration, work in tandem with the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency to subjugate and oppress the Global South.

Client states that receive aid must break unions, impose austerity measures, keep wages low and maintain puppet governments. The heavily funded aid programmes, designed to bring down Morales, eventually led the Bolivian president to throw USAID out of the country.

The lie peddled to the public is that this aid benefits both the needy overseas and us at home. But the inequality these programmes facilitate abroad replicates the inequality imposed domestically. The wealth extracted from the Global South is not equitably distributed. It ends up in the hands of the billionaire class, often stashed in overseas bank accounts to avoid taxation.

Our US tax dollars, meanwhile, disproportionately funds the military, which is the iron fist that sustains the system of exploitation. The 30 million Americans who were victims of mass layoffs and deindustrialisation lost their jobs to workers in sweatshops overseas. As Kennard notes, both home and abroad, it is a vast “transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich globally and domestically”.

Legitimises theft at home
“The same people that devise the myths about what we do abroad have also built up a similar ideological system that legitimises theft at home; theft from the poorest, by the richest,” he writes. “The poor and working people of Harlem have more in common with the poor and working people of Haiti than they do with their elites, but this has to be obscured for the racket to work.”

Foreign aid maintains sweatshops or “special economic zones” in countries such as Haiti, where workers toil for pennies an hour and often in unsafe conditions for global corporations.

“One of the facets of special economic zones, and one of the incentives for corporations in the US, is that special economic zones have even less regulations than the national state on how you can treat labour and taxes and customs,” Kennard told me in an interview.

“You open these sweatshops in the special economic zones. You pay the workers a pittance. You get all the resources out without having to pay customs or tax. The state in Mexico or Haiti or wherever it is, where they’re offshoring this production, doesn’t benefit at all. That’s by design. The coffers of the state are always the ones that never get increased. It’s the corporations that benefit.”

These same US institutions and mechanisms of control, Kennard writes in his book, were employed to sabotage the electoral campaign of Jeremy Corbyn, a fierce critic of the US empire, for prime minister in Britain.

The US disbursed nearly $72 billion in foreign aid in fiscal year 2023. It funded clean water initiatives, HIV/Aids treatments, energy security and anti-corruption work. In 2024, it provided 42 percent of all humanitarian aid tracked by the United Nations.

Humanitarian aid, often described as “soft power,” is designed to mask the theft of resources in the Global South by US corporations, the expansion of the footprint of the US military, the rigid control of foreign governments, the devastation caused by fossil fuel extraction, the systemic abuse of workers in global sweatshops and the poisoning of child labourers in places like the Congo, where they are used to mine lithium.

https://t.co/FLgNuVBwaT

— Chris Hedges (@ChrisLynnHedges) February 7, 2025

The demise of American power
I doubt Musk and his army of young minions in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — which isn’t an official department within the federal government — have any idea about how the organisations they are destroying work, why they exist or what it will mean for the demise of American power.

The seizure of government personnel records and classified material, the effort to terminate hundreds of millions of dollars worth of government contracts — mostly those which relate to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), the offers of buyouts to “drain the swamp” including a buyout offer to the entire workforce of the Central Intelligence Agency — now temporarily blocked by a judge — the firing of 17 or 18 inspectors generals
and federal prosecutors, the halting of government funding and grants, sees them cannibalise the leviathan they worship.

They plan to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education
and the US Postal Service, part of the internal machinery of the empire. The more dysfunctional the state becomes, the more it creates a business opportunity for predatory corporations and private equity firms. These billionaires will make a fortune “harvesting” the remains of the empire. But they are ultimately slaying the beast that created American wealth and power.

Once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, something the dismantling of the empire guarantees, the US will be unable to pay for its huge deficits by selling Treasury bonds. The American economy will fall into a devastating depression. This will trigger a breakdown of civil society, soaring prices, especially for imported products, stagnant wages and high unemployment rates.

The funding of at least 750 overseas military bases and our bloated military will become impossible to sustain. The empire will instantly contract. It will become a shadow of itself. Hypernationalism, fueled by an inchoate rage and widespread despair, will morph into a hate-filled American fascism.

Relentless hunt for plunder, profit
“The demise of the United States as the preeminent global power could come far more quickly than anyone imagines,” the historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power:

Despite the aura of omnipotence empires often project, most are surprisingly fragile, lacking the inherent strength of even a modest nation-state. Indeed, a glance at their history should remind us that the greatest of them are susceptible to collapse from diverse causes, with fiscal pressures usually a prime factor. For the better part of two centuries, the security and prosperity of the homeland has been the main objective for most stable states, making foreign or imperial adventures an expendable option, usually allocated no more than 5 percent of the domestic budget. Without the financing that arises almost organically inside a sovereign nation, empires are famously predatory in their relentless hunt for plunder or profit — witness the Atlantic slave trade, Belgium’s rubber lust in the Congo, British India’s opium commerce, the Third Reich’s rape of Europe, or the Soviet exploitation of Eastern Europe.

When revenues shrink or collapse, McCoy points out, “empires become brittle.”

“So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly wrong, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, just 27 years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003 [when the US invaded Iraq],” he writes.

The array of tools used for global dominance — wholesale surveillance, the evisceration of civil liberties, including due process, torture, militarised police, the massive prison system, militarised drones and satellites — will be employed against a restive and enraged population.

The devouring of the carcass of the empire to feed the outsized greed and egos of these scavengers presages a new dark age.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author and journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times. This article was first published on his Substack page. Republished from the Chris Hedges X page.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.