By Simon Ticehurst – Movement Lead WEAll
Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has called this November’s UN Climate Conference (COP30) in Belém “the COP of truth.” Ten years after the Paris Agreement, the question everyone is asking is: will promises and commitments finally become action? As forests burn, rivers flood, and temperature records shatter, do we still have the luxury of debating whether to act?
The Great Unravelling
Around the world, climate denial is back in fashion. Some governments are quietly watering down their emission targets; others, like the US under President Trump, have once again withdrawn from the Paris Agreement. In his September speech at the UN General Assembly, Trump dismissed the climate crisis as “a con job.”
Yet, in just the first half of this year, climate-related disasters have cost the United States more 100 billion dollars. The cost of denial keeps climbing — and still, the trillion-dollar question of how to fund the transition remains unanswered. COP29 in Baku agreed on a target of 1.3 trillion dollars for climate finance, but the funding has yet to appear.
We are living in the post-truth age of climate politics — a time when data and evidence are abundant, yet denial and delay continue to buy us time we no longer have, mortgaging the prospects of future generations.
Mexico’s Wake-Up Call
I was reminded of this paradox earlier this month at Mexico’s first Climate Week. The country has contributed little to the climate crisis, yet, like much of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, it is deeply vulnerable to its impacts. Mexico’s environment ministry estimates that national average temperatures have already risen by 3.2 °C, more than double the global target threshold of 1.5 °C.
The impacts are visible everywhere: prolonged droughts, crop failures, shrinking rivers, water shortages. And in cruel irony, while the event was being held, converging tropical storms brought record rains that triggered floods and landslides, killing more than sixty people.
Mexico’s environment minister, Alicia Bárcena, spoke bluntly: because global mitigation has been slow, countries like Mexico are being forced to invest ever more in costly adaptation. The country’s plans are ambitious and sophisticated — tackling climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation, and ocean pollution as one interconnected challenge — but the question remains: who will pay? Growing the same extractive economy to fund repairs for the damage it causes is not the solution.
Shifting the Story
Minister Bárcena’s call went deeper than climate policy: “We need to transition away from the current economic model toward one that promotes the wellbeing of nature and humanity,” recognizing we will not be able to address the climate crisis or wider environmental decline without a fundamental shift in our economic systems. It’s a truth many governments sense but few dare to name.
The Wellbeing Economy Alliance has been exploring just that — how to redesign our economies so they stop driving planetary decline and start restoring it. A wellbeing economy is preventive, regenerative, and circular. It sees nature not as capital to be spent but as the living foundation of all prosperity.
New ideas are surfacing. At this year’s UN Ocean Conference, faith groups proposed a Blue Moral Economy — an economy for our oceans that measures success not by profit but by contribution to ecological health, human dignity, and community flourishing. The oceans, after all, absorb a quarter of our CO₂ emissions, provide 80 percent of our oxygen, and feed over three billion people — yet we still dump 20 million tonnes of plastic into it every year. The recent ratification of the High Seas Treaty offers a rare sign of global cooperation, protecting international waters as shared heritage.
The Amazon Test
Hosting COP30 in the Amazon is both symbolic and strategic. Lula has pledged zero deforestation by 2030, and Brazil’s record shows that rapid progress is possible. But fires and drought are testing that promise. Rising temperatures and wildfires combined with expanding agricultural frontiers continue to threaten the forests that regulate Earth’s climate.
Brazil’s environment minister, Marina Silva, who led a dramatic reduction in deforestation two decades ago, has put it simply: “When we protect rivers, forests, and biodiversity, we are protecting people. We are ensuring the conditions that sustain economic activity across all sectors.”
From Extraction to Regeneration
If COP30 is to be the “COP of truth,” then the truth we must face is that the climate crisis is not only ecological — it is economic. It stems from systems that prize extraction over regeneration and accumulation over wellbeing. The transformation ahead is not merely technological or financial; it is a question of the purpose or our economic systems.
A wellbeing economy starts from a simple but radical premise: that the purpose of the economy is to sustain life, not consume it. It invites us to redesign policies, markets, and institutions to give back more than they take — to nurture thriving communities and living ecosystems together.
If Belém becomes the moment when the world begins to tell that new story — one rooted in regenerative care for people and the planet — then this would be the “COP of truth.”
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