Jamaica and small island states want new push on 1.5C target

As COP30 climate talks kicked off in Brazil's port city of Belem on Monday, opening speeches in the Amazonas hall were heavy on ambition, but just down the corridor there was a stark reminder of what failure looks like. "Hurricane Melissa slammed into Jamaica a week-and-a-half ago and every single Jamaican now knows the word catastrophic," said UnaMay Gordon, a former director of climate change for the Jamaican government and adviser to the Caribbean Community Climate Change Center, which coordinates climate action.

"We lost cultural heritage, 300-year-old churches are lost. A part of our identity was lost with it. People are hurting," Gordon told reporters. The strongest ever storm to hit Jamaica left dozens dead and caused billions of dollars worth of damage, roughly equivalent to 28% to 32% of last year's gross domestic product, according to the island's prime minister. A Melissa-type hurricane at landfall is about four times more likely in today's climate compared to a pre-industrial baseline, according to a rapid estimate by scientists from Imperial College London. Gordon urged negotiators at COP30 to do more to limit global warming to the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit)target set out in the Paris Agreement 10 years ago, and now increasingly in peril.

Scientists say that breaching 1.5C would lead to several irreversible changes, like melting ice caps driving faster sea level rise - an existential risk for small islands. The U.N. Environment Program said in a report last week the world would soon overshoot that goal, described by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as a "red line for humanity" when he spoke in Belem last week.

"Science now tells us that a temporary overshoot beyond the 1.5 limit, starting at the latest in the early 2030s, is inevitable. We need a paradigm shift to limit this overshoot's magnitude and duration and quickly drive it down," he said.

Small islands want to inject new life into the 1.5C target, with the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) proposing a COP30 agenda item to more aggressively track targets as countries' climate plans veer off course. "Small island states are here to demand we honor 1.5," said Toiata Apelu-Uili, mitigation coordinator for AOSIS, who traveled for two days to get to Belem from Samoa.

"It is not a political slogan. This is a lifeline for our survival, for our small islands. We're here because our survival, our people, our lives are not negotiable."

To stay on track for the 1.5C Paris target, global planet-heating emissions would need to fall by around 60% from 2019 levels by 2035. But they are only projected to drop around 12% according to an updated UN analysis of countries' climate plans, or Nationally Determined Contributions.

AOSIS said COP30 must work on a course correction the world urgently needs, a call supported by the Least Developed Countries (LDC) Group, which represents 44 of the countries most vulnerable to climate change.

"The world must not allow the 1.5C goal to slip away," Evans Njewa, the Malawian chair of the LDC Group, told reporters on Monday.

"COP30 must deliver a credible roadmap for addressing the gap in finance, ambition, and implementation, not promises for the future, but commitments today that are backed by adequate resources and the best available science," he said.

Alongside the demand for swifter, more transparent action to cut emissions, small island states and LDCs want greater financial support to help them decarbonize their economies and adapt to extreme weather caused by climate change. For years, some of the thorniest COP negotiations have centered on who should foot this climate bill. At COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan last year, countries adopted a $300 billion a year global finance target, but it was widely slammed by vulnerable countries as insufficient.

At the centre of the COP30 talks will be the so-called Baku to Belem Roadmap, a blueprint prepared by Brazil and Azerbaijan to mobilize at least $1.3 trillion a year in climate finance for developing countries by 2035. Hosts Brazil have dubbed this the "COP of implementation" and hope to inspire a global mutirao - a Portuguese word derived from the Indigenous Tupi-Guarani language that refers to a group coming together to work on a shared task.

But with President Donald Trump calling climate change a "con job", and with political and budgetary pressures pushing climate action onto the backburner, some fear progress will be difficult.

Gordon, who was present at the 2015 talks in Paris, wants this COP to deliver accountability on the 1.5C goal and finance from the world's biggest emitters to help the most vulnerable countries prepare for and withstand climate disasters. "When we fought for the 1.5 (target), we were fighting for our survival ... we are still fighting and we are now dying," she said.

Meanwhile, dozens of Indigenous protesters forced their way into the COP30 climate summit venue on Tuesday and clashed with security guards at the entrance to demand climate action and forest protection. Shouting angrily, protesters demanded access to the UN compound where thousands of delegates from countries around the world are attending this year's UN climate summit in the Amazon city of Belem, Brazil. Some waved flags with slogans calling for land rights or carried signs saying, "Our land is not for sale."